Life-Sentence(s)
One full-grown woman
A recently born child
A gleam of sunshine
& Pointed hill
One saint in a silent movie
Agee in a cab
Martin King on a Memphis balcony
Clouds when examined under glass
Salt water on solid rock
Jesus on the cross
Father in the guest room
4 to 6 feet
Now
Stupid Fucking White Man
Then
A pebble and a clod
The Future
Mr. William Blake
The stars of the southern hemisphere
Moisture
The climbing up
Doris Lanard
The climbing down
Robert Creeley
Overhanging ferns and lilies
A level and brilliantly white sea
A little haystack
Port Desire
The first landing
Flaccid Overlook
Entropy’s missed triumph
Your luminous body
Mine
–Claudia Keelan
Claudia Keelan's most recent books are We Step into the Sea: New and Selected Poems (Barrow Street) and Ecstatic Emigre: An Ethics of Practice (University of Michigan Press). She is the editor of Interim and the Test Site Poetry Series.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Eight): Claudia Keelan
Claudia Keelan’s enthralling “Life-Sentence(s)” is thirty-three end-stops. Thirty-three doors. Lives and deaths our experience may elaborate. Is abundance and disappearance, both playful and solemn, like Frank O’Hara’s in such poems as “Talking the Sun at Fire Island." The first line, “One full-grown woman,” suggests a catalogue. But instead we taxi thirty-three runways for imagination. Their directions different for each reader. But not runways, because that suggests that the context, the universe inhabited, is consistent. The mortalities of the first twelve lines alone encompass quotidian fact (in the woman and “recently born” child), the fevered world of a silent movie, geography, literary history, chemistry, martyrdom, and familial grief. The poem’s cross-sections interrogate time’s givens:
Now
Stupid Fucking White Man
Then
A pebble and a clod
The Future
Mr. William Blake
The stars of the southern hemisphere
Throughout the poem, contextual shifts jolt, disrupt memory. The snatch of invective, “Stupid Fucking White Man” prompts many sad examples. Pebbles and clods endure in their lowly ubiquity—here, two paragons of the indistinguishable. To think of William Blake with the honorific accorded a living man, moving about the world, makes him again an agent of eternity that we leap from into stars.
The quotation above reveals a signal part of the poem’s method: diverse entities alternate with familiar markers: “Now”. . .”Then”. . . “The Future” . . . that suddenly seem to us insubstantial. We live a world not of progress, but of disordered parallels.
For me, looking up “Doris Lanard” yielded a jumble of similar names, but also the heading “We have found Doris,” a poignant assertion. Here, in finding “Robert Creeley,” we dwell on a great poet entrained by a litany of small and large beauties:
Overhanging ferns and lilies
A level and brilliantly white sea
A little haystack
Port Desire
A tumble, a plane, a cone of sustenance, an inlet of longing.
Claudia Keelan’s vivid and unsettling “Life-Sentence(s)” contains no period, no confining mark of closure. Ending, it gives us “The first landing,” that may remind us of John Ashbery’s paradoxical “The Mooring of Starting Out,” then the comical “Flaccid Overlook,” and, finally, a vision of two beings—overlooked by the universe’s all-powerful spin-out of energy, the agent of bodies’ parting—joined in ecstatic possession: “Your luminous body / Mine”
Rejecting anchors, we reach Port Desire.
–Angela Ball