Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, November 2, 2008

At the risk of oversimplification, there's a schism in American poetics: writers who live in the world (so-called lived experience) vs. writers who live by the word. Of course, the greatest poets master both realms. Ever read a poem that makes you feel dumb? It's probably by a word-centric writer. Ever face tediously prosaic language wondering what in hell makes it poetry? It's probably by a world-peddler.

I first associated Brenda Hillman's work with word-centric poetry -- postmodern linguistic experiments that often verge (for me) on the impenetrable. But like Wallace Stevens, Hillman imports enough real-life experience to draw me in. With "Partita for Sparrows," she makes the poignant act of burying dead sparrows in Europe embody the persistence in that continent -- scarred by tyranny -- of dangerous class hierarchies that foment unrest. Presume that her choices aren't haphazard and try to unpack each detail. You'll enter a mythic landscape fresh with meaning:

We bury the sparrows of Europe

with found instruments,

their breasts light as an ounce of tea

where we had seen them off the path,

their twin speeds of shyness and notched wings

near the pawnbroker's house by the canal,

in average neighborhoods of the resisters,

or in markets of princely delphinium and flax,

flying from awnings at unmarked rates

to fetch crumbs from our table half-spinning

back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs

we would descend much later;

in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters

where streets were taken one by one,

where consciousness is a stair or path,

we mark their domains with notched sticks

of hickory or chestnut or ash

because our cities of princely pallor

should not have unmarked graves.

Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge

to which patterned being is parallel:

they came as if from the margins

of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning

our little hourglass up on the screen.

In the final lines, the birds' hearts evoke our own computer screens' whirling hourglasses. History implodes to make past and future equally alive. Time stops. There's alchemy in these words.

"Partita for Sparrows" is from "Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries," edited by Reginald Shepherd (Counterpath , 2008).

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."