In Hart Island, there are whispers of people who lie just below perception, muttering multivocal protests of how, based on their status in life, they are placed away and forgotten, invisible shoulders upon which the city (or the poetry world) rests. Not an anxiety of influence, but a murmuring of both injustice and desire to connect, for recognition — for people to either stand at the grave and acknowledge or appreciate, no matter who a person might be or might have been.
In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein begins the second section, “Food,” with a semi-coloned list of foods that includes “Orange” and “Oranges.” So, in this menu of sorts, color is singular and fruit plural, separated by the singular collective nouns of cocoa and clear soup. Unlike cranberry, a color so clearly named after the fruit, orange is more a prediction, and I think of Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Orangery, and how he must have had Stein somewhere in mind with his permutations of orange and the tenuous abstract relations of signifier into composition.
Image of brown dwarf star 2M1207 and a companion object, 2M1207b. The image may be "the first extrasolar planetary-mass companion to be directly imaged and is the first discovered orbiting a brown dwarf." Courtesy of ESO and Wikipedia: http://www.eso.org/public/images/26a_big-vlt/
The impulses that inspire poets to think through science span from investigative, speculative, conceptual, documentary, and more to impulses that use science as a form of address to and from the notion of the other. Lila Zemborain, in Mauve Sea-Orchids (Belladonna, 2007, trs.
The eighth section of Nathaniel Tarn's sequence Dying Trees is titled "Unravelling / Shock." Dying Trees was first published as a chapbook in 2003; later, in 2008, it was included entirely in Tarn's New Directions book, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers. When the Dying Trees sequence was still unpublished, Tarn gave a reading at the Kelly Writers House (2002) during which he read several sections of the then-new poem, including the one discussed here by Marcella Durand, Burt Kimmelman, Erin Gautsche, and PoemTalk's producer and host, Al Filreis.
The setting is certainly Tarn's parched American southwest. Drought is killing the trees; a cancer diagnosis is delivered; nationalism has brought more warring. The convergence of the three forms a "web." "A hole [has been] torn in the fabric of the world." News travels bodily; leaders fail to lead; beetles pierce bark; a demonic mouse – "wee" and yet terribly efficacious – compounds the morbidity to the point of body-snatching. It happens as an ecological, medical, and political simultaneity, and the speaker is not in a state to be much concerned about keeping the categories separate. Thus the poem is itself "the whole infernal weave" – a quality more obvious in this eighth section of the poem than in others.
The eighth section of Nathaniel Tarn’s sequence Dying Trees is titled “Unravelling / Shock.” Dying Trees was first published as a chapbook in 2003; later, in 2008, it was included entirely in Tarn’s New Directions book, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers. When the Dying Trees sequence was still unpublished, Tarn gave a reading at the Kelly Writers House (2002) during which he read several sections of the then-new poem, including the one discussed here by Marcella Durand, Burt Kimmelman, Erin Gautsche, and PoemTalk’s producer and host, Al Filreis.
The setting is certainly Tarn’s parched American southwest. Drought is killing the trees; a cancer diagnosis is delivered; nationalism has brought more warring. The convergence of the three forms a “web.” “A hole [has been] torn in the fabric of the world.” News travels bodily; leaders fail to lead; beetles pierce bark; a demonic mouse – “wee” and yet terribly efficacious – compounds the morbidity to the point of body-snatching. It happens as an ecological, medical, and political simultaneity, and the speaker is not in a state to be much concerned about keeping the categories separate. Thus the poem is itself “the whole infernal weave” – a quality more obvious in this eighth section of the poem than in others.
I’m very pleased to announce that Marcella Durand will be the CPCW Fellow in Poetics & Poetic Practice here at Penn for next year. In the spring semester she will teach a creative writing course in ecopoetics. Durand’s bio and a brief description of her course are here. Below is a photo of Marcella with John Ashbery taken a few months ago.
From left to right: Marcella Durand, Jessica Lowenthal, Jennifer Scappettone. They’re in my office at the Writers House, having just finished discussing Susan Howe's reading of Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun.” It’s the 32nd episode of the PoemTalk podcast. Please have a listen.
My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- In Corners--till a Day The Owner passed--identified-- And carried Me away--
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods-- And now We hunt the Doe-- And every time I speak for Him-- The Mountains straight reply--
And do I smile, such cordial light Upon the Valley glow-- It is as a Vesuvian face Had let its pleasure through--
And when at Night--Our good Day done-- I guard My Master's Head-- 'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's Deep Pillow--to have shared--
To foe of His--I'm deadly foe-- None stir the second time-- On whom I lay a Yellow Eye-- Or an emphatic Thumb--
Though I than He--may longer live He longer must--than I-- For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die--
Attempts to read and understand the poem form a central analytical narrative, or, one is tempted to say, a viscerum in and through Susan Howe's bookMy Emily Dickinson. Our group not only took a cue from Howe's sense of the poem's centrality; we used the recording of Howe's reading of the poem--and several passages from her book--as our basis and starting point. The recording comes from Charles Bernstein's interview with Howe for his LineBreakseries; the entire series is available through PennSound.
Jen Scappettone's comments help us contemplate Howe's working out Dickinson's sense of the way war enters the details of domestic existence. Al presents the extended conceit (the woman is to the man as a gun is to its hunter-owner) and then the four proceed--immediately--to complicate it, aptly. The gendering, Marcella and Jessica remind us, is not at all straightforward. Among the many questions pondered here: How do we know for certain that the gun is gendered female?
Dickinson offered several variant words. One of these is "art," which might have replaced "power." "For 'art' you need an artist," Marcella notes, "the creative power. Can the gun be the artist? Do artists extend power? What was the role of the artist or writer in America?" We listen to Howe (reading from her book) say, "When I love a thing, I want it and I try to get it." Sounds to us, at least partly, like a predatory version of the subject-object dynamic. Jen adds: "Love brings the owner and the gun together, but also the predator and the prey." Jessica speaks surely for all of us at PoemTalk when she says, in her final word, that she's glad to return to this crucial poem over and over.
Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald
From left to right: Marcella Durand, Jessica Lowenthal, Jennifer Scappettone. They’re in my office at the Writers House, having just finished discussing Susan Howe's reading of Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun.” It’s the 32nd episode of the PoemTalk podcast. Please have a 
Jennifer Scappettone
Jen Scappettone's comments help us contemplate Howe's working out Dickinson's sense of the way war enters the details of domestic existence. Al presents the extended conceit (the woman is to the man as a gun is to its hunter-owner) and then the four proceed--immediately--to complicate it, aptly. The gendering, Marcella and Jessica remind us, is not at all straightforward. Among the many questions pondered here: How do we know for certain that the gun is gendered female?
'Not like normal stars'
The impulses that inspire poets to think through science span from investigative, speculative, conceptual, documentary, and more to impulses that use science as a form of address to and from the notion of the other. Lila Zemborain, in Mauve Sea-Orchids (Belladonna, 2007, trs.