Morgan Lucas Schuldt passed away on January 30 due to complications from
cystic fibrosis. I wanted to sketch a portrait of Morgan for this
blog, wanted to write about not only his extraordinary life, but the love
supreme that his poetry embodied. His death, though, is still too close, and it will take me just a little more time.
I attended his memorial services in Tucson, where he lived
for much of the last decade of his life. Like William Carlos Williams and Allen
Ginsberg before him, Morgan was a thoroughly Jersey boy, but he found a home in
Tucson. He found Mark Horosky and Adam Chiles. He found Stephanie Balzer and
Barbara Cully. He found Boyer Rickel.
The climate change from Vermont to Arizona—I mean going from
unseasonable April warmth in New England to anomalous frosty weather in the
Southwest—the mourning at various memorials those few days—as well as the
bourbon that occasionally accompanies said grief—fused with passing a year earlier of Paul Violi—another friend and mentor—all this left me tattered.
I returned to work at The Bookstore physically twitchy, emotionally worse.
After catching up with Matt on what I’d missed—including a
poetry reading by Clampitt House fellow Bruce Snider—I was presented with a
stiff manila envelope. Scrawled on the front was a signed note from the poet Barry
Sternlieb: “For / Michael Schiavo / a few from the zen master. / (one just a
proof, / the other a signed + / numbered edition— / primitive, but still /
packing a punch!)”
I slowly unsealed the envelope. After removing one of the cardboard flats, I gently untaped the fine paper therein to reveal broadsides
of Michael Gizzi’s “Extreme Elegy” and “Second Extreme Elegy” that Barry had
printed in the mid-’80s. At one point, after a few months of employment at The
Bookstore, Matt had informed me that I was only the second poet he’s ever hired.
The first was Michael Gizzi.
Barry is a wonderful guy. We would talk whenever he’d stop by the store, and I
know we talked about Michael Gizzi, but I can’t remember as I ever told him
just how much I loved his work, how much it had, at one point, intimidated me, and then later enthused me with its familiarity. I’m sure I never told him that one of my favorite Gizzi
books is Continental Harmony. And I’m
positive I never told him that “Extreme Elegy” is one of my favorite poems not
just in that book, not just of Gizzi’s, but of all time.
What I wonder is if Barry will ever fully understand what he did for me
this past spring, even when he reads this. In that one moment, through that unassuming
act, those poetic powers that I felt closest to, that I felt were forsaking me through
the deaths of those whom I most loved and respected (M. Gizzi himself passed
away in 2010), all at once, those powers announced their presence.
I wept.
Not out of grief, no, but filled—and not of a sudden—with the consolation of the universe.
—
EXTREME ELEGY
Michael Gizzi
after Ives
The Last Rites, man
3 helpings! Extreme
Triadic Unction a -bury
a -port a -ton, troughwater
with shadowbarn
like
mausoleum
deathward we glide, our viscera
slung The pitch
of New England the mind of an ear
shockt into blooming a -shire
a -vale a –wick oaken
lid going to sleep
near still-
ness of my life—America,
un
writable love
of foliage in voice
beside an
axe
’til
evening
Canvas in moonlight an oversight
comin’ up backstream But only
a rheumy
cache
of russet spittle
like oaken funk, New England, a tonic
a
ton