Lyrics in Periods of Crisis

...But she keeps on examining and reconfiguring her images to find more meanings...

...To read a poem richly we need to know something of its family antecedents, including all those ancient and foreign ancestors...

...Mark Strand believes surrealism profoundly affects how all poetry now comes into being...

...By the conclusion, the revolving beam of a squad car sees "the mannequins putting on color as red lights twist past their windows/ giving them red wings, red wings growing out of each shoulder, rippling/ and lifting/ over the envious/ silver, prisoned glass...

...Eurydice, who must return to the Underworld because Orpheus looked back to make sure she was following...

...Her fourth collection, Black Series (Knopf, 100 pp., $23.00), is even stronger than her much acclaimed The Willow Grove...

...In the case of the last, however—Hecht's strange vision of a small snowy hillock, experienced as a flashbackwhileinthemidstof a bustling, sunny Roman piazza—the reader may feel he is being prodded a bit too far...

...He is so intimate with some writers that they become characters in his own work: A piece on translating has the late Jorge Luis Borges joining in the conversation, which takes place in Strand's bathroom...

...If I were asked to choose a poet to memorialize the devastation of the World Trade Center towers, I would probably select Laurie Sheck...

...The earliest immigrants believed large parts of the rugged wilderness had previously been virtually untouched by humans...

...The air is full of thresholds and nets," she writes, though she crosses and evades them all in her strongest poems...

...Sheck often composes fragmentary groups of poems, as if they were part of a largely lost epic...

...Some things are too horrible to confront directly...

...The word ? is a painful word, I think...

...Unable to face it, yet longing to—that is the dangerous psychological region we are warned to leave alone...

...Still, she keeps turning her gaze toward them...

...Dark myths and stories are explored: the Gorgon Medusa whose severed head retains the power to turn anyone who sees it to stone...

...Here a rather familiar sight, at least to city dwellers, is made surreal—the dummies in their displays seeming to recoil or start in the headlights...

...blind Oedipus being led across barren landscapes by his daughter...

...He is a genealogist of the discipline, and this makes him as fine a critic as he is a theorist...

...While discussing nature poetry he compares it with the confessional genre...

...None of the poems indicates, either directly or indirectly, that what it describes represents Parnassus (though Stevens certainly suggests some further import behind the story of a woman riding a donkey uphill...

...I am thinking of funerals, in particular, but the same is true of marriage and birthdays...

...It incorporates, as it were, the very nature that inspires it into being...

...STRAND is particularly fascinated by the way poets make their work sound brand new even when tapping into traditional themes...

...Their meaning is on the tip of our tongue...

...This is a form of deception that makes it possible for poetry to escape the commonplace...

...Laurie Sheck, however, far from being a lonely "I," is more akin to Emerson's "transparent eyeball," interpreting the jagged edges of our civilization as hints of messages we would do well to read carefully...

...In "Views of the Mysterious Hill: The Appearance of Parnassus in American Poetry," he examines four works: Edward Arlington Robinson's "The House on the Hill," Emily Dickinson's "A House upon the Height," Wallace Stevens' "Mrs...

...The secret life of herpoetry,asofMarkStrand's, is something we can scarcely afford to do without...

...There is a grasping after concrete detail as a way of authenticating the self...

...Gradually, a melody of rhythms and patterns begins to emerge, newborn out of the rubble...

...In The Weather of Words he discusses Virgil, Wordsworth, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Donald Justice, and Joseph Brodsky, among others...

...perhaps in its plainness it is a Parnassus after all, Parnassus wearing its American disguise as a plain hill...

...Each of these, he contends, is really describing the sacred Greek mountain traditionally considered the home of the Muses...

...But in their poems nothing is more significant than the narrator...

...Especially after the events of September 11,2001, bizarre juxtapositions are symbols of our ruptured, nonsensical world...

...no words are the right words...

...After all, our local landscape was not the ancient abode of nymphs or satyrs...

...In such uncivilized terrain, it is an open question whether olive trees, marble columns and baobabs—or whatever symbolic foliage and pavilions our forebears may have seen on other shores—would transplant successfully...

...In his latest book of essays, The Weather of Words (Knopf, 142 pp., $22.00), the prolific poet, who has frequently demonstrated this in his work, argues that his art is "ultimately a metaphor for something unknown," and for "making the unknown visible...

...In Wordsworth, "the self is because it brings itself into being, recalls itself...

...The art of René Magritte, Salvador Dali or Marcel Duchamp...

...It becomes an atlas that charts the secret life of their mysterious metaphors...

...Perhaps we once saw something like a red traffic cone standing in the middle of an unpeopled forest, though it might have been only in a dream...

...The familiar signposts have moved out of their customary locations, so they have ceased to point toward the destination we were seeking...

...For Sheck this represents the fear inside ourselves...

...The new book contains verses "From Black Series" that deal with darkness—a city night, caves, the petrified corpses of Pompeii turned "black marginalia beneath the sky's unstable searchlight...

...The universe is reduced to a story about the storyteller's personal insecurities...

...Down here I markwith my markless eye this earth, thick shadow of the leafless maple on light snow Burdens and temptations keep cropping up...

...It was not always great writing, but its presence denotes an attempt to find words for our national shock, or to discover some significance in the unfathomable...

...It is commonplace to speak of how troubled the latter poets were—to cite, for example, the suicides of Sylvia Plath and John Berryman, or the madness of Lowell...

...On Poetry Lyrics in Periods of Crisis By Phoebe Pettingell Surrealism and absurdism are hardly recent constructs, yet their fractured, mysterious landscapes— both like and unlike anything in our daily lives— seem characteristic of the artistic vision of our troubled era...

...looking at certain things may invite destruction in Sheck's interior world...

...By contrast, "in confessional poetry, the self is terminal, physical, isolated, and depends heavily on specific information—the names of friends, doctors, stores, places, and the like...

...The "secret life of poetry" is its ability to recycle what has gone before to fit a contemporary vernacular and environment...

...The Willow Grove had 12 lyrics "From the Book of Persephone" that appeared to begin and end in médias res...

...For this, she pays a high price: nightmares, depression, panic, sometimes loss...

...Galileo, imprisoned in the dungeons of the Inquisition, his eyesight failing, no longer able to view the planets he first spied through his telescope...

...A poem "must make us believe that what we are reading belongs to us even though we know that what it tells us is really old...

...It is as if the confessional poet were saying that because he has documentary evidence of his experience, he must therefore exist...

...the poetry of T. S. Eliot, John Ashbery or Kenneth Koch...

...we would pay no attention, the way we habitually overlook things that mean nothing to us...

...Strand's book helps us find our way amid life's disasters and occasional joys...

...If it did not remind us of anything we knew, it would not be so evocative...

...Yet without doubt there was a Parnassus for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, as surely as for John Keats with his Grecian urn or Ted Hughes with his Ovid translations, or for the poets of ancient cultures with their native mythologies and muses...

...Can a person spend a lifetime meditating on the Holocaust and not go mad, or not rationalize away its horror...

...A nature poet like Wordsworth, on the other hand, merges self into something grander, more fraught with significance...

...The new book opens with an image of light reflecting against plate glass: Even the mannequins change as the headlights pass over them, swathing them in strangeness...

...Yet the blackness is always shot through with flashes of discovery that flame out like meteors against an inky sky...

...Antigone...

...Without poetry, we would have either silence or banality, the former leaving us to our own inadequate devices for experiencing illumination, the latter cheapening with generalization what we wished to have for ourselves alone, turning our experience into impoverishment, our sense of selves into embarrassment...

...Like Keats' urn, it is a relic testifying to another life elsewhere, one we can only imagine: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter....' Poetic allusions act as chimes, setting off associations the same way a single note contains echoes of its harmonic third and fifth...

...Strand knows the whole poetic family well...

...Sheck dissects the almost unbearable curiosity some feel to look at the Gorgon head, even though succumbing to the impulse will have dire consequences...

...A spasm of self-doubt made Orpheus look back, thus dooming Eurydice to return to the Underworld forever...

...It can recall Stevens' jar in Tennessee that becomes a focal point and reorganizes the surrounding landscape...

...Her greatest fear is being trapped inside the prison of self, with nothing to connect to...

...What gives it greater coherence than most such volumes is Strand's personality, the always original play of his thinking...

...Like wood and glass that have been tossed and smoothed by ocean waves and sand, these objects take on strange and rich new configurations...

...The Weather of Words enables us to better understand the poems of our climate...

...Strand's fresh view finds them instead "tirelessly sociable" in their compulsion to tell the reader anecdote after anecdote about the people who surround them...

...We may not be conscious of this ghostly chord, but the overtones change how we hear the original note because they are part of its makeup...

...In other words, that red traffic cone in the unspoiled woods is not so mysterious or out of place: It can remind us of the ruined Ionic columns in a classical sylvan scene, or a teepee pitched in the Forest Primeval before the Europeans came to these shores...

...She does not write grandly, yet there is depth in her vision of brokenness that avoids the tired mourning in so many elegies...

...Sheck describes her poems as songs "made of Darkness mixed with Light," her themes as "what comes from pain, what answers pain...

...The way poetry has of setting our internal house in order, of formalizing emotion difficult to articulate, is one of the reasons we still depend on it in moments of crisis and during those times when it is important that we know, in so many words, what we are going through...

...But the markers that have replaced them still often trigger a well-known feeling...

...the novels by the Barthelme brothers or magical realists—all speak of a world in which people no longer feel at home...

...The Weather of Words, like most essay collections, is made up of miscellaneous pieces produced for various occasions: reviews, introductions to anthologies, musings for quarterlies, even a humorous Presidential resignation speech written for the New Yorker during the Bill Clinton impeachment hearings...

...It resists interpretation...

...It emerges from the fabric of the language of retelling...

...Alfred Uruguay," and Anthony Hecht's "A Hill...

...Strand cheerfully concedes the stretch, up to a point: "Part of the poem's beauty is that it resists, in its careful and cadenced disclosures, any reduction, any reading, in fact, of the hill...

...The language of a poem like "Escape Velocity"—referring to the speed a rocket must attain to escape the pull of gravity—has incantatory power, as though her very words were beating wings against the downward drag of planetary forces: What speed does the aircraft need to reach its escape velocity, breaking completely free of the ghostly gravity, until it's glassy and dazzling above us, becoming that dream-flare we can't reach...

...Strand knows perfectly well that most Americans do not read much poetry these days, but he observes that we resort to it in times of high stress...

...Or an arm vibrating, as if to touch the shocked surfaces, cracked sidewalks and neon-scald of walls, while the other arm, unlit, sleeps on, apart from the whirring interventions, shut doorways stung by light, zig-zagging shadows, grown animate with each anxious and precise erasure, advancing light hostile take-overs onto the newly minted glass...

...It "is always paying homage to the past, extending a tradition into the present...

...And the hill's resolute plainness seems a rebuke to making of it something more than it is...

...But perhaps it resists too much...

...Nevertheless, Strand's argument seems irrefutable for the first three works...

...Her verse is filled with disjointed urban imagery—department store mannequins, glass skyscrapers, television screens, the flowering of subway graffiti...

...Scary to think of/ You can almost hear the solitude/ hardening like ice against it, its wintry underpinnings, its vast spaces,/ and always inside it the stranger who can't speak...

...Despite the wintry eeriness in which it appears (some thing like that of the dream landscape in the film Spellbound), and despite its power to mesmerize a boy for hours in wintertime, it is just a hill near Poughkeepsie...

...A face briefly lit, magnetized by street light...

...In the weeks following the destruction of 9/11 we did indeed hear poetry, sometimes read aloud on radio stations that normally play only rock music and manic ads...

...Most of our ancestors arrived as strangers in an alien land...