We never know how and when a superb literary voice is born, much less what makes it happen.
But happen once more it has with the young poet Travis Mossotti’s first published collection of poetry About the Dead, winner of the 2011 May Swenson publication prize from Utah State University.
This year’s contest was judged by my old acquaintance and American icon Garrison Keillor. My initial response to his selection was driven by several things I’d like to clear up. One, that I could only find two of Mossotti’s poems online by which to make an off the cuff response to his work, which as it turns out are among the few weaker poems in his book, and two, that I feel strongly that no one should be allowed to enter a publication contest under the age of say, forty-five. Further, it seemed to me that the Swenson prize should be judged by a woman, as women are still under-represented in American arts and letters and Swenson’s oeuvre displays a brilliant woman writer in utter mastery of her craft.
These may be outrageous statements to some but hear me out. We have M.F.A. graduates pouring out of our schools now possessing a high degree of technical proficiency. They have enjambment and figurative language, the popular tone of alienation and focus on life’s many contradictions down. What they lack often, in my view, is the depth of experience and vision—and voice—to produce a coherent body of work in which the quality is uniformly high, and too many of their poems deal in pyrotechnics and surfaces without any soul to them. I make these judgments about my own small press book Reunion, published in 1987 while I was earning the MFA at Colorado State University. When I read the book now I see awkward turns of phrase, blunders of diction, convoluted, idiosyncratic imagery that I would now revise.
The other bone I’ve picked before on this blog: to me it is a shame that contest manuscript screening is most often placed in the hands of graduate students. I could name you at least fifty poets over the age of 45 who’ve been left in the dust because of the half-formed and often ill-considered aesthetics of MFA students who, it has been said more than once, are also dying to please their mentors.
Having said these things, I have lived with Mr. Mossotti’s book for several days, opening my heart and mind to his work. He is a fabulous poet and an exception to my broad-brush commentary on MFA’s.
Consider these lines, that come later in the collection but speak to the whole:
Extinction is such a harsh word. I pray for words/ that soften with each use until we may forget/their meaning altogether. I pray to never/become extinct or fashionable. I pray to live/inside the hallowed walls of your mouth forever.
An ambitious statement for a young poet. Mossotti’s book of course—although dramatically and glossily black, both cover and jacket– is not grounded in death but in life, and life’s apprehensions of mortality. His masterful long poem Decampment, which launches the collection, is a lyrical coming of age poem that with steadily building and piquant imagery unveils the speaker’s relationship with his father.
Long before the night my father and I hiked the rim/of chicory and sedge that marked our property,/generations of ghosts already meandered down/the ephemeral streambeds’ smoothed cavities,/making camp under colonies of black elm, cypress.. And with this alluring invocation an odyssey begins.
This rich poem merits several re-readings for its exactitude and beauty of language, simple, spare and yet compelling: “…A train of empty boxcars slugged by before dawn /and carried us back to Aynor like kings/..defeated. I threw up three times in a ditch,/dunked my head into a bucket of rainwater, …stepped inside, a new man.”
This poem of Mossotti’s has received a great deal of exposure and been made into an animated film. You can see the film here—be sure to have the text on hand.
About the Dead contains poems of loss and longing interspersed with vignettes of southern life, spare and dry landscapes somehow rich in flora and fauna— moments both tangible, poignant and surreal, funded at times with a sense of detachment and alienation. In many of these poems Mossotti’s imagery is unerring—it is as if we are reading someone with a compass in his hand who plots his course carefully and both knows materially although perhaps not spiritually just yet, where he is.
The poet’s control over his material is thus admirable to me, and as noted I have encountered numerous unmatchable lines of lyricism, leading me to understand why Mr. Keillor selected this work. It strikes the balance between keen, singular and often quite witty observations of the quotidian and it clearly comes from what one must call the American narrative.
In I’m explaining a few things Mossotti writes…
There’s an old bullet lodged in the field of scrub
behind my house that’s grown colorless as dirt.
The land is implacable, even as its familiar scene
of death and light retreats into the browning dusk.
Offspring of the offspring of the offspring
of crows cross over the thistle and brush,
Cross over ground that remembers nothing of human loss.”
While the poem alludes to an act of violence, the full-on descriptor—implacable, familiar scene/of death and light…browning dusk are quintessentially and referentially American lines wrought from the vast and great dreamscape/landscape ever giving rise to the survivor self.
Certainly the Speaker in our contemporary tradition places himself or herself in the land from which he has sprung, the love and tenderness for place and all inhabitants of that place that dwell in his bones, as in the fabulous poem The Dead Cause:
On the porch, a grasshopper waved
its serrated foreleg at me while I juggled
Groceries for keys; it was the kind
of friendly wave I might’ve expected
From a loved one, recently dead,
reincarnated into this green husk.
The whole ordeal triggered an alarm
of distant thunder, stuffing my head
With dark seeds; so after waving back,
I ducked inside, fearful…
But the natural world is as disturbing to the speaker as it is familiar. As I read on in the collection, the conflict between love and fear from which the work takes its dynamism led me to wonder what resolution might be waiting. And, most of the poems have backbone, ribs and flesh, have been hewn with an ax, worked at with a chisel and singed at to intensify their language.
This is not a convoluted poetry forcing the reader to guess and unravel the poet’s meaning or to speculate whether the poem means anything at all, which is the case with so much poetry in currency now. Mossotti’s work is highly accessible for the most part and saved from the prosaic by what feels like an unerring love of language.
I will touch on something that could be a matter of vigorous debate; this is a very masculine book; the work’s references/objective correlatives if you will, arise from a young man’s world. Consider the referential maleness of these lines from Saxifrage:
The gym’s boxing room has the sunken décor
of a Fifties bomb shelter—a heavy bag
girthier than an elephant’s penis, loafing
pendulumatic, long after the barrage of punches
have stopped. I used to imagine pummeling
The chops of the guy who slept with my ex.
Thump, Wham! Thump, Thump, Wham!
Knucklebone, Catharsis. Winged prayer
field-dressed like a pheasant. But sooner
or later, everyone has to move on: tornado
swipples a huddle of yearlings from the field…
How unexpected knucklebone and catharsis, followed by a winged prayer “field-dressed.” How indelibly male this voice, to write “a huddle of yearlings from the field.”
And the last stanza of Decampment:
Our house sank two inches
the day after my father died.
The foundation split. My mother
kept tripping over the new cracks
in the front porch, and Cora
spun a screwdriver on the rail.
My head filled with cement.
That night, I hiked four miles
over rotting trestle
to the abandoned quarry…
These poems do, in their own admirably direct way, radiate compassion, humanity; in general the speaker is the witness, the somewhat taciturn observer, as if to articulate comes with a price, as if one is unused to unfettered expression, another masculine/male aspect of Mossotti’s work.
The last poem, Only Then, returns us to the primal father-son relationship:
…My father would light those
stubby brown cigars and lean
over the rail of the back deck
like a Buddhist shaving his head
in the dark: he would smoke and
stare past the forest and imagine
the coming winter and the next….
I had a bit of trouble with the title poem of the book which I found compelling in its earliest stanzas– What remains/ of the dead fascinates me. In Paris, I wandered/ the Catacombs for hours looking at the bones- stacked so neatly. The plagues were so efficient/ at producing bones to stack—the churches’ graveyards /dug up and brought by horse-cart under moonlight/ to the vacant sarcophagi of the old Roman quarries…
However then for me, the poem takes a plunge; the speaker recounts literally arrested lovers on Jim Morrison’s grave in graphic language: “The man’s cock remained a hard, diligent protester/bouncing as they hauled him away over the cobblestone path/out of the cemetery—something still locked up inside him.”
All of us encounter surreal moments in human affairs and are so struck by the irony there we endeavor to give it voice. Certainly “diligent protestor” intrigues. But as a 63 year old fellow poet and reader–and woman– I trip over this blatant double entendre regarding coitus interruptus; I have no idea where this poem might have gone but we have wandered far from the intensely compelling image of the efficient plague, to something gratuitously graphic.
Despite this misstep, and here and there for me jarring diction—as in the use of the adjective “lithesome” which is so archaic as to jut out of a given line—I am impressed by Mr. Mossotti’s mastery of his craft. Mr. Keillor writes: “…like most readers, I am exasperated by so much poetry I read and exhilarated by some, and my reactions have little to do with schools or styles… this book struck me on first reading as an adventurous book grounded in real places and real people…I was struck by the rightness of his word choices, surprised by so many odd words that seemed so exactly right.”
A number of poems in the book have been awarded prizes and an impressive thirty-nine have been published. This speaks well of Travis Mossotti’s achievements to date. He is decisively launched, and the trajectory of his work will be rewarding to follow.
Jenne’ R. Andrews, M.A., M.F.A.
Reunion, Lynx House Press
Fellow in Literature, NEA.
Michael Jackson, A Lesson in the Abuse of Free Will
In advance of the burgeoning national obsession with the trial of Dr. Conrad Murray, charged with the murder of Michael Jackson by overdose of an anesthetic that shouldn’t be used outside a hospital, I wanted– surprise, surprise– to weigh in.
It’s clear that Conrad Murray was uncomfortable with routinely putting Michael Jackson to sleep, if you believe that he would turn his head away when running the IV.
Here, for the record, is an entry from Wikipedia that seems to fit as a C.O.D. for the King of Pop:
Propofol infusion syndrome is a rare syndrome which affects patients undergoing long-term treatment with high doses of the anaesthetic and sedative drug propofol. It can lead to cardiac failure, rhabdomyolysis, metabolic acidosis and renal failure and is often fatal.[1][2][3] Hyperkalemia, hypertriglyceridemia, and hepatomegaly are also key features. It is associated with high doses and long-term use of propofol (>4 mg/kg/hr for more than 24 hours). It occurs more commonly in children, and critically ill patients receiving catecholamines and glucocorticoids are at high risk. Treatment is Supportive. Early recognition of the syndrome and discontinuation of the propofol infusion reduces morbidity and mortality.
But more importantly, there is an issue in all of this that commands everyone’s attention, or should. What is an addict, anyway, and was Jackson one?. Confusion reigns, as it emerges that MJ had long relied on booze and drugs in their many forms and combinations.
I wager that every one in this country who drinks does so because he or she likes the effect of alcohol. We’ve legitimized it for centuries; we’ve bottled ethanol so that a forty-year old Bordeaux is an objet d’art, a holy relic..We’ve made it all respectable, no big deal. I wager that nearly everyone looks forward to the 5 o’clock bell and the opportunity to rendezvous at the local pub. Or, after a day of working hard outdoors or at the computer, to getting out a nice bottle of crisp white something. Everyone is aware of the dangers of drinking too much and some people do it anyway. Some people drink nothing on one night and a bottle of wine the next night. And, yes, some people pass the point of no return, get hooked and drink themselves to death.
Regarding the Rx pain killer dependency epidemic in this country, not everyone tells their doctor that they like the opioid high. Because then, of course, you wouldn’t be able to get them. Opioids produce euphoria and make everything o.k. for three or four hours until they wear off. If you don’t want to be stoked on Vicodin or Percocet or Lortab all day long, you monitor yourself and try to take it just for your pain. Or, if you are at risk, you err on the side of caution and if you need it for minor surgery or a slipped disc, you get off it fast. I’m suggesting that all of us who drink, take pills or ever have, until late in the game, when dependency slides into addiction, have many choices.
I therefore do not see Michael Jackson as a victim any more than I see myself as one, although it’s easy for me to blame the several years I took percocet on my surgeon for prescribing it. I knew why I took it; it was for the high. I stopped taking it at my initiation and am now addressing a related issue with a far less scary medication for pain.
In an ideal world, every person with an unhappy childhood would get into therapy and short-circuit the need for escape and/or pain relief. But we have millions in poverty, millions in dysfunction who don’t even know what normal is, or what a family is. Where was it that the ten year old kid just shot his neo-nazi dad? Moreover, many of us have absolutely no intention of letting someone dig around in our psyches to find out that we were abused and worse. Or we tried it, and it drove us crazier. Many of us don’t believe it’s a good idea to set up camp in old wounds. So, we do what we have to do to tamp down the pain and keep going. Does that make us addicts?
I have to say, after spending half of my life dealing with the addiction vs. dependency, no choice over substances vs. control issues, that I do not believe we can generalize and say that everyone who takes or uses a drug “recreationally” or drinks too much sometimes is an addict.
To me, an addict is someone who has to have a substance 24-7 to function, to cope, to face life, and who makes very bad decisions–like driving drunk or stoned– in the process. An addict obsesses about his or her fix and doesn’t like running out of whatever it is. An addict loses control and is ruled by the substance and not the other way around.
That all happened to me with alcohol, and I’ve now made the decision to not drink– not for any reason. I’ve never wanted to have just one glass of anything: I drank to get high and crazy and cut loose, and four years ago in that state I fractured my right leg, so that I’m writing this in a wheelchair. How and why? Well, I had a beautiful horse I was afraid to ride as I had fallen the last time I rode, so I drank a bottle of champagne and a few glasses of wine, tacked up, forgot to check the cinch, got a leg up and had someone with me, even, when the saddle slipped as I was dismounting and my leg was trapped in the stirrup so that I had to tear myself free. I would never have risked another fall if I hadn’t been drinking; my courage came out of a bottle.
A good exercise is to journal about how many times in a day one thinks about one’s substance of choice. Is one obsessive, leading to the compulsion to use, as the addictionologists (I hate it that there is such a word– very close relatives of the proctologist), say? What about your behavior? Do you make a fool out of yourself or pick fights? Then maybe whether you’re an addict or not is moot. Maybe you just need to quit, to make a decision to stop. Stopping alone early in the game can be done– by tapering off and replacing “using” time w/ other activities, and the aid if necessary of a supportive friend.
I’ve taken swipes at AA on this blog because I personally found AA to be a very disempowering organization that is more like a cult than not. AA contends that alcoholics have lost the power of choice in drink, are beyond human aide and must throw themselves into the arms of a Higher Power of their understanding. I did AA for about eighteen years and got crazier, evangelized and evangelizing, programmed. But there are other ways to get support for alcohol and drug abstinence these days that don’t require “spiritual surrender”, which is a cover for putting yourself in the hands of other ill people on a power trip.
No one should tell anyone else that he or she is an addict. No one should generalize and put all people who have substance abuse tendencies but have some measure of control in the same box as the gutter drunk– who himself or herself, is still a human being worth helping, and who is on borrowed time. Check out Ray Liotta’s performance as an end-stage alcoholic on ER about ten years ago, and things will be clearer.
Back to Michael Jackson. A tape was played during the first day of the trial today in which Jackson is clearly stoned. It turns out that he had a history of reliance upon sedative drugs, and probably wasn’t honest about that to Dr. Murray until Dr. Murray felt he couldn’t abandon Michael. Murray states that he was trying to taper Jackson off the stuff that killed him, although he’d just ordered four gallons of it. As someone just pointed out on tunnel-visioned Dr. Drew, there was an employer-employee relationship going on between Murray and Jackson, not a doctor-patient relationship, although I personally believe that we all need to be far more assertive with our providers, ask them more questions and hold them accountable when they are wrong. We pay them, after all.
But Michael Jackson was a bright guy. He knew damn well that he was on thin ice. He knew himself well, and he had his priorities: fame. A comeback. To rid himself of awful feelings that allegedly include having been physically abused by his father, by any means. To get the most out of life by foreshortening it–a working definition of an addict’s m.o. in a nutshell.
Jackson doctor-shopped and struck oil with Dr. Murray. Murray drank the MJ kool-aid and loaded him up with propofol to get him to sleep. Now, come on; what doctor does that? How crazy is that. He is therefore culpable. He contributed to MJ’s demise. But Jackson hired him in the first place, however much the family would like to portray him as a victim, and chose to kill himself. I half-buy the defense theory that when Murray’s back was turned, Jackson swallowed more pills and actually drank the anesthetic, as it was found in his stomach. Don’t think that Murray put it there. Seemingly he did not himself that afternoon administer a lethal dose.
I would say that if you die from an o.d., with the exception of the tragic deaths of college kids who don’t realize somehow and sometimes what they’re doing to themselves, you were probably an addict, and you probably did yourself in all by your lonesome, and chose not to get help. R.I.P. you who have so chosen: MJ, Anna Nicole, Heath Ledger, Marilyn, Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Joplin, Hendrix, everyone…my own mother. And God help those of us who do our best to face life on life’s terms and be honest with ourselves–especially in being self-forgiving and self-merciful when we don’t do life perfectly, or even, by some rigid perspectives, live altogether “sober.” Dr. Drew claims that alcoholics are incapable of honesty, to which I say bullshit. Self-honesty is key to getting off stuff that’s bad for you and people bust themselves on their own denial every day.
The family and the prosecution in this case cast Michael as a victim; the whole crrew is in denial. It turns out that ativan and other things combined with propofol make a lethal cocktail. This will all be a tough call for a jury that may not be up to dealing with the forensics in the case.
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