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poem: A weekly poem, read by the author.
"Below the Falls"
By Kevin BarentsPosted Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007, at 7:33 AM ETListen to Kevin Barents read this poem.
Root-barbels high on the soaked trunks grope
what bits of water drilled into the air.
We move together through the woods: a two.
Greedy hemlocks crowded in the draw
eclipse a hophornbeam. We've picked along
a path held from the hollow's laurel hells
to where a trickle pushes off the cliff
and grabbles down into a greenstone bowl
the drop has pestled through the same old years.
The lottery's been slow in spelling us.
We can't get by on our inheritance,
an heirloom made of an exhausted place.
Roots of blighted chestnut trees miscarry
doomed shoots over and over. We've hiked
above the senseless mewling of the traffic.
Thick, kindred brambles lolling in their clade
leech off the filtered sun, a sinecure,
their clustered fruits fat as neglected udders.
It's only as the smacking of the leaves
gets louder that we notice we're deluged;
the spit had hid a breaking-in of rain.
Our people are as far as they can be.
The stream swells up with rain. The falls engorge;
its cataracts erupt and issue mud.
New currents lift a shingle from the bed
and runty-legged newt, concocted here,
abandons its appendages and swims.
What do we do? Protect an heirless joy
or fold our suffering into this place?
The limpid races aren't potable.
Rusty thrushes drop a stranger's line.
Huddle with me in our leave a while
before we hurry back to our fatigues.
Kevin Barents' poetry recently appeared in Meridian.
For Slate's poetry submission guidelines, click here.
Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.
Click here for an archive of "Poet's Choice" columns from the Washington Post.
Remarks from the Fray:
Kevin Barents' piece "Below the Falls" is rich, gorgeous and sonorous, its lush imagery and lucid line-play a relief from the run of vapid, cutesy mini-narratives one gets in most poetry columns these days. Here and there, for rhetorical contrast the poet provides a chatty aside, which occasionally mars the stately, slightly dreamy rhythm of the piece, as with the line:
the limpid races aren't potable"
I'd rather the verb weren't contracted, since the line seems to be missing a beat (the elided "not"). But the dense communion with the landscape and the acute attention to sounds and minor events, articulated in a clear, if somewhat recherché vocabulary more than make up for such tiny hitches. This is a poem that definitely demands to be read more than once to gather in the nuances - and I suspect some readers might find that off-putting - but I found, as I often do, that slowing down the process of readerly perception and understanding helped me make out the very very fine grain details of the piece's imagery more clearly in the end .
For instance, it turns out a "clade" is a "group of homologous organisms" -- such as leaves on a branch, the word clade being derived from the Greek klados, which means simply "branch." This helps us picture the bramble's leaves as a group of identical plant forms clearly situated in the larger setting - a sharply drawn decorative element in the painterly panoply of poetic visuals and, as a monosyllable anchored by that tough fricative 'k' sound, well situated at the line break. Combining verbal energy and complexity with visual clarity and freshness makes Mr. Barents' "Falls" a poem I can't help but want to dive into.
--MarkEHaag
(To reply, click here.)
This poem is glutted with obscure words that have been used for the sake of dressing up the banal, unexceptional ruling idea that is the poem's central theme, that nature contains its own kinds of dissonances and violence , and his result is nothing less than an ugly tract housing with a front yard full of garden gnomes and enamel deers, large Mexican planter pots and Christmas lights remaining on the front door months after the Holidays. Nothing distracts from the quarrelsome inanity of this poem, and adding to it's lexicon only makes the condition worse.It might have have helped if these words were used musically, but that didn't happen--it's as if Barents had three contrasting "formalist" approaches in mind when he composed this, and hadn't the heart to make this expression a purer example of a given style and habit of thinking.
--Ted_Burke
(To reply, click here.)
(12/20)
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Remarks from the Fray:
Kevin Barents' piece "Below the Falls" is rich, gorgeous and sonorous, its lush imagery and lucid line-play a relief from the run of vapid, cutesy mini-narratives one gets in most poetry columns these days. Here and there, for rhetorical contrast the poet provides a chatty aside, which occasionally mars the stately, slightly dreamy rhythm of the piece, as with the line:
the limpid races aren't potable"
I'd rather the verb weren't contracted, since the line seems to be missing a beat (the elided "not"). But the dense communion with the landscape and the acute attention to sounds and minor events, articulated in a clear, if somewhat recherché vocabulary more than make up for such tiny hitches. This is a poem that definitely demands to be read more than once to gather in the nuances - and I suspect some readers might find that off-putting - but I found, as I often do, that slowing down the process of readerly perception and understanding helped me make out the very very fine grain details of the piece's imagery more clearly in the end .
For instance, it turns out a "clade" is a "group of homologous organisms" -- such as leaves on a branch, the word clade being derived from the Greek klados, which means simply "branch." This helps us picture the bramble's leaves as a group of identical plant forms clearly situated in the larger setting - a sharply drawn decorative element in the painterly panoply of poetic visuals and, as a monosyllable anchored by that tough fricative 'k' sound, well situated at the line break. Combining verbal energy and complexity with visual clarity and freshness makes Mr. Barents' "Falls" a poem I can't help but want to dive into.
--MarkEHaag
(To reply, click here.)
This poem is glutted with obscure words that have been used for the sake of dressing up the banal, unexceptional ruling idea that is the poem's central theme, that nature contains its own kinds of dissonances and violence , and his result is nothing less than an ugly tract housing with a front yard full of garden gnomes and enamel deers, large Mexican planter pots and Christmas lights remaining on the front door months after the Holidays. Nothing distracts from the quarrelsome inanity of this poem, and adding to it's lexicon only makes the condition worse.It might have have helped if these words were used musically, but that didn't happen--it's as if Barents had three contrasting "formalist" approaches in mind when he composed this, and hadn't the heart to make this expression a purer example of a given style and habit of thinking.
--Ted_Burke
(To reply, click here.)
(12/20)