May 14, 2018 Issue

One of the defining characteristics of great lyric poetry is spontaneity. It has the look of casual notation, of immediate expression – the equivalent of an artist’s sketch or a jazz musician’s improvisation or a street photographer’s quick snapshot (think of Allen Ginsberg’s “Manhattan May Day Midnight” or John Updike’s “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting” or Elizabeth Bishop’s “Santarém”).

The poems in this week’s New Yorker may have taken years to write, but they appear spontaneous – that’s one of the things I love about them. Sharon Olds’s “For You” starts out with morning coffee (“In the morning, when I’m pouring the hot milk / into the coffee …”) and ends unexpectedly, miraculously in elegy (“Trayvon Martin, song was / invented for you, art was made / for you, painting, writing, was yours, / our youngest, our most precious …”). 

Christian Wiman’s “Eating Grapes Downward” enacts the impromptu notebook-style writing mentioned in its opening sentence (“Every morning without thinking I open / my notebook and see if something / might have grown in me during the night”), doodles along for three stanzas, musing on such things as a “cousin’s cartoon mustache like Rollie Fingers” and a “miniature cow” named Mona, and then, at the beginning of the final stanza, seemingly going nowhere, offhandedly asks “What else?,” and, in reply, suddenly conjures this amazing passage:

Oh, and Mona, who seemed less cow
than concept, really, half animal, half irony,
sticking her rubbable muzzle
through the fence like a Labrador.
We stayed a long while petting the impossibility of her.
We gave her—if you can believe it—grapes
left over from our lunch,
and when they were gone, and we were almost,
her moo blued the air like a sorrow
so absurd it left nothing left of us
but laughter.

That “blued the air like a sorrow / so absurd” is inspired!

“For You” and “Eating Grapes Downward” brim with spontaneity. I enjoyed them immensely.