Final Submissions for 2015 Design Annual

by Charles Allen Watson

Mean Wile, Back at the School Yard

I heard them again at nearly midnight
under the ink of a moonless starry sky.
Scuffling southbound in a hurried gang,
like a happy pack of children laughing
and playing, yelping, dancing, and singing
as an unbound one without fear of mile-marking gravel.

No cares for they ran altogether – orderly –
but not single file; a moment we have duly prepared
for hundreds of years.

And I thought: When we build the new school
to reflect and bridge new beginnings
at the infinite easement on this patchwork plain
of needs, wants, and desires, where
the outward jam of our sandwich
meets the pups of the frontier; in the night,

hours after the foot traffic of lunchtime
in the breeze of dumpster stench,
a call to order on the slivered tire chips
playground, where litter rolls and
Little Debbie wrappers drift like spent leaves,
coyotes chant and sing
proportionally – orderly –
CB, AC :: AC, AB
the chorus of the living, longing to achieve;

We build and design to show them the signs
to transmit, to send, to yield, and to bend;
to eat not with their own soiled hands
so innocently clean at the free-will machine
in shadows of American dreams.

They charge on invisibly in the carbon black of night.

(January, 2015)

Shoe Horn

To make them fit a Big Dipper,
a L’il Dipper, all those heels,
the clogs, the clomp-clomp-clomp,
of free-ranging nanny goat.

Patent f-me pumps that
you wore to work on a Friday –
Ursa Major, Ursa Minor –
how wondrously they hurt sometimes!

The trouble with those heels,
that collection there you see:
in the closet, behind the mirror, at the stairwell,
in your Subaru backseat;

is how you put them on,
day after day – your favorites,
your sentimentals, your unmentionables –
obstacles for your path.

Digging
Arching
Aching–
the forms that lift you up will tear you down.

Pumps and heels, lifts and deals
Graceful leather ornaments
except for that boot, mateless,
on the shelf by itself in the dark.

That waiting glimmer of
Arcturus Alpha Bootis,
the brightest star,
a link, that mere spark.

(May, 2014)

Her : OS / Y

Futuristic, diagnostic, Scarlettistic
and genuinely altruistic. It reads and listens,
an unsightly beauty, exquisitely unseen.

A virtual stay-puff creature to submit to his fashion,
the cool sets, and all that L.A. feng shui;
an investment like coin-operated symposium.

Wears his ear device
for the high-maintenance OS
to honor its emotions, its impatience;

Dons his glasses, his mustache
for the program and its random
silly spectacles;

Dates his OS
and conquers his real emotions,
I.T.’s emotions, Her emotions;

Sells thy soul
in a feast with his system.
Duped or dumped, she loved the philosopher anyway.

(December, 2014)

 

How their faces fit

What comes from a hug,
a longing full embrace,
a meandering hand?

Anticipate the pressure
volupté beholden.
Greet her magnificent teeth
in this arrangement of galactic gases
of some divine interplay.

With fresh lipstick like tomato paste,
she reminded him to go easy–amoré!
Benefits for both:

strong, firm, intact, belief, disbelief.
Oh wondrous sea!
a mist in the middle,
a shroud of possibility.
Can’t we be free?

A perfect nose, a subtle touch,
’Oh stealthy one.
To press again and live one more time.

(May, 2014)

Toxicodendron Radicans and Some Impatiens at the Forest Edge

Symbiotic and perennial, you wait
through summer until September,
not deceiving,
with patience, always there.
 So obvious, never alone
where the sun meets the shade
at the edge of the forest.

Under the fertile terra, under my skin,
you shoot and you surface – dig you out at your roots!
Bloom and weep – a renewal, a reminder
of where we have been.
Honor you dig you don’t scratch you – ratchet!

Like a sniffy hound or a shifty squirrel,
I always know where to find you.
So glad you’re in love
so happy for your love
user friendly, just for me.

’Twill run your course in a few weeks or so
with Mother Nature’s approval, yes –
an upheaval, but never an evil.
This June reminder, this bleeding heart
this respect in retrospect.

I know where to find you
and you know where to find me,
just like poison ivy.

(June, 2014)

Blink: When Photopositive Meets Negative (Eyelid Media)

Awaken to a morning light
through closed panes of clear glass
consenting leaves on yonder May timber.

A silent chill meets the window,
a barrier for the morning chatter:
No dove, no cardinal, ’oriole yet;
cackling grackles, ravenettes.

The phone buzzes a hazy, lazy conscience
and opens our eyes – just for a blink!
our pupils receive this treat:
Silhouettes, fixed like shadows,
or negative prints.

The frames of the panes
resolve onto closed lids –
these membranes – for a new game of empty squares
in shadow, they dissolve.

The stairs await us –
Go!
stares
photogenic.

Our eyes obscured by panes for vision,
panes that help us view,
an immeasurable force field.
We hold a stare with time
on this parched earth, this solid ground,
and tomorrow, we start over.

(May, 2014)

Sitting down with Marvin Bell and Emily Dickinson

Charles A. Watson
ENG206
Poem Explication
March 15, 2015

The Mystery of Emily Dickinson by Marvin Bell (1990)

Sometimes the weather goes on for days
but you were different. You were divine.
While the others wrote more and longer,
you wrote much more and much shorter.
I held your white dress once: 12 buttons.
In the cupola, the wasps struck glass
as hard to escape as you hit your sound
again and again asking Welcome. No one.

Except for you, it were a trifle:
This morning, not much after dawn,
in level country, not New England’s,
through leftovers of summer rain I
went out rag-tag to the curb, only
a sleepy householder at his routine
bending to trash, when a young girl
in a white dress your size passed,

so softly!, carrying her shoes. It must be
she surprised me—her barefoot quick-step
and the earliness of the hour, your dress—
or surely I’d have spoken of it sooner.
I should have called to her, but a neighbour
wore that look you see against happiness.
I won’t say anything would have happened
unless there was time, and eternity’s plenty.[1] 

When the weather goes on for days, generally this means a state of melancholy as the wind or precipitation dictates the mood. Bell did not write this to talk of the weather, though. Having begun his life experience in New York City, Marvin Bell spent his professional years as a poet and teacher not in New England, the home of American Romantic poetry that preceded Dickinson and Frost, but in the Midwest, pivotal to the history of modern poetry. Bell earned his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa where he taught at the Writer’s Workshop for 40 years. On “This morning” not in New England, an appreciation occurs out on the Plains of the mundane in a rag-tag moment as Marvin Bell took out his trash while a young girl passed by in a white dress, carrying her shoes just after the morning rain. These little feet came down the walk, fittingly, and remind Bell of Emily Dickinson and enabled a reflection to connect to his study of Dickinson. If one were to consider Dickinson as the mother of modern poetry, then this girl’s innocent presence in the white dress qualifies as a reminder that evokes the tireless muse. Ms. Dickinson’s diminutive stature and writing personae was often the woman-girl who frequently held her last breath of innocence before every deathly sting of her dash. Still, after the dark sting settles, the white dress remains as her assigned trademark because Emily Dickinson is perfectly deserving of this distinction. Dickinson’s poetic form in the late Nineteenth Century had become hackneyed by 1990 when Bell wrote this 24-line answer to an eternal question.

Like many great artists and poets, Emily Dickinson’s fame arrived posthumously when her sister discovered her cache of poems, those for which she couldn’t find a publisher. In evoking Dickinson, Bell chooses eternity to say that her work will endure—true—and that as a poet, Bell can wait forever to meet her and her poems, for she is the girl in the white dress. As literary currency, his answer to her mystery befits the white dress standard: Prim, neat, proper, yet attainably common while carrying a darker significance, and all part of her method of exacting attention to her word choices and devices. For example, in an answer to her stinging words about a “Narrow Fellow In The Grass”—when she stoops to secure it—Bending in the Hash.[2] Bell calls Dickinson “divine” and does so properly and mysteriously with a capitol Y, but only by default in the business of a grammar sequence (line 2). The function of the colon as opposed to a dash is to introduce a list. Bell uses it to introduce the ironic paradox that is, possibly, grammatically and dramatically incorrect (line 5). “12 buttons” as a singular synecdoche would have been set off by a dash. Emily Dickinson’s use of a dash was often grammatically incorrect. In this case, “12 buttons” represent the collective of something mysterious: poems, buttons, or our poetic inheritance.

By her diminutive human stature, this little reminder captures Dickinson’s pure essence and not the New England puritan vernacular. This is the poetry; this is muse. Bell writes for Emily Dickinson and for the girl who, like a spirited bird, came down the walk (“A Bird came down the Walk”) reminding him that a well-constructed poem captures a memory like a photo that will last an eternity. Neatly contained in stanza two, it’s quite possible that the 12 buttons of Bell’s allusion signify incremental phrases that follow the poem’s second colon: “Except for you, it were a trifle: 1. This morning, / 2. not much after dawn, / 3. in level country, / 4. not New England’s, / 5. through leftovers of summer rain / 6. I went out / 7. rag-tag / 8. to the curb, / 9. only a sleepy householder / 10. at his routine / 11. bending to trash, / 12. when a young girl in a white dress your size passed…” (9–16) Bell writes this in free verse in 24 lines with three stanzas of eight lines and no rhyme. Dickinson often structured her poetry in 24 lines, using six four-line stanzas as her method of verse. Why this poem works with its 12 buttons is that Bell’s free verse equivocates mathematically to hers, but without rhyme—his three stanzas to her six.

In its avoidance of rhyme, a trademark of all the poetry preceding this modern era, the greatest irony to this poem is the repetition of “happ-” in contrast to Dickinson’s famous facial pose. “That look you see against happiness” (line 23) describes Dickinson’s dour expression in most paintings or graphic representation of her visual essence. Her personal history cannot be described as joyful. In person, she was rarely seen smiling and, in her works, she frequently sets up a whimsical scene only to sting it with stern conventional wisdom. Bell unravels this synecdoche (12 buttons) and metonymy (the dress) to explain the mystery, poke at her happiness, and understand the embodiment of the seemingly innocent garment. If wasps, commonly found among garbage, represent the tension in her work work—dashes, punctuation, stingers—then figuratively, like the cupola, the eternal dress with the twelve mother-of-pearl buttons has the role of smothering them. That number holds minor significance to her work, only that it might describe the famous dress or half of the value of a typical Dickinson poem. Did the dress button down the back? What does Bell mean when he “held her dress?” (line 5) To Dickinson, white signified many hopeful ideas from the color of the soul to a wedding dress—she was even buried in white and enclosed in a white casket! The white housedress was practical, easy to care for, bleachable, and commonly rag-tag. What would it mean for a poet to hold something so vintage, famous, real, and mythical? It’s quite possible that Bell literally held the dress as it is on display in the Emily Dickinson Museum at Amherst College.[3]

Bell’s poem, though devoid of rhythm and rhyme, has poignant echoes of Dickinson’s style and, with subtle allusion as shown in Western Wind and, has the weight to uncover the essence of Dickinson. The descriptive word rag-tag originated around 1865 in the last years of Dickinson’s life. (adj. 1. ragged or shabby; disheveled. 2. made up of mixed, often diverse, elements: a ragtag crowd.)[4] The form and function of the “cupola” (line 6), or a dome, might suggest a little trap to the reader like the cornice and the fly buzzing before death (“I heard a fly Buzz—When I Died” Western Wind, 422). (Cupola; noun; a light structure on a dome or roof, serving as a belfry, lantern, or belvedere; a dome, especially one covering a circular or polygonal area; any of various domelike structures; Metallurgy. a vertical furnace for melting iron to be cast; Italian, Latin; 1540-50; < Italian < Latin cūpula, equivalent to cūp (a) tub + -ula -ule. Cf. cup).[5]

Also noteworthy is Bell’s loaded use of trifle (“except for you, it were a trifle:”, line 9) before a set of phrases that provide the setting for this Mystery. A trifle describes many pieces including an article or thing of very little value; a matter, affair, or circumstance of trivial importance or significance; a small, inconsiderable, or trifling sum of money; a small quantity or amount of anything; a literary, musical, or artistic work of a light or trivial character having no great or lasting merit; bagatelle; a kind of pewter of medium hardness. (trifles, articles made of this. M.E. (to mock) < Old French (to make sport of) 1175-1225   ex: bauble, toy, fritter.) Even more significantly ironic, the trifle is an English cold dessert made with sponge cake spread with jam or fruit, soaked in wine or sherry, covered with a custard sauce and cream, and decorated,[6] the exact kind of treat one might store under a glass cupola to keep from the wasps and the flies.[7] The elements of the entire stanza are the bits leading up to lines 15–16 when a “young girl / in a white dress your size passed.” Rich in wordplay, in the same breath it represents some memorable details of Dickinson’s work. Of her wills and her keepsakes she asks, “what portion of me be?” (“Heard a Fly Buzz”) as if they were trifles and simple division of all her worth. The implication is not much; but there is a housework white dress brought to life here in “Mystery.” Like Bell’s poem, the bits that make up Dickinson’s work are the mechanics of her poetry that sometimes reflect the seemingly mundane.

With this poem, Bell enters steadfastly into the figurative realm of Dickinson wordplay. He chooses to be near her but knows the wasp sting will keep him in check. Recalling Emily Dickinson’s invitation to explore her persona through her words and imagery—but not for too long—he is merely the tide to her.

“Until We meet the Solid Town—
No One He Seemed to know
And bowing—with a Mighty look—
At me—The Sea withdrew—
(“I Started Early—Took My Dog”, lines 21–24, Western Wind, 423).[8]

He can admire her for eternity as sure as the waves will crash to the shore; That is all. For within the whimsy of Dickinson’s reflection, her innocence wanders into darkness. Her white dress remains perfect, but with a humble rag-tag soul. Because of this venture, Dickinson is not always deserving of the white dress—and how could a wasp retain this honor? The young girl, however, deserves this even in her worst behavior. Why shouldn’t a girl have a twelve-button white dress?

“or rather—He passed us—
The Dews
Gossomer, My Gown
My Tippet—only Tulle” (Western Wind page 423, lines 13–16)[9]

A tippet is glamorous and ceremonial strip of cloth, while a tulle is a more common soft cloth for veils and dresses. The encounters of “Started Early, Took My Dog” and the gallivanting “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” behold the racing spirit of this imagery.

With simple alliteration, Bell aptly describes Dickinson’s body of poetry as “much more and much shorter.” (line 4) That’s how she wrote. The slight breath of caesura before line 3 and the unrhymed free verse that follows is counter to Dickinson’s works and Bell’s gift with this poem. Dickinson abided by and was a master at all forms of rhyme and rhythm. One could analyze her work and find that it features nearly all of the poetic devices, with iambic tetrameter instead of iambic pentameter. “The barefoot quick step,” (line 18) is another nod to Dickinson’s rhythmic demeanor and how we know her by her words and subjects like a binding thread. With infusion, Bell gives us Dickinson and defines the mystery with but one properly used set of dashes:

… so softly!, carrying her shoes. It must be
she surprised me—her barefoot quick-step
and the earliness of the hour, your dress—
or surely I’d have spoken of it sooner. (“Mystery”, 17–20)

He could have capitalized “her” as set off by the ensuing dashes, but Bell is referring to the girl so quickly and innocently passing by as the mystery. Man will always remember this youthful imagery and eternal muse. If you are a man and could play an image over in your mind, what would you choose—is it divine? Bell gives us a hint of consonance as the “wasps struck glass.” It’s his use of consonance in the poem’s final paradoxical moment as Bell asserts that “Eternity’s plenty” leaving the reader to reread and approach this mystery delicately. Does Eternity own plenty? Of course an eternity can own a plenty! This loaded finish also suggests that eternity can show possession or utilize a verb.

Her poems are the wasps with stingers—“Or surely I’d have spoken of it sooner” What else would Bell have been waiting for as Dickinson’s essence speaks to him and he is casually afraid of being stung? After centuries of poetry in both Western and Eastern cultures, the metaphor of the white dress still bonds the sexes while defining the difference between man and woman, boy from girl, man from girl, and woman from boy. Except this one: Marvin Bell’s paradox of Emily Dickinson and the 12 buttons of temptation or fastened purity. Like Dickinson and her modern poetic and ironic mechanics, Bell leaves the ambiguous, open ending for the reader to decide how the surface allusions superbly cling to the mystery of Dickinson’s intentions. “Mystery” is a reverential homage, not a parody, with no obvious replication of Dickinson’s body of work. Bell masterfully paints a new picture of her with elements that define the white dress, the stings that surround it, and its enduring mythical allure through the postmodern age.

Sources:

[1] Bell, Marvin. “The Mystery of Emily Dickinson.” Contemporary American Poetry; Eight Edition. Edited by A. Poulin, Jr. and Waters, Michael. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. 2006. Page 26.

[2] Dickinson, Emily. “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.” Western Wind: An Introduction To Poetry, 5^th Edition. Edited by Mason, Nick and Nims, John Frederick. McGraw-Hill Companies, New York, New York. 2006. Page 124

[3] http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/white_dress. Emily Dickinson Museum. Trustees of Amherst College, Amherst, MA. 2009.

[4] Dictionary.com, LLC. 2015.

[5] Dictionary.com, LLC. 2015.

[6] Dictionary.com, LLC. 2015.

[7] Dickinson, Emily. “I Heard a Fly Buzz, When I Died.” Western Wind: An Introduction To Poetry, 5^th Edition. Edited by Mason, Nick and Nims, John Frederick. McGraw-Hill Companies, New York, New York. 2006. Page 422.

[8] Dickinson, Emily. “Started Early, Took my Dog.” Western Wind: An Introduction To Poetry, 5^th Edition. Edited by Mason, Nick and Nims, John Frederick. McGraw-Hill Companies, New York, New York. 2006. Page 423.

[9] Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for death.” Western Wind: An Introduction To Poetry, 5^th Edition. Edited by Mason, Nick and Nims, John Frederick. McGraw-Hill Companies, New York, New York. 2006. Page 423.