Anthony McCann
EP Poetry
Frankly I was a little uncomfortable writing a poetics statement (it does feel a little like applying for a job or begging you all to like my poems, or both) and it took me a long time to hit on something I felt both energized about writing and that seemed appropriate to the topic. Finally something reminded me, I can’t remember what, of one of my more powerful childhood memories—one I realized I associate very much with my having become a poet. The memory is from one Good Friday in the mid 70’s,when I was an earnestly and maybe a bit weirdly Catholic child.* It was a soggy and blustery March afternoon and I had run out into the yard after hearing an announcer during the radio broadcast of Handel’s Messiah say that Jesus Christ had just entered his agony. I was staring at the greenish-gray, low-hung sky and I remember thinking or feeling or sensing with a total terrorized certainty and clarity that right then at that very moment Christ was writhing on the cross. Right then it was happening, just in a different sector in time, and this meant that right then at that moment everything that had ever happened was happening. That thought drastically uncorked the world in its glorious terror, its absolute shining enormous simultaneity. For a minute or two anyway.
All the power of this moment, this memory, for me is contained not in my thoughts at the time but in the scene—the yard as I remember it: a single, bare and silver tree, the yellow grass, and in the green seams in the undersurface of the low-bellied sky. But remember is not really the right word for a memory so often recollected. I recall it, I re-make it, every time I “remember.” Each remembered version of this “memory” is somewhat different. I can change a detail, I can change the color of the grass. I can drop the bare tree and insert the bearded catalpa and it’s still somehow the same “memory.” Some not small details are, for whatever reason, uncrucial. For instance, I remember that it was very windy that day, but in order to recall the scene and the intensity of the sensation I oddly don’t need to include the wind at all, despite how much it doubtlessly contributed to the original experience. What I do need to have is some kind of tree, preferably one that’s a little sickly, or gnarled or just plain bare. It should be in the middle foreground and a little to the left. I also need the grass, the yard stretching away towards the back shed. And, most of all, I need that heavy sky. It can be green; it can be slate gray; it can be plump cotton brushed with ash as long as it is low, and absolute, and heavy. This is the basic grammar or, I suppose, geometry of that moment. This grammar or these shapes, these charged abstractions, feel strongly related to both the presences many of my poems try to invoke and to the language and imagery used to invoke them.
I’ve noticed that certain poems I write (there are a few example in the selection of poems here) often begin or begin to take shape through writing and re-writing and further abstracting or otherwise warping descriptions of the physical world, often of the sky, as if I were trying to rebuild that same childhood scene of hierophany over and over. I usually begin this kind of poem with a mental apprehension or mind held image of a particular space and of the larger brooding world assembling beyond it. This sensation or image is brought on by a phrase or a word, often itself an attempt to invoke or name something I have seen. The more substance the image culled from the world acquires as it resists and redirects the further descriptive assaults I’m making on it with language, the more the poem itself acquires its own substance and energy. It seems (and I feel tentative here since I am no philosopher of mind) that this resistance to description twists the language and the poem into unexpected shapes and dispatches it in unexpected directions and in doing so also gives the poem its energy or tone. To say that this is how I write all my poems or most of my poems or most of most of my poems probably wouldn’t be true. But it does seem to me to be how many of my poems begin. I also believe most of my more realized poems have in common a world charged with seething presence that is related to my first overwhelming encounter with being, presence and eternity. More than a few of these poems, often to my later surprise, rediscover, transformed in a new light and tone, some of the bare structure--the grammar, as well as the content, of that initial experience: the tree, the grassy stubble, the sky, and holy terror.
—Anthony McCann
*I told my Sunday school class I wanted to grow up to be a martyr. I can still picture all the allegedly future fireman, cops, nurses and teachers turning around to stare at me as I turned red. I hadn’t realized it was the wrong answer. In fact I’d thought it was the right one
The TemptationsNow you will feel absolutely terrified
And you are burning
And you will want to drink a beer
A gallon of beer immediately
And some water
Then you will want water
You are under the command of water completely
And you are absolutely terrified
This has been your experience
You put your face between your knees
You put your hands behind your head
You are under arrest
Under the command of science
You will be sentenced to the stars
To hard labor on the stars
On the surface of the stars
In a scientific suit
Of unmeltable plastics
Chilled with dry ice
And with some other kind of ice
(Rats will watch you from the moon
And you will want to drink a beer)
*
And you will want to speak
But under the command of water
All the verbs are swimming
And you are kneeling in the water
And you are receiving your commands
That are the commands of science
To free the gases of the stars
And you are absolutely terrified
And you will want to speak
*
Now a horse appears
Under the command of science
It is Horses on the Stars
It has come to cut your name
*
With a vision should come pain
A horse represents the pain
You may not give it as a gift
And you may not accept it
And you will have to buy it
*
This has been your experience
Under the command of water
The desert will suddenly bloom
The surface of the stars will bloom
And all the stars will drown
And you will have drowned the stars
And you will be absolutely terrified
That maybe really you are burning
Miami International Airport Hotel
1.
The alarm goes off---I'm still in the airport. Is it impossible to imagine my physical shape? I was dreaming of jobs again and of t-shirts that scream “Chicago!” And then I am absent, suddenly, accepting the fact: it remains impossible to imagine this hotel.
Are we inside the airport or are we clinging to its ribs?
At the elevator bank the walls are locked. The air piped in on rods of dust.
The doors open onto a square of grass.
To my right and to my left: two bright and empty hours.
2.
The alarm goes off. I'm still here. I awake feeling a pang of support for the locally grown organic foods movement. After so long of being unable to move. The walls here fit together perfectly and are slathered with mirrors. But when I go to the window it’s the same view of a vague and depthless dark. Is the hotel inside the window or is it grafted to its face? I fall asleep. The alarm goes off.
*
The hotel is drawn to exigent specifications that required the installation of these massive mirrors. The mirrors are where the walls get locked. (The dark behind the mirrors is where they brew the air.)
*
The restaurant is seamlessly integrated into the hotel system of the airport and is called simply “The Port” or, alternately, “The Port View Restaurant.” On the roof there is a finely trimmed lawn, the grass slick with halogen light. From here I see a blue disc moving in the dark. This is a New World Presentation.
3.
I should have been a blue disc.
In my dream I was sleeping.
Retaining some sort of physical shape.
A hollow hot place in the middle of the deep.
I was in this hotel but this hotel in Chicago
as the doors opened in a perfect yawn.
But out there in the dark, man,
they grow things you never seen--plastic
wrists, witches made of glass.
Meanwhile I wake panting, sleeping on my waist.
The hotel has no shape and is never dark inside--
the dark is outside between the mirrors and my skin
while the hotel is drawn to demanding exceptions.
At this point a new motif is introduced:
fossils encrusted in the airport linoleum.
I am drawn to re-imbedding in the surface of the place.
Where for this air, these robot tunes?
This has been a New World Presentation.
In Favor of One’s Time
my clear
plastic cup
was creased
with milky veins
wet lights
hung loose
along the grammar
of the hills
each day
the death count
was revised
alone sometimes
in pairs
we canvassed
the terrain
near me always
was a highway
and the silent power
of the birds
the cry the song
finds limits
but my body
is a vessel
of their joy
Greatest Snow Emergency Ever
Coming in, coming out,
of distant music
I make a point of
not speaking
because
right now
I am typing (I have no
body people,
people, here I am)
*
And when we wake up
with 2 feet of snow
on my breasts
I say (to myself since I
am always speaking)
I say
This is a nice little shrine
*
I say
Distant music
isn’t always
sacred. People
when you wake up (and I’m gone)
it’s the Greatest
Snow Emergency Ever
Arthur Rimbaud
Last night I dreamt of the parkway again
The Senators: silent, dignified, sad
The Sky: blue as the eyes of the beast
I ripped off his ear and part of his face
After the accident he began to smell different
Not badly exactly, he began to smell sweet
I wrote a letter explaining my motives
I lined up each pill on the mantel by color
The lines are cut, the shades are drawn
Our bodies are factories factoring light
Our bodies were factories delivering light
I was wearing a raincoat and red leather pants
In the sky the city had been detained
I was locked in the bathroom spitting up foam
Later I helped him search the lawn for his teeth
The Whole Sky was a flag: blue and horribly still
The New Romantics
The Crimes of Science are inexact.
Butterflies suffer in crystalline
Syntax. Nightbirds don’t whistle
They crack. Unbreakable
As the sea. O. You.
Unsoilable,
Unsayable,
X!
And what was I waiting to reach you for?
A stranger slept in my ear.
These unpaintable trains—
They have this failure to glisten.
So again I missed the clouding up
Of the cloudless air again.
Forgive me, Doctor, I am spiteful, unclean
And I fear that I might be in rebellion.
When I struggle to be a hero to my people
And near me nothing is burning
Suddenly little circles are burning
And then everyone ignores my radiance.
Rains come to unbutton the air.
The hillsides come unstitched.
Nightbirds creep
The eaves of this
Ceremonial stone.
As all around us
A void thickens.
The Consolation of Literature
Afterwards, when they went out,
There was not a soul on the esplanade.
The sky was thick with birds
And this thickness was called night.
Across the glazed surface of an emerald pool
The sun of the landlord poled his canoe.
We were cold under it, despite my hands—
Their enormity and weather.
“They went out and left us here
with the abstracted air of a disavowed lump.
They will hang their eyes on the moon!”
And so, drowned the moment we are born
That very evening at the class party
The rendered sky, flat and ripped,
Was the color in the ides of science.
O Sky, how can you be so ingenuous?
A vessel in the form of a cup, of great
Diameter and little depth.
How will I ever reconcile
My randy heart
To your ten million blips?
Thus our radiance is reviled.
But as dawn approached with its artful leaks
The vast, likeable air grew thin.
Its glittering is The Miracle of Grammar.
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