A few years back I grew weary of the themed poetry anthologies, many published by university presses, some fascinating, but others not. Their themes were love or violence, race or place, this or that, but I often closed the covers wondering how many drum solos I could stand. In service of fair disclosure, I was asked to contribute poems to some of those collections, and even when I hesitated, I never wound up refusing. About the new Monticello in Mind volume, which I’ve just read, I do not have that weary feeling. In fact, I’m excited about it. The subtitle is Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, and complicated as our third president and his legacy are, I feel a refreshing wind blowing through most of the poems, even when their considerations and revelations are not cause for jubilation. Inconsistent and contradictory as he was on some matters, enlightened angel and red-headed devil that he could be, Jefferson was almost always provocative, and the midden of his brain continues to offer odd amulets, wisdom, boldness, risk, quirk and conundrum. He was a man of more than two minds, and to my knowledge one of the most interesting humans since Leonardo. Diplomat, farmer, philosopher, author, anthropologist, inventor, slave owner, secret keeper, fiddler – it’s almost too much for one person to ponder, though fifty people employing their separate sorceries of language can perhaps keep most of the juggler’s balls in the air at once, for a while.
Jefferson once wrote that keeping slaves was like holding a wolf by its ears. You don’t really want to hold on, but neither are you sure you want to let go. Maybe Jefferson was himself a kind of wolf, and we’re still similarly flummoxed as the metaphorical wolver was. Even the least forgiving might have trouble dismissing the architect, even the most avid acolyte will struggle with the image of shackles and overseer’s lashes. But editor Lisa Russ Spaar, who often contributes poems and reviews to Shenandoah, is fully aware of the Rubik’s cube of character, and she has found some four dozen poets who have lent their imagination and their craft to bring the Enlightenment’s great conundrum further into the light, even with the shadow still clinging to him.
I can hardly feign objectivity here. I can’t think of a poet who does more to bring her peers’ work into the public forum than Lisa, and she’s done it many times in the pages (and then links) of this journal. And to be fair, I’m one of the contributors to this current enterprise and count myself lucky, but setting this information aside, just open the book at random and read a few poems, then turn to Lisa’s astute and eloquent introduction. I believe the hook will be set, thrash and splash as you like; you will be reeled in.
Also in the interest in transparency, these poems are all, to varying degrees, about a person, a place, a historic time (though most reach toward the present and beyond) evident in lively ways, metaphor corraled, if not leashed. Even in the more extravagantly constructed poems, meaning is sought and achieved, imagery coherent, and everywhere one finds the pleasures of saying – this is a collection to be read aloud, to savor what Donald Hall has called “milktongue,” akin to what Robert Penn Warren called “the tangled glitter of syllables.” In short, I’m a neoclarificationist, and loose ends, fragments coy evasions are seldom what draws me to poems. I can really enjoy scat singing, either from the bandstand or on the page, but these poems seldom glorify the riff and tease (though I do love the lyrical “Hey hullah nonny fiddle honey-child o” in Tess Taylor’s “Graveyard, Monticello” and suspect it of having living roots). Narrative elements are prominent, form – either symmetrical or asymmetrical – is evident, and though humor is present, the poems are not jokes, shaggy dog stories, self-celebrations or the chic nonchalance often appearing in slick magazines.
If this sounds more like a celebration than a review, that’s appropriate. I have asked someone with no dog in the fight to review the anthology soon, no holds barred. The result should be less distracted and more professional, but I do want to tread on the reviewer’s territory a little. The University of Virginia has published Monticello in Mind in a hardback with a splendid dust cover and charges $22.95 for it. The blurbs on the back are deft and persuasive. This book is accessible, and it contains poems which will surprise, delight, perplex, goad and inspire readers. Author bios and brief commentary (by Spaar, who proves a dependable guide to both the place and the verse) follow the Afterward.
Who wrote them? Many, but not all, poets familiar to me: Talvikki Ansel, John Casteen, Claudia Emerson, Robert Hass, Terrance Hayes, Mark Jarman, Jennifer Key (a poem which received a prize from Shenandoah a few years back), Yusef Komunyakaa, Thorpe Moeckel, Chet’la Sebree, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, David Wojahn, Charles Wright, Kevin Young It’s not fair to stop listing, but these particular authors are stuck in my mind this morning, and I promised our blog editor I’d be less windy here than usual.
Just a sample of the subject matter:, four of the poets have chosen to write about Jefferson’s attempt to create his own New Testament, what Spaar calls “a project somewhat postmodern in its technique of collage and erasure.” He wanted to excise events which confounded his Enlightenment perspective, but he didn’t succeed in banishing the sense of miracle and mystery.
Race, gender, love, empire, a living and working community, power of all stripes – these concerns ripple and surge through the collection. Bees hymn, children explore, artifacts are gathered and disappear and reemerge. Adults contend and one mind strives for a wildness of order. I feel the marvelous place in this book and recommend it, for all the beauty and pain available there. If Jefferson if our wolf, I sometimes want the impossible – to hold him and yet let him go, but about Monticello – estate and book – I feel less ambivalent, as Mary Ann Samyn phrases it at the end of her poem: “History begins to come true as we tell it. / This is the spot where.”
RTS