September 8: Poet of the Week, Matthew Gavin Frank, Music, "Types of Symphony"

I had no idea until this morning who I was going to choose as Poet of the Week.  Usually, by Friday or Saturday, I have an idea.  This time, I literally stood in front of my book shelf at 4:30 a.m. and just scanned my shelves.  My eyes stopped on a collection by Matthew Gavin Frank.  I scanned the shelves again.  Back to Matt's book.  Third time, same result.

Thus, the Poet of the Week is Matthew Gavin Frank.

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you already know my affection for Matt's work.  He is, simply, a fantastic writer.  On top of all that, he's a really decent guy.  Down-to-earth.  Funny as hell.  Somebody you want to have a beer with, which I have done on more than one occasion.

The first poem I've chosen to share with you comes from his newest collection, The Morrow Plots.  I've already written a review of this book, talked about its strange, dark beauty.  Today's selection is slightly lighter than most of the poems.  If the rest of the book is ebony, this poem is dusk.

It's about the music of life, the way I read it.  There's music in everything.  The chicken sandwich you eat for dinner.  The smell of skunk in the early morning dew.  Sour milk in the fridge.  Everything contributes notes, chords, phrases of light and dark.  Melodies heavy and tripping.

Saint Marty could listen to this "song" all night.

Types of Symphony

by:  Matthew Gavin Frank

When the sun rises behind the black
                                                                cow, everything
around the cow brightens.  This

is the rule.  The milk pails

upturned by the night,
the river, the landowner in bed
                                                     biting his lip.  No one is exempt.  The wife

who has pulled their daughter awake
by her hair.  In her scalp, needlmarks
                                                                            of blood struggle

against her skin, nothing
                                 a hairbrush can fix,
nothing to undo the know.
I don't know what to make of this
                                                                          as I wake next to you,

your neck steeped in days-old panache,
the kind of perfume a shower

does nothing to wash away.  I can't tell
if the cow is a sign of doom
                                                    or hope,

if the landowner's teeth
are too weak to break the skin.

                                                          Your answer isn't
an answer at all, but more
of an aubade, your fingers, in sleep, reaching
                                                                                      for the piano

in the blankets,

your voice like the cow's to the world
                                                                           to every hairbrush
not picked up, to the boy who,

in the back of a barn,

handles his first gun.  Sleep,
like some rough draft of God
                                                                 still engaged in the nonviolent

act of dove-making.

It's beautiful music

               

April 13: Disappearing, Matthew Gavin Frank, "The Morrow Plots," New Cartoon

Anyway, as soon as I got my breath back I ran across Route 204.  It was icy as hell and I damn near fell down.  I don't even know what I was running for--I guess I just felt like it.  After I got across the road, I felt like I was sort of disappearing.  It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

It's snowing again in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  It's an end-of-winter snowstorm that makes me think the sun is never going to appear again, that it's been swallowed up by cloud and cold forever.  I know how Holden feels in the above passage.  I look outside, and the world has disappeared again into white.  In the fall, snow seems cleansing and clean.  Now, snow seems like a cruel joke, as if someone is throwing a blanket over my head as I'm trying to get out of bed.


Matthew Gavin Frank tells a story about the genesis of his new collection of poems, The Morrow Plots.  He was living in a summer community in upstate New York, teaching at a nearby college.  During the warm months, the town was a thriving tourist attraction, with amusement park rides and boaters and a hedge maze.  When the cold and snow descended on the hamlet, it was deserted, frozen in isolation.  It was during this time when he became homesick for the Midwest where he grew up.  He started Googling famous landmarks in Illinois and eventually discovered the Morrow Plots, which he describes as "a now-revered series of soil plots upon which agricultural experiments could be conducted" on the grounds of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The Plots were established in 1876 and became a National Historic Landmark in 1968.  Frank began tilling this sacred ground and found this book.

The poems in The Morrow Plots are unstable, moving back in forth in time and character.  Each line is a sprouting seed, an experiment in astronomy and agriculture and identity.  The poems aren't easy.  They're intelligent and confounding, tests of sound and emotion, syntax and line.  Much like its namesake, the book creates fields of scientific beauty and mystery in the reader's heart and mind.  To pick one poem to highlight here is like choosing one ear of corn from a silken Greek chorus crop.  Each poem, shucked and exposed, is both frightening and tender.  One of my favorites is titled "Breadbasket":

Breadbasket

I have not eaten for days.
It is common--this notion of what happens
under each tooth.
A coven of molecules burning
with the wet hay of the harvest.
As I chew on the air, I feel, under my
shirt, the metal cold
of a dying girl's hands.

When the diner reopens, I will eat,
visit my friends in the hospital,
a sick doctor losing himself
in the fluorescent light
while shaving the chest
of a broken farmer.

On an empty stomach,
there is a fullness to sitting on the roof
of a building dedicated to the study of life,
the wet-eyed edges of things
that could be the falling of a student chorus,
could be the corn
gently blown, the statue
of a Huguenot lost in Illinois.
Up here, strangely un-hungry,
height and food have fused.  My body,
this thick bag for transience.

Matt Gavin Frank stuns me, over and over, with his poems in The Morrow Plots.  It is not a comfortable stun.  More like the stun of an icy wind on a November night or the slap of a cornstalk on a sunburned shoulder.  The pain is transient.  The payoff is dark and bracing truth, as lasting as the Morrow Plots themselves.

Like Holden Caulfield running across Route 204, Saint Marty can feel himself disappearing into The Morrow Plots, becoming a part of a larger story, both individual and universal.

The Confessions of Saint Marty

April 12: Proof, "Autoerotic Asphyxiation," Matt Gavin Frank

Just to prove to you how crappy my poems are, I'm going to prove how good my friend Matt's poems are.

This poem is from Matt Gavin Frank's newest collection of poems, The Morrow Plots.  It's titled "Autoerotic Asphyxiation."

Now, please excuse Saint Marty.  He's going to slip into the nearest bottle of Prozac.

Autoerotic Asphyxiation

The world goes pink with buffoonery,
billions of squirrels

running away.  In their cheeks
acorns arrange themselves

like dog stars, wait
for the constellation

that looks like a camel.
A mesquite jealousy

in humplessness, the stockings
we save for just such an occasion.

We haven't spent
this much time here

since we were seventeen,
when mortality was a barking sky,

an animal a continent away,
this documentary

about Morocco.  Like the squirrels
we move without headlights.

You speak equations
into my ear that would take

the stocking to solve.
Canicula.  Ligature.  In the next

room, we hear my father's
one sharp cough, wonder

if we're not breathing
enough.

Let's just prove how crappy my blog is, too