114 Poetry for Students
between them with the thrown
shoes of horses, luck briefly as a thing
of heft made to shape through
air a path invisible, but there...
The “thing unsaid” is luck, is the “insubstan-
tial,” the realization of the role of chance in our
lives—here symbolized by the game of horseshoes.
The poem makes us feel the heft of the iron shoe,
and the weightlessness of air; what could have been
merely an idyll somehow (that is, lyrically) be-
comes an evocation of the raw contingency that sur-
rounds even the quietest, most serene moment. It
is hardly necessary to note that the poem is not
about being Carl Phillips; it’s about being alive.
But Phillips does not always, it seems to me,
trust his own intuitions, and the traces remain in
the syntactically broken lyricism: “It is for, you see,
eventually the deer to / take it, the fruit // hangs
there.” Here we are back in the raspberry patch, a
kind of strange pastiche of seventeenth-century dic-
tion (as a teacher once put it to me, “I threw my
horse over the fence / some hay”). In some of these
poems, it is the idea that’s lyrical, not the poetry.
For all his penetrating brilliance, Phillips does suc-
cumb to what I would call the Jorie Graham effect,
a poetry of temporizing self-interruption:
Of course, of course,
the doomed crickets. The usual—as if
just let go on their own
recognizance—few birds acting
natural, looking guilty.
Gray black gray.
You were right, regarding
innocence. A small pair of
smaller moths rising
parallel, simultaneous, ascent
itself seeming axis for
what rotation? sex? combat?
“This, The Pattern”
These poems are dramas of thought, but they are
existential, not classical dramas; they avoid their own
iterative tendency. One of the hallmarks of this po-
etry is that it constantly refers to what lies outside,
beneath, behind the poem; another is the profound
remark stumbled upon like a coin, as in “Lustrum,”
which begins inauspiciously “Not less; only—
different. Not / everything should be visible. / Wing-
dom: // doves. Not everything / can be. There are
many parts / to the body.” And then, the poem says,
“To begin // counting is to understand / what it can
mean, to / lose track.” At last, we are getting some-
where, I think, betraying my own perhaps retrograde
desire to hear the chords resolve. What has been sub-
tracted from lyricism is its urgency. A big word like“truth”—over whose definition millions have fought
and died—is now a kind of Roman candle set off in
the poem, dazzlingly, but with no pressure to see
where it lands. Hence, “I became tired, as / who
doesn’t, having always // the truth, and not saying.”
As though the truth were so obvious as to be not
worth bothering with; instead, we have “less the truth,
than a way to frame it,” as Phillips says elsewhere.
At its best, the poem is a series of snapshots
in which the taker’s thumb has been caught over
the lens:
Splendor:
nothing priceless. To believe
anything, to want anything—these,
too, have cost you. Flame,
and the beveled sword, set
inside it. This one,
this—what did you think
body was? What did you
mean when you said
not everything should
be said? The light as a tipped
cone, searching.
The body pops up the way God used to in de-
votional verse, tethering the poem to something that
everyone can relate to, the crossroads of materiality
and sexuality being the only serious subject our cul-
ture can any longer imagine. But truth and appar-
entness are not exactly the same thing. If the body
is self-evident, what of the self? Could the body be,
I wonder, not the end of lyricism, but the beginning?
Peter Balakian made his reputation as a poet
with work that explored his own experience, but
probed through it to the bedrock of the Armenian
experience and the genocide of 1915 (“at last, po-
etry about genocide that is truly, in every thrust,
pause, and detail, real poetry,” as James Dickey
wrote of Balakian’s 1983 collection, Sad Days of
Light). But it isn’t quite accurate to say Balakian’s
work was “about” genocide, though there may be
a door in the big house of American poetry with
that word written on it. There were poems, like
“The Claim” (containing documents from the
poet’s grandmother’s human rights suit against the
Turkish government), in which the personal ele-
ment shrank beside the enormous shadow of his-
tory, but it was always there. And Balakian went
beyond the poem of the body to the poem of the
flesh, the human (and animal, for history reduces
us to animals) flesh which has faced steel and fire
and lime in the past century. In his best poems, the
self was a lamp to illuminate world memory. The
lyrical force of “For My Grandmother, ComingThe Litany