A collapsed sun in your pocket: The poetry of Michael Odom

I once wrote in this column that Michael Odom’s poetry reminded me in certain aspects—not in every way, of course, because he is not derivative; his voice is truly original and unique—of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Startling imagery, unexpected words yoked together by violence, a certain defiant voice ... when I read Odom, I'm reminded of  Thomas’ "Do Not Go Gentle" and "Sullen Art."

Some of the poetry in Odom's recent collection Selene possesses that same defiance, and I think these poems may appeal especially to men of a certain age – either those in their early twenties or those in their late 40s (like me).

Why?  Because these two age groups are connected by their relationship to ideals and the hopes they carry for their lives.

The twentysomethings dismiss the 9-t- 5 treadmill and believe that life holds more for them, that they'll overcome that treadmill soon enough; the fortysomethings dismiss that same treadmill even as they recognize they’ve been walking on it for the past twenty years.

In either case, Odom’s opening poem “The simple strength of men who never know…” offers a catalogue of all the ways that people, men especially, define conventional success in this treadmill world:

Their climbing grasps, like primates, For leafier nests, prettier mates, shinier cars, And Power, the lying god…

Elsewhere, he reminds us how women receive such poor tributes from men. How men’s appreciation falls short—extremely short—of the beautiful creation that is a woman.  To the goddess whose name is the title of this collection, he says:

We poor animals, men, watch breasts, Selene, The way children were taught to sing along to TV lyrics with a bouncing ball

Our imaginations fall short in many ways, and we miss what is extraordinary in what is seemingly ordinary.  Imagine the desert, for instance.  It is just a bare, empty stretch of hot sand and dirt, right?  But in Odom's handling, he describes it in the following majestic, Thomistic (to my ear, anyways) line:

Under the tutelage of Orion's arm Lording above in the ocean's leprous cousin

That, my best beloveds, is breath-taking language ... the kind of inspiring, eloquent language we just don't find in many places anymore (including, unfortunately, the recent presidential inauguration address).

Ok, enough already.  You get it: I dig this poetry a lot.  I would urge you to seek it out.

Finally, what about that note of defiance in Odom's work that reminds me of Thomas?  He suggests to us that the only idealism that will ever seem to last is the idealism of art, of creative vision.  That earlier poem above, about the primates grabbing for success, ends on a splendid visionary statement:

...I know a boy much smaller Who carries in his pocket a collapsed sun.

This is the kind of language that we all need--this is what I want to be reminded about in the course of my own treading. While I’m at my desk, caught up with emails and projects, caught up in ephemera of all kinds, there's a part of me that is eternal. That’s what Odom's Selene tells us.

This collection is appropriate to any season of the year, but it seems especially appropriate now, in the early weeks of the new year. Selene is an ideal companion as you look ahead, plan your year, and realize -- please, my dear friends, remember -- that there is still so much you can change about your life.  It is never too late.

A pale view of Hill

For I will consider my cat Jeoffry…

We lost a major figure in the world of poetry at the end of June, Geoffrey Hill, and as I’ve scrolled through the posts of Call of the Siren, I realize I haven’t written very much lately … but when I have, some of it seems to have been about Hill.

Maybe that’s because no one – aside from talking to W.S. Merwin a few years ago and listening to him describe visiting Ezra Pound – has given me a greater sense of poetry’s living tradition than when I sat at a table and listened to Hill talk about Eliot, Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, Dryden, Auden, Lowell, Southwell, and so many others.

I studied with him in the graduate program at Boston University in the 1990s.   When I enrolled, I had no idea the maker of Mercian Hymns was on the faculty, and when I learned that he was, I rushed over to his office to sign up for his class on poetry and religion. I was gushing with excitement as I reached the top floor and entered his office.

“I’m so happy to have found you!” I said as I set my Add slip on the desk in front of him.

“Found me?” he said, looking up. “I didn’t know I was hidden. I’ve been here three years.”

He gave me that trademark look you find in the Guardian photo accompanying this post. I think this photo was taken around the time he lived in Brookline and taught at BU. That’s the way he looked when I made my gushing declaration on that autumn day in his office.

But forget that sour expression or what some people have said about his crankiness -- I want you to know that Hill was a warm, generous teacher. There were six of us, including him, gathered around a conference table.

He played recordings of John Dowland for us that were hypnotic; the notes of the lute floated down the hall. He described the torture of recusant priests in Protestant England and then recited Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” as if he were composing it in his head. The way he read poems was a revelation to me. He was gruff and good-natured, and he was always patient with our ignorance of the subjects he knew so well.

“Mr. Owchar, and how is your Bunyan today?” he asked me once, smiling, as we studied Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners.

“Fair to middling, sir,” I said.

“Well then,” he said, “give us some of the fair.”

Everyone laughed, and then I did my best to explain some passage in Bunyan, and when I was done, Hill improved on my thoughts the way a jeweler polishes a dull stone.

As I've been reading obituaries and tributes about him, I've learned how prolific he was in the past decade. My reading of him stopped with the Peguy poem and the Enemy Country essays … and the occasional item I found in the TLS.

That’s because I like the earlier phase of his career – the later works are too compact, too elusive for me. But the balance between contemporary England and its legendary past that you find in Mercian Hymns, for instance, to me is, well, perfect. It is magic.

There’s a line in one TLS tribute that talks about Hill’s discouragement over his royalties checks even in his laureled, later years. He was discouraged not because of the money but because it suggested to him that he didn't have a readership.  Poetry has never really been a big seller (unless you're Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes), but I hope Hill is enjoying some kind of adulatory compensation in the afterlife that he never found in those royalties.

And hopefully he can add my middling post to that compensation, too.  Rest in peace, Professor.

The Wright choice for poet laureate

The Library of Congress exercised superb judgment earlier this month by selecting Charles Wright to succeed Natasha Trethewey as  U.S. poet laureate. There are few modern giants still standing in the world of poetry -- there's W.S. Merwin, of course, but I have a hard time identifying too many others (I welcome any and all of your suggestions, my friends).

Let's see ... Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Mary Jo Salter, Carol Ann Duffy ... ?

Wright is undeniably a part of this group. He's not only prolific; he also practices his craft well within that shimmering notion of a "tradition" that T.S. Eliot described in his famous, foundational essay.

Which made me a little surprised with some of the announcements of Wright's naming, especially in the Washington Post, because they emphasize (and over-repeat) that Wright is a "Southern poet" who was born in Tennessee.

They refer to his Southern background so many times that it seems like they're surprised by it, or else it's some kind of novelty. I can't help visualizing him in some stereotypical way -- as having a drawl or listening to Carrie Underwood (I don't know, maybe he does).

It's not that: It's just that the geographic insistence gives the impression to unfamiliar audiences that Wright is some kind of regional talent, not the bearer of literary tradition in a grander, older context (which he is).

The Wright I know is the admirer (disciple?) of Dante who describes his experience of reading Inferno during a summer in Laguna Beach, Calif., in an essay included in the volume The Poet's Dante (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Or else, for me, Wright is the speaker  who has an intriguing encounter in the poem "A Journal of the Year of the Ox":

Who is it here in the night garden, Gown a transparent rose Down to his ankles, great sleeves Spreading the darkness around him wherever he steps, Laurel corona encircling his red transparent head cap, Pointing toward the Madonna?

This mysterious figure has some advice for the poem's speaker about his craft, about life in general:

Brother, remember the way it was In my time: nothing has changed: Penitents terrace the mountainside, the stars hang in their                      bright courses And darkness is still the dark:                      concentrate, listen hard, Look to the nature of all things....

There are many works in which poets describe imagined meetings with other poets. Dante meets Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio ... Eliot encounters a poet (Yeats?) in Little Gidding ... Heaney meets Joyce in Station Island .... and Wright speaks to Dante in the above passage. There now, do you see it? Tradition.

A full circle.

There's a linkage to the distant literary past that's vitally alive in Wright's poetry, as this passage might suggest, and I'm excited by the Library of Congress' decision for a simple reason: It may give an immensely important poet a chance to become even more widely known.

RELATED:

Paris Review: J.D. McClatchy in conversation with Charles Wright

Merwin the mighty

One of the great privileges of my life — aside from being a husband and a father, of course — was meeting W.S. Merwin. He was eager to get home to Hawaii, to his wife, to his gardens, but we talked for about an hour while he was visiting Claremont McKenna College a few years ago. I had my connections to the college, and my identity as a rep for a large newspaper, and that created the kind of opportunity that only seems possible in a dream. But I was also forewarned that he was leery of interviews and suspicious of reporters because they routinely mangled the currency of his craft and took his comments out of context. I was reminded of that warning after reading a comment included in a Huff Post article about a new film of the poet's life. Merwin sounds like a person whose life is characterized mainly by "I don't...":

"He said 'I'm not going to talk about Buddhism and I'm not going to talk about my writing process,' and on top of that, he's just a deeply private person," the filmmaker says in the article. Merwin  "put some creative parameters on what the film is."

Initially, I felt the same parameters. Especially when he eyed the digital recorder in my shirt breast-pocket. He told me not to use it. What could I do?  I tried so hard to keep up with the flow of his thoughts, but I couldn't scribble fast enough.

I knew his work pretty well, especially his Purgatorio translation and early poetry, and the lovely little book about his years in Provence. I asked him question after question. Maybe that made a difference.

I also started expressing my  frustrations over the fate of a manuscript, and he didn't hide his irritation at the whole marketing process, either. It was a revelation. The whole thing bothered him--Him!--too. When he talked about visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's, it felt like a flash-bomb had gone off in my face -- Pound, for God's sake, he knew Pound!

He was as generous to me, and as passionate about his work, as the young Princeton student who once talked poetry with John Berryman:

I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

And suddenly I heard those words that I'd never expected to hear. He pointed at my recorder and said,  "ok, you can let it run a little."

RELATED: MERWIN AND ME

• Los Angeles Times: A Q & A with M.S. Merwin
• Call of the Siren: On poets and the poetry presses
• Los Angeles Times: Merwin in the South of France

Not your typical tribute to Maya Angelou

Poet and writer Maya Angelou has died, at the age of 86, and media outlets are flooding with tributes and obituaries. It's hard to pick just one that captures her unique presence in contemporary writing -- so I'll leave that up to you. But there's an unexpected one via comedian David Alan Grier (pictured left), who captured Angelou's mannerisms and style in a playful piece during Barack Obama's first campaign for U.S. president: high-flying in the realms of grandiloquence as she composes a poem to candidate Obama ... until the interviewer asks her to do the same for Republican contender John McCain. Rest in peace, Maya Angelou.

RELATED:

• The New York Times on Maya Angelou
• Maya Angelou on race and politics in the Washington Post