High Five: Jake Adam York

(In this issue's High Five, Jake Adam York tackles five of his favorite poems. Photo credit: Kevin Andre Elliott/Jake Adam York, 2002)

I have answered and destroyed my answer to this call several times between invitation and deadline. This choosing, the nomination of my favorite poems or poets, has been more difficult than I imagined. Am I to name the poems I like to read most often? Or those that have taught me the most? Or the poems that supply the most insight into my own poetry? There were hundreds of poems, each important to me in some way, to consider. At last, I present five (maybe next week they won't be my top five but they'll always be a high five) poems and poets that have had life- and work-changing impact—here presented in the order of my encounter with them and their revelation to me.

Dylan Thomas, "The Conversation of Prayers."

Thomas is the first poet I read on my own. I'd read others in high school, as part of the curriculum, and once I borrowed the collected Robert Penn Warren and the complete poems of Emily Dickinson from the public library, but I can't say that, though I turned all the pages, I really read those. Thomas, on the other hand, was the first poet I chose, the first poet I bought, and the first poet I read unsupervised. In my senior year of high school, I took a trip to Britain with some of my classmates, and in a bookshop near Covent Garden discovered and bought an Everyman edition of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems.

I turned pages on a bus to Edinburgh, but didn't understand much. I loved the sound but found the symbolism difficult. "The Conversation of Prayers," however, was the first poem I read and understood and in which —this is the important part—I saw and understood the art.

This poem is fairly short, a mere twenty lines in cinquains. Its narrative relates the confusion of prayers offered by a small boy and a care-worn man, such that the replies to the prayers are twisted, one pleasantly, the other not. It ends with a twist and frisson much like a great horror movie or ghost tale, which I admired and admire.

The poem's most significant feature is a crossing rhyme whereby a word at a line end will find its partner in the middle of the next line while a word from the midst of the first line will find its partner at the end of the next line. The last line of each stanza returns to the pattern of the first, giving a circular feel to each stanza which is itself challenged by the continuation of the narrative itself:


The conversation of prayers about to be said
By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs
Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,
The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move
And the other full of fears that she will be dead….

The poem's form is matched to the content—the form communicates, even amplifies the poem's narrative, and makes it sensual at once. This impressed me much more than sonnets. The technical features of sonnets were readily apparent, but their artifice always seemed rather traditional or conventional, a quality that always made me doubtful that the shape or realization of the sonnet could be fully deliberate. Here, however, was a poem that was full of deliberation and that produced great surprise and joy. Here I found true the platitudes that were flung about in my classes, that in poetry form and content join so firmly they magnify one another.

This was the first poem I memorized, for my own pleasure and not for a course, and I continue to favor it because I still enjoy it for its music and its story and its art, but I revere it for the lesson it offered me, the evidence that poetic art (or craft if you wish) could be smart, could be deliberate, and could arrogate authority to itself by the measure of its success by its own rules. When I came to writing seriously a few years after discovering this poem, these revelations became much more important as I tried, as I try, to craft poems in which the forms are unique and unprecedented (as much as possible) but also significant and effective at communicating the ideas and the emotions the poem holds dear.

The book is one of the most important I own—I still have that copy, though it's more than 15 years old now and badly worn—for the other important lessons to be had from Thomas about the opacity of a certain musical and symbolic density, features I imitated for a while before turning from.

Seamus Heaney, North

One of the first single volumes I read in its entirety, North impacted me profoundly. When I read it, on the advice of a teacher, I was struggling to decide what amount of difficulty and opacity was the right amount and just how much was too much. After reading Thomas, I'd become particularly enamored of phrases organized by music as much as by sense, and the result was a particularly knotty poetry that often sounded good but rarely made sense to anyone on a first read or a first listen. In Heaney, I found a lighter music, more welcoming of a reader yet still rich.

I found as well a poet who felt an ethical obligation to speak to the problems of his time and place in a language that bore the inflections of his home. This was particularly revelatory—and would continue to be—for I spent much of high school and college trying not to be from Alabama. I had found, in many circumstances, that my accent was a liability, a suggestion of ignorance or bigotry, but instead of thinking about the circumstances that gave the accent such meaning, I wanted to turn from it entirely and as well from the Southern culture it made audible. In Heaney I saw a counter-model.

Given what he observes he would have every reason to disown or disavow, but he implicates himself, most notably in "Punishment." There, of course, Heaney describes a corpse pulled from a bog that suggests the woman was shaved and hung for committing adultery. Heaney's description brims with anger and indignance that this would have happened to anyone, yet, he says near the end of the poem:

He knows that he, too, would have participated in the punishment had he lived then. Only the luxury of distance allows him to pretend he would not have.

A powerful example I found in Heaney, made all the more powerful for me by my own exposure to the archaeological history of Alabama, which made the state's racial troubles seem much nearer than they had in most of my life. My wife, who was working as an archaeologist, took me a the sites of several Civil-War-era blast furnaces that were used to forge weapons for the Confederacy. Of course, they were all built by slaves, and in one place we could observe a grave, which brought that history to me very powerfully. I wondered, like Heaney, what I would have done, and my work took what I would describe as an ethical turn: it became much more interested in speaking to others than to itself. I still read North frequently when I need to be re-oriented, even though my work is turning in different directions now.

Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."

Were I considering a desert island scenario, I'd want the entire Leaves of Grass—actually several versions of it—but "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is the poem I'd carry in my head. Of Whitman's poems, it's the one that means the most to me personally, but it's also the one from which I learned the most, and it's useful by itself as a kind of anthology of Whitman's craft and program.

From Whitman generally, but from this poem especially, I came to appreciate the power in the simple, direct statement amplified by a carefully executed syntax, and so from Whitman, as much as anyone else, I learned the art and brawn of syntax, that it could be a tool and a strong one for organizing a poem and for pushing the poem's business into the reader's mind.

In "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," where the main interest is how common experience creates bonds between fellow citizens, I love the way a simple grammatical parallelism not only witnesses but actually institutes an argument of identity, of equivalence:

There's a lesson in democracy here, as Whitman's speaker is willing to be considered by the terms that apply more directly to the "you." He is willing to be made commensurate with the other. Just as impressive is how Whitman reverses normal temporal priority—his experience, acknowledged in the past tense, came first—in the poem's logical priority, a gesture that enables readers to feel centralized by the poem's interest, in which location each of us comes to imply Whitman's speaker: he is our parallel.

I love, too, that this enables the real feat of this poem, Whitman's "approach," his remarkable declaration that almost seems to materialize him here and now. By a simple shift of tense—no announcement, just the performance—he arrives:

I suspect most of us, taking this at face value, might just say Bullshit, but this is the kind of poem in which, if you read it closely, pretending that these words are the only signs we have for a time and trusting them to create the world in which communication could occur, then this gesture will almost floor you. The simplicity, the unadornedness of the poem's language begs us to treat it as substantial, even trans-substantial, and when we read trans-substantially, the simple shift of tense is a shift of world. If the poem can convince us that Whitman's experience is implicit in our own, then when we unfold and substantiate our own experience, Whitman's should, logically, unfold as well.

And so Whitman encourages us to trust that the poem supplies the information that's required and to exist within the poem as much as possible, which is why I love this poem as much as I love John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, because you can live within it for a time when the power of each word, each note, each phrase becomes all the more powerful for seeming to occupy if not constitute the entire universe.

More generally, the turn this poem takes, the transformative moment when what was in the past becomes present, at least in the poem's attentions, is both the most energizing gift a poem can offer and what I strive to capture in my own writing: the moment in which that which is nevertheless continuous undergoes a change of degree that may as well be a change of kind.

Emily Dickinson, "My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun"

Everything I know, everything I love, everything I think about metaphor inheres in this poem.

At first, it seems a simple comparison: life=gun. What distinguishes this poem is how seriously it takes the metaphor. In another poet's work—even in Emerson's intelligent discussion of a snow-storm as an architectural force—metaphor is largely if not entirely an instrument of the poet's thought, adhering to the object of interest only insofar as it will improve that object. In Dickinson's, however, the metaphor becomes an agent rather than a tool and does not merely express but shapes the poem's arguments.

This is to say, the metaphor seems to force the poem to be aware not only of the purpose or aim of the metaphorical operation but as well of the metaphor's material. Once a comparison is initiated, there is not one object enjoined to elucidate another but two objects that mutually modify one another.

Here there is a woman and a gun, and in the commerce of metaphor, the woman becomes an instrument in ways that suggest powerfully the difficulty of her experience as a Nineteenth-Century woman, and the gun becomes an agent, a thinking, speaking being that longs for freedom and independence as surely as any woman would have longed. I've always considered this fairly sly for in transforming the poem's feminine consciousness into a gun, the poem can actually gesture toward problems of social, economic, and sexual dependence and independence in ways that are more straightforward than most women's writing of the time.

The mutual dependence and modification of each object in the metaphorical relationship on the other supposes an extremely intense and serious treatment of metaphor, one I so admire I find it difficult to accept as metaphorical the simple comparisons that fill our daily language. And so this poem, like Whitman's, charges us to demand more of the world and of our language, to read language as serious material, the substance of the world, a trans-substantiation of everything, which alone makes for poetry that occupies the mind indefinitely.

This is the poem behind one of my favorite contemporary poems, Larissa Szporluk's "Meteor" (from Isolato) which uses the technology of metaphor to enforce and communicate the transformations I crave.

John Ashbery, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

I almost included Hart Crane's The Bridge, which is also important to me, but coming to the end of my space, I could only include one more and Ashbery's poem is more important to me right now, largely because I am struggling as ever with the right balance of the transparent and the opaque and Ashbery seems to get it as right as ever in "Self-Portrait."

It is perhaps implicit in my turn from Thomas to Heaney and to Whitman that while I have long been captivated by a very dense musically driven poetry (which we can also find in Dickinson and Szporluk as well as in Crane), I have also (in considering my contract with a reader and the ethical obligations I might have to speak to and with someone) tempered my interest in the densely complex with more open and extensive work that builds common language in simple structures into something almost anyone could enter. Generally, I have been satisfied that my choice to write in a more colloquial form has meant the difference between poems that find audiences and those that languish in the drawer, but, at the same time, I keep trying to find a way to introduce a greater musical and intellectual density into a poem, so that a poem doesn't merely appeal to consensus knowledge or general capacity but also demands something from a reader and expends the reader's capacity while exacting the right response. This is where I turn to Ashbery.

"Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror" is, in my mind, one of the most important and most impressive poems written after World War II. On its surface, it seems simple enough: there's little involuted syntax or arcane vocabulary. The artistic references may be lost on some, but these are understood quickly enough with a turn in the library, so these are not serious impediments. The poem is, in its materials, fairly open and inviting. Nevertheless, the poem is hard because the concept it wants most to explore—the possibility of relating to an other and the mechanisms by which such relation might be possible—is a difficult one, and the poem's speaker is struggling even with his capacity to confront the problem as he confronts the painting. Strangely, the use of colloquial language may actually make the poem more difficult, for there are few or no technical words that can act as anchors, so the poem forces us to work things out for ourselves. As Ashbery says of the painting that inspires: "The secret is too plain." Once we get it, the poem's brilliance inheres in the plain language: only by starting where we are can we begin to struggle with the epistemological and ethical problems of relating to others.

This poem is—like A. R. Ammons's "Sphere"—very important to me right now as I consider what is the right amount of difficulty for a poem that will require a reader to arrive somewhere other than where he or she begins, for a poem that will not only witness but wreak a transformation. Somewhere there is a change that will change us. That's what I'm looking for.