At the CPITS symposium, David Starkey asked the writers in the workshop what we were reading. For poet-teachers, this is an especially important question because we often bring new literature into the classroom.
The selections in textbooks are often decades old by the time they’re published. These textbooks devote many pages to significant writers, although the examples from those writers are often selected for their decorum rather than their immediacy. Such is our comedy of manners.
As resident writers, we have the opportunity to bring in work from outside the curriculum, contemporary work that belongs to this era even if students won’t find it anthologized in their required anthology.
The title plays on at least two definitions: "to bring out the meaning by performance" and "to give in return or in requital"
One of the books I told Starkey I’d been reading was Joseph Zaccardi’s Render (Poetic Matrix Press). Today is Veteran’s Day, and if school weren’t out at Valley Center High, I’d probably bring in one of Zaccardi’s poems. The bio in Render doesn’t mention military service, but Zaccardi’s poems do. I wouldn’t call them “war poems”; rather, these poems appear early in the collection, making war an early experience that the narrator responds to. The title poem says, “What takes away, gives” (60). Is this something war taught the veteran? As I think about the veterans in my life, I think about terrible simplicity of the ultimate sacrifice and the difficulty of their survival.
Zaccardi’s book is not so much about transcending but surviving a “rotten war” without letting the touch of rot destroy the soldier (5). Throughout the collection he plays with the words “lessen” and “lesson,” homonyms, to be sure, but also synonyms if the one observes not only what is lost but what takes its place and how whatever appears lost is transformed (1, 10, 13, 47, 71).
Poet Joseph Zaccardi
One technique Zaccardi employs is the negated image. At least since Shakespeare noted that his mistress’ eyes were nothing like the sun, poets have used negating descriptions to come as close as possible to what they were attempting to say (Cesmat). Zaccardi occasionally uses a negated image where others might have willfully forgotten for reasons of self-preservation. In the poem “Regret” he writes,
What I forget is kept on a long list, white tape
of a cash receipt. It unfurls, accounting for debits,each detail printed in a blue smear.
***
I can’t remember nearly missing first call to colors,
or hesitating at the gangway, saluting the ensign,
or almost not leaving. (8)
The end of one thing is the edge of a new thing. Rather than write reminiscences, Zacccardi writes through something to the next thing:
…. Everything turns
on itself: the earth, our sun, a dog
tied to a Maypole. And who will be sorry
if “nothing” is uncovered, who will care
if there’s no world at the end? (64)
Li Po "felt the pull of faraway, the way tea changes water..."
What some might consider negation or obliteration, Zaccardi seems to consider transformation. Inspired by Li Po’s observation that “tea changes water,” Zaccardi seems to go one better and note that change is the essence of water (29). In the poem “Waterchain,” he writes, “At the altar we will someday lie,/the sacrifice,/the Christ. Iron holding body to wood./This is the judgment, the devouring and emptying./It is water that holds us surrounds, captures” (44). The word “capture” resonates with military overtones and sites the conflict within.
It is interesting the poem concludes with a reversal but not a resurrection. I find myself asking while reading other poems if such transformations are true. In “Desolation,” Zaccardi observes how the landscape recovers from fire while a farm does not. Later in “Illumine,” Zaccardi writes “What is reflection if not desire?/With it comes devastation” (11); conversely, it seems that desire might not come with devastation. Perhaps this is one lesson these poems have for enlistees who are willing to lose their innocence to win a war. There is no innocence to keep, no war to “win.”
Works Cited
Cesmat, Brandon. “Negated Images: Edge of the Real.” Blazing Laptops. San Diego Writers Ink, CA, 29 March 2008.
Next: Answering Starkey’s Question, Part II: Reading Jollimore’s The Solipsist
