Yesterday was April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month, as it happens. I was dusting my bookshelf and by chance a worn little chapbook plopped out at my feet—it was Seizures of the Sun, published in 1996 by then-17-year-old Meschach McLachlan, a Mormon prodigy poet from Cullowhee. I was impressed anew by the caliber of this book. This is quality bohemian verse, a bit overdramatic as befits a teenaged poet, and yet much more finely executed than the chest-thumping histrionics of many so-called performance poets. Here’s a selection:
An excerpt from “We Will Be Unseen in Something,” by Meschach McLachlan:
“…. He has
died his hair red because of a splotchy girl, invisible
to the city also. He enters and barnacles a table.
Pays for coffee in nickels. I think of him in the town
that sips on neither of us any longer because of his being
cigarette breasted and coughing. A dog collar around his neck,
he said he was too skinny for God anymore, while I
fumbled through my backpack for a book, barely listening.
He would always know the waitresses by name
and leave them poems for tips. I would sit, shifting a little
in the menopausal air of after midnight,
being too close to tired to do anything but laugh
like a drowing bee from when I was three during a summer
like not many, memorable, when I took
the muffled black and yellow from an apivorous wet
to the tiny pool’s partitions and felt the first sex,
the painful penetration, the crying.”
Has anyone heard anything from this poet lately? … Thomas Rain Crowe, whose New Native Press published Seizures of the Sun, told me a few years ago that McLachlan had given up poetry for a tech career. Then I ran across some of his work from 2004 in the (now possibly defunct?) journal Nanthahala Review. I have to say these poems didn’t resonate like his juvenilia, but it was great to see him writing again.
Just one more poem before I go, this one from South Carolina poet Laura Stamps’ book The Year of the Cat, published in 2005. Now, cat art in any form is dangerous, as fraught with potential awfulness as benevolent fairies and smiling moons. (And I say this as someone who, since 1990, has had at least one cat in the house, and occasionally up to five.) Which makes Stamps’ book that much more of an accomplishment: 100 pages of poems, every one about a feline, and not one of them embarrassing. Check out this one:
“Relief Divine,” by Laura Stamps:
“Amazing how the complaints
of a lifetime roll from your lips
every Sunday, like a blessed
wafer, only to dissolve in bird-
song on the tongue of a Monday
morning, the sun flashing its
scarlet cassock against the
night’s solemn sentence, the
kittens shrieking at the porch
door for breakfast, the last
whisker of discord twitched
away by the hallelujah of this
new day gracing the pinewoods,
flush with the heavenly scent
of leaves, moss, and moist clay.”
Very nice. Very April. Who’s the poet that best encapsulates for you “the cruellest month?”
— Melanie McGee Bianchi, arts & entertainment editor
I’m going to go with Nipsy Russell.
I was thinking of Basho, because haiku is full of seasonal imagery. But for me, the best poet for any month is the Japanese tanka artist Yosano Akiko:
“To punish men
for their endless sins,
god gave me
this fair skin,
this long black hair.”
Thanks, Alli — endless sins, indeed, including poor spelling (Jason, that’s “Nipsey” Russell with an “e”)
“It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”
— Andrew Jackson
Yeah, nice guy, Andrew Jackson — responsible for signing into law the Indian Removal Act, among other dubious moves. I prefer a quote by E.B. White’s character Stuart Little: “A misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.” :)
I don’t see you trying to give your house back to any Native Americans (sorry had to say it). Jackson was a bastard, but that quote was too good to not use.