Spring

Angie Estes is a poet’s poet—an honorific term that reflects a general recognition among peers of a writer’s compelling vision and clear technical mastery.  It was supposedly coined by Charles Lamb to describe 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser’s work and his influence on others (including the likes of Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth).  Sadly, the term also connotes an artist who does not possess the sort of broad popularity that less complex talents might enjoy.  In Angie’s case, the former is certainly true, while the latter needs some qualification: after all, her seven volumes of poetry have earned her such honors as: the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize; the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry; the FIELD Poetry Prize; and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America.  In 2010, her collection Tryst was a finalist for the exalted Pulitzer.  But, to me, the poet’s poet designation also signifies this: a fellow-writer whose creative abilities function at such a rarefied level, simply reading their work runs a surge of electricity through the mind’s circuitry, intensifying even our own creative processes—much the way playing against a tennis pro sometimes deepens focus, speeds up reaction time, and conjures a devastating backhand slice we didn’t even know we possessed.  The thinking within Angie’s poetry is so rich and compressed, diamonds seem an almost inevitable result.  Let’s start with the title of her most recent collection: Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City (Unbound Editions). Upon seeing it, my reaction was situated somewhere between a wry smile and a wince of discomfort.  I registered, of course, the playful contradiction, but found myself feeling a certain pang for what was about to be cut short (love, perhaps?) in a city like Rome famed for its timeless vitality.  And indeed, the tension between what seems eternal (like art and poetry and philosophical discourse) and what is painfully short-lived, animates many of the poems in this book.  Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to them to recharge my own cerebral batteries and jump-start the heart when mired in darkness.

I have a few literary friends who shy away from what they think of as ‘erudition’ in poems; when they come across obscure references or passages in a foreign language tucked within the more experiential stanzas, I watch them quickly begin flipping the pages.  But Angie’s erudition is bracing, a quality of mind that simply refuses to be harnessed by anyone’s expectations.  She weaves her way between ‘high art’ and ‘pop’; the cultural geographies of America, Europe, and beyond; and, not surprisingly, the contentious relationship between what the head knows and the heart wants.  Reading today’s selection, did you smile at that enjambment between lines 1 and 2—“Everything is in such a/ hurry”?  The unexpected line-break, and then the serpentine form of the poem, force us to veer, tap the brakes, surge ahead, always paying a deeper attention to time (not to mention Time with a capital-T) as the ultimate context for our lives.  How challenging to live in the here and now when, in one instant, Cedar Waxwings adorn a tree limb—and the next, a squirrel’s broken body lies “in a bright red halo/ of blood on the asphalt,” its trembling right arm seeming still to be hurrying off.  I believe this poet’s work is a perfect example of what new research is calling the “Whole-Brain Phenomenon;” it describes intelligence by “global brain connectivity, not just specific regions, indicating a more holistic neural basis for cognition.”  Memory, observation and imagination; leaps between past, present, and future possibility—these are not only inextricably linked in her writing, their interconnectedness spurs tiny eruptions and showers us with sparks.  We leap from that halo of Sciuridae blood to Fra Angelico and her depiction of a pair of martyred brothers (Arabian doctors whose Christian faith had them dispensing medical care for free—a radical concept—and led to their doom).  Then, from beheaded saints to broken pottery, and the desire to repair our fragmented world (though, in Japanese kintsugi, the cracks are emphasized with gold filler, rather than obscured, a reminder of our imperfection and mortality.)   With each new turn of the lens, this kaleidoscopic poem dazzles with surprising new patterns.

Feeling for a way forward, language is always the poet’s compass: “the past could be/ morning sky or evening sky, even/ Evensong”—the word play lifting the mood (and who knew the anagram for Louvre was velour?) Then this literary craftsperson subtly steers the inner conversation toward its true north: “The past/ is so unwilling to stay/ where we put it that we had/ to give it its own conjugated/ tense, past imperfect.”  So when the poem’s speaker concludes “as in je désirais: the condition was never-ending,” I found myself thinking of my own longstanding desires, and that beloved who might inspire in me such blissful grief.  (And just who shared that caviar feast?  Whose skin, the softness of velour?) Prompted by the title, I intended to share this poem with Red Letter readers next spring. But I realized the true weather of this piece is a perpetual vernal longing when, outside our windows, bleak winter feels frighteningly permanent.