Turn of the Year

Do it. Start it today. Choose your form (or choose a changing, evolving form), and try a long poem. I’m listening to Liz Lerman’s HIKING THE HORIZONTAL right now (highly recommend, especially for those who lead writing workshops), and at one point she discusses what a “residency” means, and talks about how the work an artist produces during a residency is a sketch, a draft. That a residency is a place for new ideas, not finished works. I think—wow—we need to bring that thought to our poetry more often. Sketch the beginning of your long poem, draft a line, a canto (I just read Mark Strand’s Dark Harbor, and love the canto form; see also Connie Voisine’s THE BOWER, which I wrote a review of here, and of course Dante). Cantos or sections are a wonderful way to trick yourself into writing a long piece, stretch those poetry muscles of yours. Something I love is filtration—letting everything in. I think of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, and A.R. Ammon’s Tape for the Turn of the Year, which you can read as a book as well as see its archived form typed on receipt tape, and Rachel Zucker’s work.

I don’t know—long poems always feel very right to me in winter, during the holiday months. Last year at this time, I wrote a long poem very much in love with Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I’m going to share the beginning of it below (it’s unpublished, have not sent it anywhere because I’m like a broody hen with work), but since I’ve mentioned several books I consider quintessential winter books simply for mood but also for wintry imagery (Dark Harbor, Midwinter Day, Ashbery’s Self-Portrait…), I also want to mention my favorite Geoffrey Hill title, Scenes from Comus, in dialogue with John’s Milton’s masque of the same name (another wintry poem! good lord, so many good ones).

That should be enough reading suggestions for now, haha! Here is the beginning of my long poem “Flowers in a Wooden Vessel” and a canto from “Turn of the Year,” just begun this week, and still in oh-so-drafty-form.

Be gentle with yourselves this week.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFlowers in a Wooden Vessel (excerpt)is a myth of color, begun in the year’s dark—Brueghel thinking on color as the hunterstrudged through the snow with their dogs,as the ice was still on the lake and skatersglided and stumbled against the clear cold.In his father’s winter scene, everyone’s faceis turned away, even the dogs. The sky a blue-grey steel, like the sea. But even throughhis father’s snow, a gold-green vine sprawlsin the foreground, breaks through the ice.And though a fire blazes, everything is chilled.The white hills are layered deep with treesand more hills—glimpse of a mind’s winter,calendar scene of landscape shaping a person,painting the one who lives and breathes the cold.Peasant Brueghel, they called Pieter the Elder,in his life’s winter at forty, when the lightis brightest on the blue-streaked snow.Pieter left his work. He left an infant familyof painters. The baby, Jan, would grow to paintthe soul of a flower, or the best image of the flower’s soul: its petals and stamen(filament and anther), stigma and style, ovaryand sepal, calyx and stem, foliage in greenand gold striations, painted against a green-dark.Velvet Brueghel, Flower Brueghel, Paradise Brueghelthey called him for his paintings of fabrics,fritillaries and paradisal landscapes. (Scholarsnow know Brueghel also painted scenes from hell:the Temptation of St. Anthony and Aeneasand Sybil in the Underworld, fantastic depictionsof fire and the grotesque, Bosch-like and appealingto a later, erudite audience; Flower Brueghelheld Hell Brueghel inside—what is a flowerbut a holy, not a damning, flame). Brueghel’s flowers were like gifts the gods dropped in flight: a mass of them clustered together in Flowers in a WoodenVessel, as they never can be in life—You would need to begin in spring, at the startof February, and finish in the month of August,wrote Brueghel in a letter to a friend.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedTurn of the Year (III, excerpt)It is the end of the year.It goes out on hammering.It goes out crying.It goes out on Handel,Wittgenstein. On desirelike a church spire.It goes out grey, goesfogged, goes with rain.On Christmas lights, blown out.It goes out with white wine.With my child, tappingmy second glass: that is your last.It goes out carrying my cat,light as a bird. His clawdrawing blood from my chestin farewell. No one is longfor this world. The Colossalof Rhodes is gone, pulled downor destroyed by earthquake.I used to want to see it.The year goes out. Out and out.Handel’s music folds and layersin the chapel. The stained glassglows and goes dark.The air is filled with vibrationafter crescendo and silence.The after is astounding.