Death Threats and Mackerel in The New Yorker

A welcome commentary in the New Yorker's blog page about the Seattle threat letters and "A Display of Mackerel."

Idiosyncratic Menagerie

Here are the results from my Poetry Workshop in the Guardian, a wonderful collection of distinctively individual animal poems. Thanks to all who entered! The Guardian chose the top ten poems, and I picked from those my favorite five.

The Reader You Don't Want

On my way to school today I got an e-mail from Dan Savage, the brilliant sex columnist who writes for The Stranger in Seattle. It seems that eleven gay bars in Seattle have received threatening letters. Their author claims that he plans to poison at least five people in each of these bars one Saturday evening this month, with ricin; he sent a copy of the letter to The Stranger's obituary desk, informing them to expect 55 deaths. Savage had posted the text of the letter in an online column the paper hosts, and one of his readers recognized that a passage in the letter is lifted, word for word, from my poem "A Display of Mackerel." The quote isn't attributed, so it took a reader with a memory for poetry to catch it.

It's hard for me to describe how horrified I feel by this. On the literal level, my poem describes looking at a group of mackerel on ice in a fish market, and contemplating both their beauty and their apparent absence of individuation. The poem was written in 1994, in the awful latter days of the AIDS crisis here, when there was no hope in sight and the losses just went on and on. I wrote a number of poems then which try on positions toward the fact of mortality -- trying to make it bearable, at least for a little while, the notion that we lose what we love. No poem can do that, really, but the attempt to make meaning out of loss or to seek a way of understanding it is practically as old as poetry itself.

So -- now here are my lines twisted to a new context, and what was intended to suggest consolation is instead bent to an occasion for creating fear.

No writer, of course, has control over what readers do with the work, and that's as it should be. I like that people seem to inhabit poems, make them their own, by applying them to their own experience and needs. I've seen this happen again and again, where people find a meaning I did not exactly imagine but which is perfectly in line with the poem's intent. That's part of the art, this making of a meeting place between the interiority of the writer and that of the reader. I've never had this happen before, though, and it makes me want to -- I don't know, wash the poem clean?

Because the threat is so extreme, I'm hoping it's an ugly hoax.

(A side note: over on TowleRoad you can read the threatening letter itself, and many people have commented. One notes that the letter's prose is "grandiose" and so he's obviously a lunatic. Hey, that's not inflated psychopathic rhetoric, that's lyric poetry!)

Each mortal thing speaks and spells

This enormous oak is next to our rental house in Palo Alto, and it's an imposing presence. It seems unlikely, somehow, to share your street with this immense life form. These trees spread out over a lot of space, with heavy branches hung parallel to the ground. It's much bigger -- maybe twice the size -- of the house beside it.

The first thing I've taken in about this place are plants and trees. Coming from the east coast, it's balm to the spirit to see leaves and flowers, and a pleasure to notice the way the bluejays look entirely different from eastern ones, even a different hue, sort of lighter and more azure. This morning, on my way to the barber shop, an unfamiliar little brown bird hopping in the gutter, with a lustrous black head like a leather hood.

Today's my first class at Stanford, so I will be meeting a new crop of young poets. All this new-ness has me thinking about individuality, so this brings back this splendid stanza from Hopkins.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
        Deals out that being indoors each one dwells:
        Selves -- goes itself: myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

The great oak, the jays and the birds and the poetry students I don't know yet, all crying What I do is me; for that I came.

New York at Daybreak

I'm reading an advance copy of THE VEILED SUITE: The Collected Poems of Agha Shahid Ali, which Norton will publish soon. It's a wonderful book, and it brings Shahid back with such directness and vivacity. It seems so long since his death in 2001, and also as if he's just right around the corner, and will suddenly appear, talking and laughing and charming everyone in sight. Among the many ghazals in the book -- he was known, of course, for bringing a deeper understanding of the form into contemporary American poetry -- there's one I particularly like, in which each couplet ends with the word "rain." I'm placing this little passage here tonight because I've just left New York, for the next three months, and sitting here at the kitchen table of a rented house in Palo Alto, Shahid's evocation of a particular kind of New York solitude seems especially poignant:

New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me --
to make this claim Memory's brought even the rain.

Display Lives

This new apartment building in our neighborhood, on 7th Avenue, partakes of the fashion for big walls of glass, which is the thing in new buildings in New York, and feels like an import from Miami or other warmer climes. Since so many city apartments have smaller windows, or face other buildings, or dwell much of the day in shadow, you can see why people would be drawn to big expanses of glass. Not to mention just how interesting it is to look at the city's shifting welter of detail.

But this has the odd effect of creating these lit, open-to-the-street lives. I'm not sure how much you can tell from this photo, but from the street it's easy to watch the television sets in the apartments on the second and third floor, not to mention watch the people: a woman in the kitchen preparing something, a child wriggling out of his pants, a man walking through a room looking for something. I wonder if they feel at all conscious of being looked at; do they enjoy that, or do they edit it out? If I'm walking by at night, I can't take my eyes off the mirror on their living room wall, or the surprise of movement as a person walks through a room, even though it makes me feel like a voyeur. How can you be a voyeur if scrutiny is so invited?

It seems an invitation, from the designer of the building to the dwellers therein: turn your life outward, go about your business spotlit, in the air, just above the street, so that all the world sees your achievement, the accomplishment that is your address. As well as to the casual viewer: this life could, or maybe couldn't, be yours.

Holy Relics

This is the right arm of St. Edmond, who died in the 12th century. It's displayed in an otherwise modern chapel on Enders Island, just off Mystic, CT, at a Catholic retreat center which used to be a novitiate of the Edmondites. It is, in its odd way, beautiful; the skin is like a kind of thin gray translucent leather, and it clothes the longish fingers, outlining the joint of each knuckle very clearly. It rests on a golden pillow, and there's a kind of sleeve which covers the arm itself so that what you see's the hand and a bit of wrist. On the tip of the thumb there's a bright red drop, I guess a long-ago attempt to indicate the holy blood that had coursed here. What makes this object beautiful, obscene and riveting all at once?

One answer might be suggested by the way that Rosamond Purcell (see below) finds fascination in objects in the liminal state of decay, things on their way to not being themselves any more. At what point is, say, a doll no longer a doll? When it's headless or armless, or the eyes or missing, or just when exactly? When does a book that's been ruined by rain or the actions of time cease to be a book? In that way, Edmond's arm raises questions about where the human ends; is this arm far enough away from its source that we wouldn't call it human? Not yet. Is it a thing? Yes and no. It persists in the zone of uncertainty, and if it really IS Edmond's, it's 800 years old, and going nowhere in any hurry.

There's the endlessly intriguing quality of the fragmentation of the body, the stuff of dreams and of anxious fantasy. To be fragmented is, of course, to disappear, but look -- here's this arm, persistent, inexplicably intact, present.

Underneath the vitrine in which the arm rests, there's a second case full of smaller things, lockets, a little monstrance, a collection of baubles. Many of them have windows, transparent chambers inside of which is a bit of hair, a vertabrae, an unidentifiable organic something. I love these. I doubt anyone knows now quite what they are, whose elements are contained there, but they're encased in silver and crystals and hung on silk cords, and all tumbled together.

(The Edmondites, by the way, don't seem to be medieval in the least. They've done pioneer civil rights work, and a group of them took off to Selma in the early 1960s, where, among other things, they founded a home for elderly, indigent African-Americans.)