April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh
painting a woman inside a woman
whispering a faint lullaby
that sings in my blind heart still

The others were lumberjacks
backwoods wrestlers and farmers
their women were meek and mild
nothing of them survives
but an image inside an image
of a cookstove and the kettle boiling
— how else explain myself to myself
where does the song come from?
         (from "The Dead Poet", Al Purdy)

The bad...

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put


on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed


The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually


concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth


Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace


copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery
       (From "That This", Susan Howe)
_______________________

The clattering of definitions is irksome to the eye and ear, and particularly to the ear: the predictable obeisance to the usual "objects", "form" and (always after Zukofsky) "music" accompanied by the fawning self-congratulations round a grand piano. One turn through the Science & Technology pages is more than enough to fill Howe's verse, reinforced always by a few choice admonitions to look "disjunctive" with lots of space. Is the poem "visible" or "form", "half truth" or "whole truth"? But "lumberjacks", "farmers" and "women" are as real in Purdy as the words of flesh of which the Purdy poem is made. As perhaps only Chris Faiers knows it best, Al's not a name but a place of fest and friendships, sturdy (decades-old) A-frames and cold lakes. Where Al lived and wrote, now worthy of writers'-residence sanctity, is the hearth of the poem, particularly the Canadian. And because Purdy's Canadian, and the poem and the place, Howe's imported linguicide can't touch it.

This is "song", man; that is just prescribed Zukofskian sheet "music".