Picture this: a relatively handsome, bored, long-haired undergraduate boy slouches in a classroom, sometime in 1987 (or so). Contemporary American Poetry, four credits, Tues/Thurs 10 to 11:50 am.
The professor drones on about Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop. The boy likes these poets. They are interesting. They make him think, and he likes to think. But not too much.
They turn the page to a new decade, a new group of poets. In his red-jacketed anthology, there is a black-and-white photo of a handsome poet-dude, resembling a bit of Chris Reeve, the Superman years.
They begin reading poetry from this guy out loud, this guy whose name is Mark Strand.
The boy in the classroom feels a charge, and his mind begins to awaken, somehow. Something in these poems seeps its way into his unconscious, and the poems, while they have meaning on their face, underneath lies a seething mass of emotion, idea, phobia, desire. For example:
SLEEPING WITH ONE EYE OPEN
Unmoved by what the wind does,
The windows
Are not rattled, nor do the various
Areas
Of the house make their usual racket--
Creak at
The joints, trusses, and studs.
Instead,
They are still. And the maples,
Able
At times to raise havoc,
Evoke
Not a sound from their branches
Clutches.
It's my night to be rattled,
Saddled
With spooks. Even the half-moon
(Half-man,
Half half dark), on the horizon,
Lies on
Its side casting a fishy light
Which alights
On my Floor, lavishly lording
Its morbid
Look over me. Oh I feel dead,
Folded
Away in my blankets for good,
and
Forgotten.
My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled
And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my looses ends
Loosen,
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.
This sounds hokey, but when the boy first heard that poem, the hair on his arms stood on end. Really. (Or as the young kids say nowadays, For Reals.) And Strand's poems still have that effect. (Okay, so the boy was me, when I had hair. When I was a bored, low B-average college student, blah, blah, blah....)
Come get your hair stood up at the Lighthouse Writer's Studio weekend. May 3 and 4.
Oh, and check back daily as I will be violating copyrights and posting more of Mark's poems here.
Cheers,
--MJH
