Sunday Poem

AN IDEA OF ORDER IN BEACON HILL PARK 

The seagull doesn’t like to be ignored, fans
out a white demi-bloom of tail, flies
breast to breast with the water gull below,
a show of sudden flight and reflected shadow

close or at a distance any eye that pans
this wake of flight is led to spaces
in trees where living branch meets dead;
below, spent cigarettes and blossoms, floating birdshit
and feathers where the willow trails its swimmer’s hair

these things are not what we’ve come for—what’s advertised
are peacocks, the more iridescently bright the better,
rhododendrons fuschia and puff-sleeved as bridesmaids
in procession and attended by fern fronds

more startling still, a short walk down the street—
ladies and gentlemen—scarlet ibis and flamingoes
under glass. In the land of the newlywed and nearly dead
everything’s arranged to please us

but not this misfit, this beautiful fan-tailed scavenger
who, more like us, eats garbage, makes from it ivory plumage,
tries to take over the world, calls out a raucous screed
on the subject of attention here where we’ve come to scavenge
an idea of the garden, cultivated in empire’s detritus

ah look, a lone duckling, an ageing romantic
clucks at the loss of mother but her man looks at his watch,
holds her elbow in a slingshot grip, says
don’t worry, honey, it’s nature 

and along the groomed trails we shuffle out, leave spaces so our tribes
don’t meet in unmediated ways until we reach the street
the lights, the flashing crosswalk man we’ve made
and technobirdsong that must be obeyed

frozen in the sudden open glare, the man
picks a fallen petal from his love’s hair,
the signals change, and we walk on in unison
sprouting shreds of blown down and errant pollen.

by Carmelita McGrath from The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry (Breakwater, 2013), edited by Mark Callanan and James Langer.

(Painting by Tamara Bond.)

Verbatim

"Maybe the epic poet of Newfoundland has yet to be discovered. She may be out there contemplating sending her first suite of poems off to a literary journal. She may be thinking about taking a creative writing class or may just be now reading the poet that will change her life and draw her to poetry. I’d like to think that she’s the person this anthology was compiled for. A little message in a time capsule that reads, 'Here is your inheritance. Now carry on.'"
James Langer and Mark Callanan discuss their new anthology The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry.

How Do You Create Beauty in Poetry?

For James Langer, beauty is a principle one abides by best when quarreling against it:  

Beneath all of the divisions within poetry—all the schools and mantras and ideals of form—poetry’s first principle, the thing at its compositional core, is variation. That supersedes all else, in my opinion. Whether we’re avant-garde or new in the old-fashioned way, to paraphrase Frost, I believe we can agree on that core. Verse means turning, and that refers, I think, to more than just considering your line breaks. It’s a contingent idea of beauty, variation. To play with and against what has been deemed beautiful through the tradition. To create something that is recognizable and different simultaneously. And then to offer that thing up to the court of opinion and argument. The whole tradition, with its giants, as we understand it and agree and disagree with it, has been one big argument about what’s beautiful, trying to set and reset and adjust the terms, trying to come to agreements.

(Illustration by Javier Pacheco.)  

Sunday Poem

GUN DOGS 

And I’ve unleashed the dogs, out of season,
on days so hot all solids seemed to rise
from a quantum and kindled crux of yeast.
Slipway boats venting through unseasoned gaps,
paint roughed to a barm and the blisters
of green balsam rupturing on contact,
until my hands, drawn tight with a flexed mesh of sap,
hardened like two heels of bread. The gun dogs,
tongues loose, would spring on a hot scent
as though to free their paws from ground frost;
hound voices shattering the heat so completely
a dazed sun straggled a moment to piece
the light back together again and regain
its train of lumbering thought. And somewhere
from the understory, a snowshoe hare
would harness that great mutant heart in its chest
and slingshot into naught. I’d wait for the dogs
to circle, wait for their yawps and gutturals
to set borders as far as their voices would carry,
wait beneath spruce and birch boughs hung
with the curve of a boat’s bow or the arch
of a nave infused with stained light. There’s a point
when a beagle turns a comer and changes
its voice from pursuit to driving forth, when the sound
tugs a drawstring at the burlap of your nape,
when persistent dogs swing to push home,
when they close the distance and nutshell the time
left to reckon with the headwind of a bark
that assembles its mass and leaps as four paws
from a camouflage of brush. Always willing
to start over, go further than need, the hounds
would drive a hare down the burrow of a muzzle
without fear, without shying off. I’ve felt
the gun dog’s turn without a weapon in my grasp,
in the absence of prey, at times and in places
where no dog ran, or was, or had a right to be:
when I loitered in dark corners and put flame
to a glossed patch of gas at the crossroads station,
when I woke in a sub-zero bus shelter with hair
cold-bitten to the hard floor, when I steadied
my father who leaned too far to one side
three days after the first of his brothers died.
Other times, like standing with a lug wrench
in a fog-clot on the isthmus with the hazards tripped
or when my first Selected Frost split
at that place in the bind where “Birches” starts.
It's surged in the circuit and called me out
when I’ve missed the point or burned it black,
when I’ve holed up in a corridor of sound
just to feel the echo swell and contract.

From Gun Dogs (2009) by James Langer.