Poet of the Month (original) (raw)

Patricia Nelson was introduced to poetry as a child, when she attended Lawrence Hart’s summer workshop in the early 1960s. Tall, thin, white-haired and smoking a professorial-looking pipe, Hart had an appearance strikingly different from any teacher she had seen before. He also had a strikingly different approach to poetry and students.

Hart first encountered Modernist poetry when it was relatively new. After his initial outrage, he set out to identify the lines that were somehow strangely effective and to analyze what made those lines work. He did this by means of extensive, even obsessive, reading and annotating; correspondence with practitioners he respected, and experimental teaching.

Hart launched his teaching process by demanding that his students “just report” what came to their senses. This was his method of freeing their writing of cliches and easy modifiers and generalizations. Ruthless in his way, but never malicious or condescending, Hart just didn’t let up until his students succeeded in reaching this initial level of originality. From there, his more advanced students moved on to a Modernist-inspired brand of metaphoric imagery, and intellectual statement that contained a freshness comparable to good sensory reporting and imagery.

Marketing their efforts as “Activist” poetry, Hart’s early students received substantial recognition, including Yale Younger Poets Series awards and features in Poetry Magazine. As the ‘60s unfolded, however, poetry seemed to “move on” from the aesthetic values of Modernism and toward a looser, more free-flowing style.

Jason Remembers Medea Storms blew me forward to an island
where the white stones glowed.

Where each day came over the hills
with monsters and a beak of yellow light.

A marvelously wrong place,
made of mind and other dangers.

There I was brave. Each task
they gave me seemed to love me.

A witch appeared, who loved me too,
with magic like fistfuls of pale motes.

Then she loosed the other part of love
where lay a rage as bright as hornets.

Jason Revises the Memory My memory of it undulates,
a warm green sea, endlessly nudging
the shore with revised animals.

How the meaning evolves, grows
lush and contradictory, a dream
that one can see from many places.

All of us lied, all were lied to.
The villains rose and ebbed,
as victims did, and heroes.

All of us, just curves in the story
on which a little glow or knowledge
seems to fall, for now.

But what of the gods and the drying dead?
They who made this desert at my feet,
this quiet dust that gleams with monsters.

A Sybil Contemplates Dido Her rage shatters like a white wave.
Thoughts so bright and dreadful
they seem to mirror truth.

How large her gestures are,
How they spill upon the pale sand,
as if some star had overfilled the sky.

If she were not so hot and fierce,
if I could touch her like a chilly sea,
would she then be still?

If only words could catch
this moment as it falls,
this shining cup about to break.

The Seer Prepares to Warn Caesar

A group of Roman senators, concerned about a concentration of power that threatened the continuation of the Roman republic, conspired to assassinate Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. In his play, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare introduces the figure of a soothsayer who foresees the assassination and tries to warn Caesar.

It's hard to see betrayal glowing
in a shadow—blades shifting quietly,
white and slant as moonlight in the forest.

And it’s hard to nudge an emperor with a dream.
If only I could burble softly in his own sleep
like some pleasant river he remembers fondly.

I'd whisper, without touching him, that power
is a color or a leaf that floats upon his skin.
That his size is made of weather

and the weather changes.

Julius Caesar Goes Forth on the Ides of March

Julius Caesar rose to power on the strength of his military victories in the Gallic wars. When the Senate demanded that he disband his army and return to Rome as a civilian, Caesar refused, and civil war ensued. When Caesar defeated all of his opposition, he was appointed dictator for life.

Yes, I hear the whispers
and I see their twisting faces
sideways on the air.

Men who change their shape
like blowing cloth
when they draw close to me.

But what else should I look for?
Love? The gauze of moonlight
on my elbows?

The empire made me large.
I walked on the deserts where
the shocked face of the moonlight lay

I know the subtle enemies who move away,
as silent as the pale dunes. Armies bearing metals,
wailing like the darkness in the sea.

I've worn every shape that fit me
and for me there is no door
that opens backward into smallness.

So, pull the curtain back on who they are.
Let them taste that light like salt.

Brutus Hesitates Shakespeare portrays Brutus as a reluctant conspirator.

I stop, as if I've walked onto a slope
that moves, a loss of weight upon the truth.
Perhaps I always made my way
toward this sudden sight:

My acts as I would imagine them.
Betrayal as a day of height and heat
where I stride noonward
on the smallness of my shadow.

The wish to kill was sweet enough
when it was intermittent. A music
that nudged me. My words swelling
as I swaggered toward the act.

I seemed to touch a tallness,
a rise that drew me near
the stars that circle like a season,
the surge of the large, white sea.