by Austin Segrest


Monument: Poems New and Selected by Natasha Trethewey. HMH, 2018. 189 pp. $26.00 (hardback)
Murder Ballads by Jake Adam York. Elixir, 2005. 68 pp. $13.00 (paper)
A Murmuration of Starlings by Jake Adam York. Southern Illinois UP, 2008. 82 pp. $14.95 (paper)
Persons Unknown by Jake Adam York. Southern Illinois UP, 2010. 100 pp. $14.95 (paper)
Abide by Jake Adam York. Southern Illinois UP, 2014. 82 pp. $14.95 (paper)

And only conscience, more terribly each day
rages, demanding vast tribute.
                    —Akhmatova

Natasha Trethewey’s new and selected poems, aptly called Monument, appears at a crucial time in the history of public monuments. Big questions are being asked, and in some cases, actions are being taken, concerning whom, and why, we publicly remember. For example, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where I write this, there is a lively debate about “the Bas Relief”: a monument to the Pilgrim’s first landing and signing of the Mayflower Compact in this area. A central issue is the founding narrative put into play by such a prominent monument—as if history, or anything worth remembering anyway, begins with colonization. What about the native people who were already here, the Wampanoag? For years there’s been a local movement to include a monument to the Wampanoag somewhere on the little town green where the Bas Relief stands. But now that a memorial has been commissioned and designed, folks are getting cold feet. They’re questioning the new monument’s authenticity, its size, its shape, its placement. Monuments are “set in stone,” after all; one should be absolutely certain.

Of course, these concerns are red herrings. The real threat is publicly admitting to wrongdoing, which starts here, in this spot, in this compact, in which the Wampanoag were not, as they should have been, acknowledged as legitimate inhabitants of this land. Many the abuses that lead from this first flawed assumption, this historical erasure. Even now, the Wampanoag, debated about and spoken for, are kept not only invisible, but silent. The park remains the good local advertisement it always has: a monolithic narrative, a legacy of purity, piety, and democracy, with white men at the center of it.

Natasha Trethewey’s poems show us that such a tidy narrative does not hold up under scrutiny; it simply isn’t what history looks like. If the Wampanoag memorial looks like a tomb and gets in the way, as some complain, Trethewey would say all the better. Time and again her poems tell us that history is inconvenient, dark, a graveyard, an unhealed wound, a messy palimpsest. Until we let our sacredly guarded narratives and purity myths be dispelled by raising awareness of the convenient omissions and crimes committed in the name of purity and nobility; until our monuments take “the shape of loss” (“Transfiguration”) as well as gain, they will continue their insidious work of erasing and silencing the dispossessed.

As well as making it a hardback (and so the more like stone), HMH, beneath the dust jacket and covers, has cleverly gilded Monument. Get it?

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wears this world out to the ending doom.
     So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,
     You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Unlike with Shakespeare, there’s no mystery who Trethewey’s muse is. It is this muse’s “living record” that Monument works first and last to recover from the ravages of time. In the process, the poet herself is “saved” (“Articulation”)—less by immortal than by moral verse. By detecting, confronting and airing the deeply and even personally ingrained injustices that work to erase and silence this muse (“I can’t recall her voice since she’s been dead: / no sound of her, no words she might have said”), the poet has answered a calling (“Shooting Wild”).

You could call this muse Clio, the Muse of History, with her contemporary train of attendants: postcolonialism, feminism and race theory. But lest you get carried away and make this poet your champion of some abstract cause, Trethewey bookends Monument with poems in memory of her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, as well as anchoring it with the entirety of Native Guard (2006), the Pulitzer Prize-winning, elegiac collection dedicated to, and first and last about, her mother.

Monument’s proem is a new work called “Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath.” This is an advice poem. Like many such directives, it most immediately serves as self-advice: how to not lose your shit when people needle your trauma with wildly inappropriate comments, i.e., microaggressions. But having withstood decades of such microaggressions in the long “aftermath” of her mother’s murder by her abusive ex-husband, Trethewey also speaks from experience to a broader marginalized community.

Do not hang your head or clench your fists
when even your friend, after hearing the story,
says, My mother would never put up with that.

Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that,
more often, a woman who chooses to leave
is then murdered. The hundredth time

your father says, But she hated violence,
why would she marry a guy like that?—
don’t waste your breath explaining, again,

how abusers wait, are patient, that they
don’t beat you on your first date, sometimes
not even the first few years of a marriage.

The pattern continues. This poem of controlled rage unveils a private history of people’s reactions to her mother’s abuse and murder. Tagging the mounting examples, the advice, in one sense, amounts to “grin and bear it.”

                              Imagine a thought-
cloud above your head, dark and heavy

with the words you cannot say; let silence
rain down.

Some will read this ironically: that of course one shouldn’t do what oppressed people have always been told to do. Others will balk at its problematic restraint and propriety, will toss this book aside, saying, see?! I suspect both readings would miss the point. Though often edged with irony, and at times with humor, Trethewey’s poems are rarely tongue-and-cheek. Consider what she’s not saying: she’s not invalidating the hurt that these comments cause; she’s not saying it shouldn’t piss you off; she’s not saying the comments are understandable or in any way forgivable. On the contrary, she’s compiling reasons why it not only sucks but is also patently unjust. The advice to “carry on” is pragmatic: how to get through the day. It’s the lesser of two evils, the alternative being to lose friends, your job, your mind. We should also hear a deep chord of solidarity: we know better, we can get through it, we are not alone. At the same time, considering the historical traumas she embodies and confronts through her mother’s body, how can’t the takeaway be bitter, fraught? “Try to forget the first / trial, before she was dead,” she writes. Indeed, try all you want, it’s not going to happen!

Either way, the speaker’s particular grievances, rather than being silenced, are here being aired as a poem. As Monument shows, poetry serves as Trethewey’s means for fighting back, for “contending,” as she writes later in this poem, with the faulty assumptions and unexamined myths that perpetuate such microaggressions.

            Remember you were told,
by your famous professor, that you should

write about something else, unburden
yourself of the death of your mother and
just pour your heart out in the poems.

“Imperatives…” sends up the idea that the death of her mother wouldn’t also be in her heart. The New Critical subtext of this famous professor’s advice is that real art is impersonal, ahistorical, apolitical. As Eliot writes, “the progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Trethewey’s career, as exhibited in Monument, can be read as an indictment of the historical erasure implicit in this thinking. Her poetic rebellion might seem subtle, or, given our current political climate, less daring than mainstream liberal, but it’s rooted in saying what she’s been told from the start not to say. Witnessing to her mother’s tragic life and loss is where her work begins and ends, an explicitly personal, political, and historical project. Her mother is her lodestar and muse. And cross.

Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that
reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and
contend with what it means, the folk saying

you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul:
that one does not bury the mother’s body
in the ground but in the chest, or—like you—

you carry her corpse on your back.

This wonderful final image brings home the fact that Trethewey will never be disburdened of her mother’s death. To the contrary, it’s her duty, her calling, to carry it with her: to take up her cross and walk.

“Articulation,” the bookending poem in Monument and the title poem of Trethewey’s forthcoming collection, elaborates on this salvific calling. Ekphrastic, like so many of Trethewey’s poems, it considers an 18th century portrait of Saint Gertrude, who was “called to write / after seeing, in a vision, the sacred heart of Christ.” The speaker takes her own, final piece of advice from “Imperatives…”: “Ask yourself…”

     …[h]ow not to see, in the saint’s image,
my mother’s last portrait: the dark backdrop,

her dress black as a habit, the bright edge
of her afro ringing her face with light? And how

not to recall her many wounds: ring finger
shattered, her ex-husband’s bullet finding

her temple, lodging where her last thought lodged?
Three weeks gone, my mother came to me

in a dream, her body whole again but for
one perfect wound, the singular articulation

of all of them: a hole, center of her forehead,
the size of a wafer—light pouring from it.

How, then, could I not answer her life
with mine, she who saved me with hers?

And how could I not—bathed in the light
of her wound—find my calling there?

Monument shows us that for the last two decades Trethewey’s been answering her mother’s call—answering her with care, imagination, consistence. And insistence. So tirelessly, in fact, that the work continues in the selection and arrangement of Monument’s poems. So, for example, to foreground the work of recovering her mother, she moves the last poem in Domestic Work (2000) to the front of the selection. From “Limen”:

All day I’ve listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,

his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother’s face.

In turn, Monument makes clear that “Limen” is a predecessor of the title-poem, “Monument,” from Native Guard (2006). The Virgilian motif of the natural world’s edifying industry again worries Trethewey into thinking about remembering her mother. From “Monument”:

At my mother’s grave, ants streamed in
          and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising

above her untended plot. Bit by bit,
          red dirt piled up, spread
like a rash on the grass; I watched a long time
          the ants’ determined work…

Like the bees in George Herbert’s “Praise (I),” the ants “sting” her “delay.” “Limen” ends in the open doorway of the woodpecker’s knocking, with a vague hunch that more is going on:

I’m sure [the woodpecker] must be
looking for something else—not simply

the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift
the tree might hold.

In “Monument” the stakes are explicit: her mother’s “plot”—her story, her person, her death—has gone “untended.”

          I’ve tried not to begrudge them
their industry, this reminder of what
          I haven’t done. Even now,
the mound is a blister on my heart,
          a red and humming swarm.

This New and Selected reads with the tightness of a unified collection. It is both monument to, and investigation of, “the story beneath [the] story” of what and why we remember (“Miracle of the Black Leg”). The one story beneath them all for Trethewey—“the singular articulation / of all of them” (“Articulation”)—is the story of a black woman from a “black place” (“White Lies”), striving for autonomy and subjectivity. Rewarded with emotional and physical abuse, neglect and the wormwood of shame, she nevertheless manages to articulate something lasting, something that is not in the end erased or silenced: a shape, a life, a light for other victims to see by. Thematically recursive, the woodpecker’s investigation nevertheless progresses, deepening over the course of the poems, asking more, and harder, questions; clarifying more—and more devastating—stakes and contexts.

By insisting on a female savior—a mother, a black woman—Trethewey is bucking the western trend of the white male savior. But what we don’t necessarily see coming is how closely the myth of the white male savior, and her “duty” to revise it, hit home.

Whereas Native Guard looks back to the roots of black erasure in the Civil War, Thrall (2012) steps further back in time and examines the origins of the idea of the “taint” of blackness in Enlightenment/colonial Europe. White master-father-mentor figures (Papá Bellocq and Velázquez) culminate in Thrall and Articulation with the figure of Trethewey’s actual father, a white academic poet, and Trethewey’s first poetry mentor.

We see that up until Thrall the father has been sacrosanct, off-limits. But steadily, the searing light from her mother’s wound finds even her father out. “Duty,” a new poem from Articulation, rehearses one of Trethewey’s father’s pet stories from her childhood. In the story, he single-handedly saves baby Trethewey from Hurricane Camille. Tellingly, Trethewey’s mother and her mother’s family are erased from the narrative.

When he tells the story now
he’s at the center of it,

everyone else in the house
falling into the backdrop—

my mother, grandmother,
an uncle, all dead now—props

in our story: father and daughter
caught in memory’s half-light.

More disturbing than the egotism of a such a myth is the subtext of black erasure in combination with white salvation.

I am small in his arms, perhaps
even sleeping. Water is rising

around us and there is no
higher place he can take me

than this, memory forged
in the storm’s eye: a girl

clinging to her father. What
can I do but this? Let him

tell it again and again as if
it’s always been only us,

and that, when it mattered,
he was the one who saved me.

“Enlightenment,” a meditation on Thomas Jefferson from Thrall, lays bare what’s at stake in such elevated salvation.

I did not know then the subtext
     of our story, that my father could imagine
Jefferson’s words made flesh in my flesh—

the improvement of the blacks in body
     and mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites—or that my father could believe

he’d made me better.

Liberal goodwill and a faith in his and Jefferson’s “moral philosophy,” in “the better measure of his heart,” insulate the father from the “dark subtext” of his assumptions. He’s blind to the exception credited himself, the white hero, at the expense of the less enlightened. The white patriarch dominates the conversation, the historical view. Marianne Moore’s early twentieth century poem, “A Grave” (1921), begins in a similar vein:

Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
but you cannot stand in the middle of this…

Like the sea in Trethewey’s new poem, “Waterborne,” Moore’s man-blocked sea is also the “tangle / of history.” In another new poem, “Reach,” Trethewey describes her father as a pseudo-Orpheus. His “old guitar” is “hemming the darkness” with “the music / of his words,” that “same old song.”

I know where this is headed: how many times
has the night turned toward regret? My father
saying, If only I’d been a better husband
she’d be alive today, saying, Gwen and I
would get back together if she were alive.

By this point in Monument we’re well-prepared for the hem/him pun and the play on the father courting and mending “darkness.” Drunk on the isle of regret, his idealized version of the past forever “just out of reach,” his absurd notions carry him off into myth, out of his better-knowing daughter’s reach. In the end, she can only “call / him back” from his errancy through her myth-breaking poem.

In Thrall, Trethewey composes her own founding myth, self-consciously taking a page from the patriarchy. “Calling” imagines her mother baptizing her as a toddler “at the altar of the Black Virgin” in Mexico. It’s an assemblage from that hazy conglomeration of early childhood memories, stories, truths, and half-truths. “What’s left,” she writes, “is palimpsest—one memory / bleeding into another, overwriting it.” Notably, in her memory her mother’s face is “blurry”—ever threatened by erasure. In the spirit of her mother’s Catholicism, Trethewey endeavors to make a kind of icon of her mother, a blessing of her sacrifice.

                    What comes back
is the sun’s dazzle on a pool’s surface,
             light filtered through water

closing over my head, my mother—her body
          between me and the high sun, a corona of light
             around her face. Why not call it
          a vision? What I know is this:
I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna;
                       someone pulled me through
          the water’s bright ceiling
                    and I rose, initiate.

One comes to understand that Trethewey was raised to think she owed her achievements to the influence of her father. Monument effects a steady swerve away from this all-too American narrative. Instead of crediting her father’s academic influence, she celebrates the working-class black women who raised her. It is their belief and persistence and suffering that has “pulled [her] through.” From “Domestic Work”:

All week she’s cleaned
someone else’s house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper-
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she’d pull
the lid to—that look saying

Let’s make a change, girl.

But Sunday morning are hers—
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing.

Yet there’s no doubt that Trethewey is consigned to be—has set out to be—a monument maker in a certain literary tradition. We might say there’s no getting completely out from under her father’s (that is to say, western, colonial) influence. Those ants are Roman, after all. Monument reminds us how instinctive myth-making is to western poesis. “Myth,” a mirror poem and one of Trethewey’s most impressive formal feats, reflects the poet making (if unconsciously) an “Erebus” to keep her mother in, “still trying / not to let go.”

I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,

the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking

you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.

*

Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.

But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—

I make between my slumber and my waking.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.

Though Trethewey’s myth is more self-aware than her father’s, the apple, apparently, has not fallen far from the tree.

Like most poets, she’s also given to relating things back to herself, to taking up the view—like Ophelia in “(Self) Portrait,” who forgets to take off the lens cap and sees only her “own clear eye” in the camera. Growing up being vaunted for her white appearance—because it meant things would be easier for her—no doubt complicated matters. As her Aunt Sugar tells her in “Flounder,” handing her a hat for the sun, “You ’bout as white as your dad, / and you gone stay like that.”

To inscribe the truth, to do her mother justice and to witness against the forces that work to erase and silence the marginalized, Trethewey has to stay constantly on guard—even against herself. This self-division leaves her in the lonely, if poetically powerful, position of being an outsider on the inside. She’s a kind of “passing” double-agent, with a double-consciousness, with what E.O. Wilson, that student of ants, assigns to Homo sapiens alone: “psychological exile.”

She’s stuck in-between, in no-man’s-land, in the margin, estranged from identity, from the past, from home—even though it’s all she sees. Book after book she takes the pilgrim’s highway, Mississippi 49, back to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But as she writes in “Theories of Time and Space,” “[y]ou can get there from here, though / there’s no going home.”

The poems from Beyond Katrina (2010), collected under the title “Congregation,” attempt a kind of prodigal return to present-day Gulfport. Even though it’s her place, she finds herself out of place. From “Prodigal”:

…What is home but a cradle
of the past? Too long gone, I’ve found
my key in the lock of the old house

will not turn—a narrative of rust;
and everywhere the lacunae of vacant lots,
For Sale signs, a notice reading Condemned.

Her car and hair stick-out. She can’t get behind a church collecting tithes from a community crippled by Katrina, taking advantage of their last shreds of pride by presenting a false choice between faith and victimhood: “Without faith / we is victims” one marquee reads. She’s separated from her old home by glass: the glass of her rolled-up car windows and a new glass wall in her old church. Unable to bring herself to answer “the call / to altar,” she can watch, but not participate.

I got as far as the vestibule—neither in
nor out. The service went on. I did nothing
but watch, my face against the glass…

Her psychological no-man’s land features in a new poem called “My Father as Cartographer.” In this allegorical poem, her father strains through the “dim light” of old age “to survey” the “territory” of his inner life:

…here is the country
     of Loss, its colony Grief;
the great continent Desire
     and its borderland Regret…

The borders are fixed: he’s set in his ways. The tenor is nostalgic, beneficent, colonial. At the end of the poem we hear what’s “missing”:

…the traveler’s warning
     at the margins: a dragon—
its serpentine signature—monstrous
     as a two-faced daughter.

The father’s map does not acknowledge the threats—blackness, impurity, the feminine—that frame his inner life by dint of their exclusion. This unmapped margin “where dragons be” is haunted by his daughter. Like Aunt Sugar’s flounder, with one black and one white side, Trethewey comes out of the deal “two-faced.” “Ruthless” (“Elegy”) in her investigation of her father’s assumptions, she also feels like a “two-faced” traitor.

The graph in Cartographer reminds us that her father is a writer. The father’s pen has been causing American women poets anxiety since Anne Bradstreet’s early poems in seventeenth century New England. Bradstreet’s father, Thomas Dudley, as well as being deputy governor of the colony (a Puritan Thomas Jefferson), was also a poet and Bradstreet’s educator and mentor. Patricia Caldwell examines a number of pen/quill images in Bradstreet’s early poems. With conventional demurring, her “lowly” tool is often a foil for higher-flying, phallic quills of male writers. After her father’s death, significantly, the pen imagery drops out of Bradstreet’s poems. Bradstreet’s most famous pen crops up in “Prologue”:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who sayes my hand a needle better fits,
A Poets Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;
For such despight they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it wo’nt advance,
They’l say it’s stolne, or else, it was by chance.

Obnoxious here means vulnerable.

Bespeaking hierarchy and violence, both pens and needles figure in Monument. In “Theories of Time and Space” from Native Guard, for example, “shrimp boats are loose stitches.” In “Southern Gothic,” from the last section of Native Guard, her mother’s “cold lips” are “stitched shut.” The unnamed, freed-slave recruit persona in the sonnet cycle “Native Guard” has an ambivalent relationship with his pen. On the one hand, his former life as a slave is “inscribed upon [his] back.” On the other hand, he endeavors, like Frederick Douglass, to use “ink” to accurately “keep record” of his experiences, and finally, to “account” for injustices. From “1865”:

These are things which must be accounted for:
slaughter under the white flag of surrender—
black massacre at Fort Pillow; our new name,
the Corps d’Afrique—words that take the native
from our claim; mossbacks and freemen—exiles
in their own homeland; the diseased, the maimed,
every lost limb, and what remains: phantom
ache, memory haunting an empty sleeve…

Douglass himself famously uses his pen to fight slavery, yet early on in his Narrative he complicates the image of this instrument of freedom. Describing the slave quarters’ inhuman conditions, he writes, “my feet have been so cracked with the frost that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”

In Thrall the pen of the fathers comes under scrutiny as a tool of colonization. The ekphrastic poem “Knowledge” dissects a 19th century drawing of a dissection. We see the objectification of an “ideal female body,” with gentlemen of science and art gathered around the cadaver, peering and prodding. Like their cold scalpels and pincers, the pen, that inscriber of power, is one of the “instruments of the empirical.” Trethewey comes to identify each of the “learned” men in the drawing with her father. Recalling how he would talk about her as his “crossbreed child,” she sees that he, too, was a taxonomist of a mythic ideal sanctioned under the “temple” of pseudoscience. “Here,” she writes,

          he is all of them: the preoccupied man—

an artist, collector of experience; the skeptic angling
          his head, his thoughts tilting toward
what I cannot know; the marshaller of knowledge
          knuckling down a stack of books; even

the dissector—his scalpel in hand like a pen
          poised above me, aimed straight for my heart.

Like Bradstreet, Trethewey feels “obnoxious” to each probing purveyor of self-interested, myopic knowledge. Though writing is her calling, the pen’s authority is subsumed by her identification with the female object of study. Robbed of subjectivity, at the mercy of the “anatomist’s blade,” she is passively “penned.” This predicament echoes a nightmare in Native Guard:

…In my dream,
          the ghost of history lies down beside me,

rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

Trethewey finds herself in a classic, western bind. Her poetic scrutiny of artifacts runs the risk of being yet another critically bladed taxonomy “in thrall” to words (“Taxonomy”). Is she not another maker of objects that show her what she wants to see? A kind of Jefferson, needing to see herself “as architect of Truth” (Torna Atrás)? And what a masterful poetic architect she is; with what ambivalence the word “measure” recurs in Thrall. Isn’t she a kind of secular exegete, a typologist, if not of the “taint” of blackness, then of its erasure? “How not to see”—a plea she invokes over and over in these poems—“the mind of the colony” (“Taxonomy”) in her own mind?

Yet what’s the alternative? Spiritualism? Mysticism? Folklore? Postmodernism? As much as Trethewey’s hankering after “signs” resembles her grandmother’s superstitions, she goes equally in distrust of, equally in exile from, anything smacking of talismans (“Believer”) or alchemy (“Taxonomy”). Over the slippery-when-wet suggestions of postmodernism, or the cosmic consolations of spiritualism, she prefers the prosaicisms of history: its artifacts and archives; its careful methodology of interrogation, process and transparency; its bitter gruel of irony. She aims for perspicacity, a deep and clear engraving the public can read. The durable pleasures of form are good enough means for, but never supersede, her ever-clarifying critical ends. She will not let herself, like so many before her, get carried away. She will not stray far from the American margin she was born into. Restriction is her power.

This is morally acute, edifying poetry: eminently teachable, didactic in a good way, even deictic in its need to say, over and over, “here,” in its constant reminding that “what matters is context” (“What the Body Can Say”). Quiet, plodding, workaday—I think any of these descriptions would be ok with Trethewey—it’s also revelatory, but as antithesis and antidote to the traditional Romantic inflation of the subject at the expense of the marginalized/objectified other. If there is “one art” or “law of one organization” that “holds true throughout nature” for Trethewey, it’s more Bishop’s loss than Emerson’s “moral nature.” Time and again, she detects injustice, rather than justice, and makes “the mind’s slick confabulations” (“Calling”) answer for themselves, rather than showing how “the laws of moral nature answer to those of matter.” She can afford no such faith.

Still, Trethewey’s outcast mentality and unbending moral conviction make her an heir of Emerson. Another such poet is Jake Adam York. York was a white poet from Alabama intent on claiming the responsibility of civil rights murders through his art. Born north of Birmingham in 1972 (6 years after Trethewey), the son of a steel mill worker, York died tragically at the age of 40 in December of 2012. In his brief career he got a PhD at Cornell, published his dissertation on public monuments and American poetry, taught at the University of Colorado Denver, where he edited the literary arts magazine Copper Nickel, and published three books of poems, with a fourth that came out posthumously. Two annual poetry prizes honor him: the Jake Adam York Prize for an “ethical book” (Milkweed), and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize for a “poem of witness” (Southern Humanities Review).

York passed away at the cusp of a racial revolution in America. Trayvon Martin had just been murdered in Florida. Ferguson and Black Lives Matter were a year or so off, as was the first of three reports on hundreds of undocumented lynchings in America released by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a Montgomery, Alabama non-profit law firm. EJI describes its mission as an “effort to reshape the cultural landscape with monuments and memorials that more truthfully and accurately reflect our history”—very Trethewey. Last year EJI opened a six-acre memorial to “contextualize racial terror.” At the center of the site are over 800 steel columns—one for each American county where a lynching happened. Set in a surrounding field, each column has a twin, waiting to be claimed by the U.S. county it represents. Some counties have claimed them, some are resisting. It’s hard enough to announce, “this happened here.” Admitting that “we did this” is a whole other can of worms. In his ambitious project to elegize as many victims of civil rights murders as he could, York wanted to claim them all—not the experience or the suffering of the martyrs and their communities, but the crimes that his community was responsible for.

It was an all or nothing proposition for York; silence was inexcusable. His latest elegy for Medgar Evers, “Postscript,” from his posthumous collection Abide (2014), begins,

I didn’t want to write this,
even to think of you,
afraid the thought would curl,
would tangle and make you
common and factual as light.
So I’ve waited,
hands, pencils down.
Now that seems like a prayer
against the world and being in it.
That is why he waited
in the bushes. That is a prayer
the closed eyes say.

For York, to stay silent about these crimes is to resemble the murderer waiting silent “in the bushes.” To not write about it—whether out of propriety or shame or denial—doesn’t make it go away, except in memory, creating a negative feedback loop of forgetting and erasure that only makes it more likely to happen again.

Yet it’s worth considering why York says he initially resists writing another elegy for Evers. He’d already published a long one, “And Ever,” in his previous and last published collection, Persons Unknown (2010). What is he “afraid” of, exactly? Suffused in the ubiquitous burning (“curl”) and woody thickets (“tangle”) of his native, murderous landscape, the anxiety here is one of representation: how York “makes” Evers through his art. This concern has a double edge for a male, white southern artist. York’s identity markers—resembling those of the man waiting for Evers in the bushes—make him, some would argue, least qualified of all identities to speak about Evers. This, on top of the universal problem of making art about an atrocity.

What does it mean that York doesn’t want to “make” Evers “common and factual as light”? The simplest answer is that York doesn’t want him to be “just another statistic,” as the saying goes. If this is a concern here, it must have been a concern for each of the dozens of civil rights elegies York endeavored to write. How does he go about avoiding this? Or is it unavoidable, but the lesser of two evils compared to not speaking up? And another question: is it, in fact, possible, or desirable, for a monument to transcend the “common,” the “factual”—the public?

Poetry, at least to the New Critics, is ineluctably more than mere information. It is, they like to say, “unparaphrasable.” If you can get what you need from a statistic or a synopsis, what’s the point of writing a poem? Fair enough. But this thinking risks throwing shade on facts, on history, on politics, on clarity. Isn’t there something “factual and common as light” about EJI’s columns? Or even about Trethewey’s hardheaded, lapidary poems of historical recovery?

York’s subject matter and identity relative to it are difficult already. As a white man writing about racial crimes, he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place: at one end, representing black victims he feels for but whose identity and experience he can’t comfortably lay claim to; and at the other, representing white perpetrators with whom he can’t empathize but whose identity and experience he can—and in fact feels morally compelled to—speak to. Why does he compound difficulties by also (often) being oblique and obscure in these poems? Does he fear being basic—too “common and factual” for good poetry? If so, is that because good poetry shouldn’t be that way, or because good poetry about this subject shouldn’t? Perhaps he’s mimicking the obscurity and obfuscations of the public record concerning these crimes. Perhaps the issue is that these cases can’t really be said to be “common and factual” because they are, at least in part, out of the reach of the “light.” It’s difficult enough to work out the facts in many of these cases, not to mention seeing into the abyss that is the killers’ and their communities’ motives.

A crucial assumption at work, it seems to me, is that the “common and factual” is forgettable. York, a fellow recruit of Trethewey’s in the fight against forgetting and erasure, wants to do Evers justice by making him memorable. But how?

Like any good southerner, Trethewey included, York starts at home, with place: the iron hills north of Birmingham, his people’s life as steel workers, a local defunct military installation, Indian mounds, constellations, an archeological dig, satellites, his music collection. All of it is haunted by unnumbered and recent—but repressed—crimes of racial terror, by lingering and unexorcised atrocities. In the foundry of the “Magic City” (the once steel boom town of Birmingham—or more to the point, Bombingham), York’s native elements are forged, transformed into a self-mythology. He comes to see himself, like Trethewey, as a double-agent, an outsider on the inside—even as an alien with the gift of second sight. From “Letter to Be Wrapped around a 12-Inch Disc”:

[I prayed] each night not only
                    not to die

but to wake up and discover
          what I’d always known, myself
an alien with this second sight,

                    the world a book
of such vibration I could see
          what I needed.

Thus was York cast in his Alabama crucible. His desire for transcendence and permanence leads to a restless interrogation of archival matter. Never satisfied with extant recordings, he tries to get back and replay the record, which means playing on and with the materials until they yield a sense of possibility or renewal. Like a jazz player riffing on a tune, something must always be penetrated, toggled, or tweaked: to strike the right chord on the connecting strings of possibility and set the material humming. Descending into the past, into the historical record, into unknowable pain, he strives for purchase, for reliable testimony. The hope: to reopen the case, after a fashion. If only for a moment, possibility combats the ephemerality and folly that mire human endeavor. As Marina Warner writes, “‘As if’ is wishful and, sometimes, wistful, but it is a hope.” Said another way, York takes a wrong, about which nothing was then or apparently can now be done and finds a metaphysical opportunity to do something—Auden be damned. As Emerson writes, “we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion…announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communication, through hope, new activity to the torpid soul.”

The idea is to see what elegiac potential the archive might yield. Though less sanguine than Emerson, York explores in particular how the physical elements—air, water, fire—might be said to preserve, or serve as, the historical record. In this way, nature could be said to safeguard the truth. Dr. King Jr.’s assertion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” comes to mind. On the human scale, it means that slowly, very slowly, things are improving; justice is making a little progress. On the divine scale, it means a day will come when God will mete out His Justice. For everything that’s happened, we will be held accountable. York’s elemental record, his nature’s indelible hard drive—if far-fetched and stretched—is antecedent to the Ultimate, divine reckoning of a Judge from whom nothing is hidden.

“In the Magic City,” from York’s first collection, Murder Ballads (2005), interrogates how steel might serve as a possible witness of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. The poem links steel with the church bombing via the act of listening to John Coltrane’s “Alabama” on vinyl. Coltrane’s tune was composed in response to the bombing.

As in many another jazz poem, metaphor tries to catch the wind in a net.

     Tyner almost sweats
what he keeps just out of time,
     what Jimmy’s talking from the strings
like something’s coiled up there,
     a static even Elvin never shakes.

But in the third stanza the magic of the Magic City kicks in:

Or maybe what the needle thinks,
     some Old South air trapped in ladled steel,
a space that quotes the ridges
     and their empty veins, old Sloss
filling up with fire
     or Cherry’s heat opening 16th Street….

What if this record needle, the poet wonders, was forged in a Birmingham furnace from Alabama ore? In a microscopic “air” bubble trapped in that needle there might just dwell a consciousness, at least in so far as it takes part in speaking the record’s grief-inscribed grooves, which themselves “quote” (resemble?) the hills and valleys where this ore was mined (and where York himself originated). The needle’s thoughts would be the sound of early sixties Birmingham, the static of its three-fold burning of jazz, steel furnaces, and black homes and churches. The Magic City’s theoretical and not a little esoteric air bubble, like those trapped deep in arctic ice, keeps (and speaks) a record of the time.

In Persons Unknown, York’s last collection, he mashes up a series of Charles Mingus performances at a Mississippi juke joint with the nearby lynching of Mack Charles Parker in 1959. Mingus’ performances were a tribute to the recently dead saxophonist Lester Young. It seems to have been reported that each night Mingus’ band’s “goodbye” got more “sensitive.” In other words, with each session the songs grew more honed, more perfect in their transmission of grief. From “Sensitivity”:

Six weeks since that whisper rose
into the windows of a stage
behind the Half Note’s bar,
whisper Mingus let spread like a bruise,
Lester Young is dead, six weeks
since he fell from the sky,
dead off the plane from Paris,
and each night this goodbye’s
gone more sensitive. Now
the flats are hid, and Handy’s learned
to fold the sound of breath
inside the notes—the bleeding throat,
tongue’s last epileptic flutter—
while Mingus thrills the bass
in waves of sound and fail
no microphone could hold.

If these and only these jazz giants could achieve such “sensitivity,” what instrument of detection could possibility be sensitive enough to comprehend the sound “no microphone could hold”? Nothing human, surely. York imagines patrons’ drinks trembling with sound waves. “Here,” he writes, “only the drinks are listening” (in another poem, the “surface of a ladle…hears each word”).

But it would take an even more sensitive instrument to also detect—inside the jazz, inside the cocktails’ liquid—the nearby Pearl River’s ripples, disturbed when an abducted, beaten and shot Charles Mack Parker was thrown in. To hear the elements play their Walden-esque “universal lyre,” to make them lean in and speak, would take a certain Orphic elegist.

Drinks tremble like the river
halfway from here to the grave,
pulled by wind or plummet,
cough of strings beneath the hand,
and uptown a tape is waiting
for magnets to say this again,
a teletype is writing a story
for tomorrow’s Times—
a body pulled from a river
in Mississippi, with only fingers
for a name. Here
only the drinks are listening
as Ervin rises, ghosting Handy’s lead,
and even they cannot hear
how the rivers heal their quiet,
how they fill their scars so perfectly
that remember feels like forget.

Like the steel-milled record needle, the poet, through his sensitivity to the universe’s grooves, interprets the past. Many a tragic retrospective poem operates upon such sensing and reading. Trethewey, York’s fellow southern elegist, has perfected the photograph poem, for example, wherein the devastatingly irreversible future is read in a moment’s photographic details. Often, figures captured in the photo are unwitting future victims for whom we wince with a kind of dramatic irony to see consigned, by foreshadowing imagery, to their fate. Consider the villanelle “King Cotton, 1907,” part of the series “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi” from Native Guard:

From every corner of the photograph, flags wave down
the main street in Vicksburg. Stacked to form an arch,
the great bales of cotton rise up from the ground

like a giant swell, a wave of history flooding the town.
When Roosevelt arrives—a parade—the band will march,
and from every street corner, flags wave down.

Words on the banner, Cotton, America’s King, have the sound
of progress. This is two years before the South’s countermarch—
the great bolls of cotton, risen up from the ground,

infested with boll weevils—a plague, biblical, all around.
Now, negro children ride the bales, clothes stiff with starch.

Think, Philip Larkin’s “MCMXIV”: “Never such innocence again.”

York saw himself in league with Trethewey (and, by all accounts, she with him). Uncompromisingly-moral monument makers for the deep south’s racial crimes, they were coworkers “against the grain” (“Letter Written in Someone Else’s Hand”). As we’ve seen, Trethewey was urged by her New Critical mentors to not answer her mother’s personal/political calling. York’s narrative, prominent in the posthumous Abide, is captured by the image of a central Alabama teenage rap battle. White and black, these kids have been told they “shouldn’t / name, stir up, remember” their disquieting racial history (“Letter to Be Wrapped Around a Twelve-Inch Disc”).

Along with artifacts and archives, both York and Trethewey are attentive to what works of art have to say. Trethewey seems to prefer visual, static works—photographs, paintings, monuments. York’s tendency is to make static artifacts dynamic—seeing into the inner workings of the photographic process, for example. He also extends ekphrasis to the nonrepresentational, protean art of music—to jazz, no less, that least-fixed form (by no means the first male poet to worship at this shrine).

One of York’s big departures from Trethewey’s style is his resistance to deterministic irony as the elegist’s endgame. Retrospective tragedy can get pretty deterministic—pretty dour—fast. As Tomas Tranströmer puts it, “writing about the dead…is a game made heavy / with what is to come.” Or as York himself writes, “to see is to know / everything as aftermath” (“And Ever”). In “Darkly,” for example, from Persons Unknown, York tasks himself with imagining “how” the killers of William Edwards, Jr. in 1957 got “there”—that is, not only to the Montgomery killing grounds, but also to the point of plotting and committing the crime. Among a slew of what-if’s and maybe’s, the one avenue the poet refuses to imagine is that the killers were “always there.”

It’s hard not to consider York’s and Trethewey’s different approaches in light of that ugly academic word, positionality. Trethewey sees herself pinned beneath history’s “heavy arm” (“Pilgrimage”). But York wants to leverage that arm, to open and “pen” an “elsewhere,” as he so often writes. From “Epistrophy”:

I have to raise the needle

I couldn’t touch, once
          too delicate for my hand,
needle that had to wait

for my father’s. He’d stand
          some nights in silence,
smoke his only word, then reach

and take the arm.

Here, childhood record playing is intimately involved with the poet’s father: part inheritance, part prohibition. Seamus Heaney finds himself in a similar bind, a kind of anxiety of influence. From “Digging” (1966):

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
….
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Guns, pens, spades, a phonograph stylus (both needle and pen): by God, a man needs a tool to wield! Both Heaney and York illustrate their departure from patriarchal manual labor (York’s Hephaestian father working nights in a steel furnace). For better or worse, the son’s pen is more delicate and sensitive than the father’s blunt instrument. The son’s art will break the silence, speaking out about forbidden subjects: the Troubles, civil rights murders, his “pen rolling like a needle / over the dark” (“Letter to Be Wrapped Around a 12-Inch Disc”).

In “Negatives,” also from Murder Ballads, York essays to “break through” and access not only the “ancient waves” of the civil rights movement, but also the fleeting imagery of redemption. The poem meditates on a 1911 postcard made from a photograph of a lynching. The upgazing white crowd and black smoke of the burning victim are all that can be seen. Midway through the poem, the speaker imagines a daring reversal, reminiscent of the end of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation” (1965). More directly, he’s riffing on Trethewey’s “Photograph: October 1911” from Bellocq’s Ophelia’s sonnet cycle “Storyville Diary.”

But let us imagine
just afterward, the camera slung

on the taker’s shoulder,
and at its heart a thousand blacks

staring into this cloud of light,
for a moment neither

gathering toward nor
descending from heaven,

but waiting in their adoration
and blessing each with its glow—

a vision of these thousand whites
turned dark for an hour

and praying, terrified, to this pillar
for the rectifying light…

The “original” negatives inside the camera tell a different story from the photo. In a trick of light, the upgazing faces are, for a time, black instead of white. Instead of a despicable, complicit mob, they become a vision of black martyrs “waiting in… adoration,” “praying” toward a “cloud of light,” which blesses “each with its glow.”

In his last poems York returns to photography, again “breaking” through for a Promethean metaphysics of redemption. From “Letter from Okemah”:

They’re all there, the photograph
hung over its place in the air
rippling in the heat as in the bath
where the page first learned it,

water I want to break
to steal the light that burns her there,
her son’s light, too, and leave
the townsfolk where their gaze

can dry the river to a trace,
in a bright that will not blink
until they’re burnt back to salt,
to terror’s silk, to paper.

Old-school analog photography is cannibalized into a Day of Reckoning. The “rippling” Oklahoma heat makes the poet think of the original lynching photograph’s development, when the chemical “bath” first burned the horrible image onto paper. In a kind of inversion or abortion of this photo’s birth, the Promethean poet wants to “break” the bath’s “water” and “steal” from the gods of photography “the light that burns” Laura and L.D. Nelson to the page. This theft, then, would leave only the light-inscribed image of townsfolk leering down from the bridge from which the victims were hanged. The townsfolk’s craven “gaze,” left on its own, would be infernal enough (perhaps with the addition of that stolen fire raining down on them) to “dry the river to a trace” and burn them “back to salt.”

Perhaps York’s most trenchant reckoning happens in his last book, Persons Unknown. Having already published an elegy for Willie Edwards, Jr. in Murder Ballads (“Consolation”), the poet revisits the subject and the place where the murder was carried out—Montgomery, Alabama and the Alabama River where the body was thrown. York finds himself, nevertheless, locked out of history again—not unlike Trethewey separated from her old home by glass (“Congregation”). The river comes to symbolize the “glass” through which the fallen poet only manages to see Edwards’ murderers, and himself, “but darkly.”

Taking his time this go-round, York does a little fieldwork, walking downtown where the killers hatched their plan to abduct Edwards. York imagines the plan’s conception indelibly scoring the universe:

…that wave of heat,
the echo

that will fill the night
fifty years gone

when five men bent
in the diner’s greasy light

[…]

and planned to kill a man
they’d never seen.

Light and sound resonate down the years like a supernova warping space-time, or like Milton’s
Nature “[s]ighing through all her Works” after the fall of man.

Leaping like a charge around the concept of elemental memory, the poet speculates that “[m]aybe the streetlamps remember the light” of that winter night,

gelid and thin as bacon fat,

as the vowel in your mouth
that just won’t break…

Here, in one of York’s finest hours, his own speech betrays an identification with the Montgomery killers. This characteristically oral simile gestures toward the obstinacy of York’s Alabama accent: for example, the way the upward-tending whine of the long-i in a word like “high” rises without “breaking” at the end of the vowel into a subtle diphthong (i-ee). This difficult-to-catch but penetrating insight also serves as acknowledgment that there are some things York can’t “break” through.

Yet, maybe this identification can be of use.

Maybe that light could serve as

a door I can walk through,
a room where I can sit beside them

hardly out of place,
then watch them rise and part…

Though York doesn’t exploit the physics of photography this time, his cinematic imagination does summon a “rectifying light.” Denying the unprosecuted killers any inscription, either in his poem or in nature, he takes solace in the fact that they “never arrived” into the historical record, that they were “forgotten by the water.” Though he refuses to accept the deterministic idea that the killers were somehow “always there,” what is inevitable, he concludes, is that when they leave this world for the next, the “face to face” clarity will be prosecution enough. Then they shall know even as they are known.

They’d still come,

each one, to that morning
at the end of everything

when they’d look back
on the healing water

and say
My life hasn’t meant a thing.

Though he was often given—driven—to eschew bite-sized syntax and conventional usage, it’s amazing what this lover of oral culture could do when he trusted speech. York’s spot-on dialect and Biblical subtext gives us “that moment / when [a man] sees himself as his language does.” A delicacy, indeed.

York’s peculiar elegies exhibit a growing obsession with both the historical record and LP records, with both the murders of, and music made by, African Americans during the civil rights movement. Daring to handle the tone-arm and let the stylus descend, he walks the line between recovery and appropriation, between being a crusader and a connoisseur. Given the racial dynamics at work, the material itself, like the phonograph’s delicate stylus, is “sensitive.” And if York’s labors show us anything, it’s that he knows this.

Music critic Amanda Petrusich’s description of 78 record collector and sound engineer Christopher King’s turntable comes to mind. She describes a scene “littered” with improvised tone-arm weights—“matchsticks, tongue depressors, little plastic ice-cream spoons.” These weights are used to make micro-adjustments for various conditions under which the old recordings King has devoted his life to were made. One might imagine York’s work being littered with improvised linguistic weights. His obliquity and sometimes straining sentences and perspectives attempt to correct not only for a deterministic or otherwise compromised historical record, but also for his sense of being prohibited from it.

A new poetry catalogue on my desk holds that a “good poem forges a compassionate pact with the world.” To be sure, York, poet of furnaces, is a forger. He mines and melds correspondences in order to open spaces for revision and reflection. From the infernal steel mills of the Alabama foothills to the heavenly furnaces of the stars, from the public to the personal, from white to black, from self to other, his delicacy is always matched by his invention, his eye by his ear, his compassion by his ambition.

As for York’s “pact,” I’m not sure it’s with this world.