Wild Civility

David Biespiel

• Éditeur: University of Washington Press
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806792
• Sujet: Literatura
• Sous-sujet: Crítica literaria

David Biespiel's long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds, " says Biespiel, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine." The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language. Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise.

UNDER A BLOSSOMING PLUM TREE

—Labor Day, 1996

Under a blossoming plum tree

In a summer of peace,

Tallying the steps

The gang of jays made near the blackberry-

Entangled roses, I thought of the glassy

Distance between loved ones—

A river without a bridge,

Dying lilacs

In the merlot bottles.

What the Earth means—

The dirty crabapple leans down

Crippled more

Than a windblown candle.

Like murmuring

Old men

Fearlessly bowing

Their heads

To the eternal flame,

The apples keep falling

Bruised for weeks

In the humid grass.

Once waking at night

My lover beside me,

I watched the slick grass

Sputter: the heart’s like that—

A wick in a drafty window.

I’d awakened

From a dream

Of a black room

Filling with water.

My lover beside me,

Her eyes like chicory.

She was swimming

In and out of

The tumbling waves,

Turning her head

To open her mouth

To the actual air.

Inside the vinegar bottle

Is the Caribbean.

When I turn the glass

Upside down

The imprisoned sea

Tumbles, pounds,

and settles

Like dust.

When I hold the ocean

In a bottle sideways

The bubbled air

Stops still:

This day, the next,

The purpose,

The work,

Is language.

What if Uncle Rueben hadn’t said a week before his 97th birthday

That he didn’t believe in god, because where was god

When the Jews were holding their six million last breaths,

And I said, how do you account for it not being seven million, fifteen million, fifty million?

FRENCH KISS

He never had a psychograph to fetch the sagging gripes of the sufferer. He was ripped with suffering, pummeled,

A prawn of manpower. And yet for all his droning in the mouth of the gynarchy, and though he sang

Praises to the soul kiss, it got to be a chore, a jerk of the groin, and he got so frail he withdrew like a hurt moth—

A scene in a play (seen now or by crowds a hundred years hence), that moment came and went.

So he turned to a lectionary of runts, but without triumph. Instead, the marvelous vanity

Festered and shut down like a fenestra. Then a darkness rose out of the mind’s bubble—with a guileless pipit crying Modernist America is dead and gone.

And when he thought to try again on the bed of arch and strafe, when he thought that life was worth the threat of life,

And his dreams broke inside his head like sparrows and dancing was the sorrow of pilgrims and beggars,

He suddenly feared that silly sketch of easy-blown theater could disappear again like his centuries-forgotten mother tongue.

POETS

William Butler Yeats

I liked best the desolate nights that rained the color of slate and mimicked complexities of cats and kings.

Also, unseeing eyes. The sun helped no soldier. It never broke or slaughtered fear or changed

The winds or damaged mavournin muse with her unforgiving beauty. Whining gave tenure to generations.

They should know—playboys of petty summary. Passion, precision: I wished most to know these fraus

(There’s desire worth residing in). I feared to pull back, aging into spongy italics, but the torn accounts

Cackled like pulp. ...