So the first event was a great success! A mostly undergraduate crowd watched and listened to both poets read for around twenty minutes each. I am very grateful to Professor Meg Tyler, the host and chief planner behind all these events for giving me the opportunity to introduce the poets. I was quite anxious, and hardly looked up from my paper as I read, but it was certainly a memorable experience. A video recording of the event should be on its way soon. Here is the first introduction I read, for Catherine Barnett, focused on her poem "Night Hour," transcribed below:
All night the unlocked door
Remains unlocked, all night it rocks in its frame
and speaks to child who waits
in his bed with only a pillow
and a phone under it--
and no light in the house
no other sound in a house
left open to mothers, thieves, wind--
"Night hour" is the 8th poem in Catherine Barnett's second book,
The Game of Boxes. It is composed of clauses piled one on top of the other, and it offers no full-stop, but stays open, just like the "unlocked door" the speaker describes. The poem opens, "All night the unlocked door / remains unlocked, all night it rocks in its frame / and speaks to the child who waits / in his bed with only a pillow / and a phone under it"
One gets the sense reading the poem that there is a story not being told. Why is the door unlocked and why is the phone under the child's pillow? The repetition is reminiscent of what you find in children's (bedtime) stories. The child seems to be alone, except for the only sound in the house--the unlocked door rocking in its frame. The door, as "all night it rocks in its frame" seems to share in the child's vulnerability, bringing to mind the first lines of
Speak Memory, "the cradle rocks above an abyss."
The door is "left open to mothers, thieves, wind." To the mother, whose return we assume is longed for; to the thieves who capture the child's fear and dread of what might enter the house. To the wind which can blow open a door, like the many doors these poems open.
For Steven Cramer, I focused my introduction around the first poem in his most recently published book
Clangings. Here is a link to Cramer reading the poem:
Steven Cramer Reading from Clangings
In Steven Cramer's
Clangings, different kinds of sound play enliven each line. In the openings poem's homonyms and chiasmi (such as: My friends say get on board, but I'm not bored" or "That's why when radios broadcast news, news broadcast from radios") the speaker suggests the links between connected and disparate things, reflecting the ties that bind different aspects of his personality. "My friends say get on board" implies that perhaps friends are urging the speaker to "get with it," as if that were an easy task. But the speaker insists on hearing something about bore-
dom instead, which he insists he isn't, attuned to the sounds of objects around him, especially companionable sounds--dinner plates, broadcast radio--ironic because he has no such companion outside himself, only the voices within.
In
Clangings, the world of the speaker seems hyper-animated. In his charged and enchanted state, he sees connections we may not -- between vivid objects and strings of words. Amid this jumble, it might come as a surprise to find that each individual poem in the collection is composed of five quatrains. These quatrains feel open, perhaps expressing a desire for fluid thought, which is never quite achieved; like his chiasmi, his phrases come back at him, not having found a receptacle/target. The poems are written in tetrameter, yet they work against the so-called meter of enchantment. Amidst all the beautifully communicated chaos, there is some search for meaning, some natural yearning for a magical ability to transcend this state of being. The first poem concludes with the lines, "What, you wonder, do I mean? / Except for slinging my songs / wayward home, how do things / in people go? is what I mean." Beyond just the speaker, there is a larger quest in this work; to learn about how we all think, aspiring to some greater clarity.
