Homage to Jay Meek, Part Three, by Yahya Frederickson
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| Yahya Frederickson |
This installment of the panel's highlights comes from Yahya Frederickson. Yahya is a poet, co-translator of Arabic poetry, former Fulbright Scholar, and former Peace Corps volunteer. He is the author of five poetry collections including The Gold Shop of Ba-'Ali, The Birds of al-Merjeh Square, and Returning to Water. He serves on the faculty at Minnesota University - Moorhead.
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In 1989, I was a budding poet, fresh with an MFA from University of Montana, trying to find homes for my poems. I’d heard about a journal published near my hometown—a journal called the North Dakota Quarterly. I’d heard that the editor considered the work of new poets, in addition to established writers. Maybe my poems—the imagery and landscapes of which were drawn from the upper Midwest—would be of interest to the editor, whose name was Jay Meek. So I sent him some poems.
It wasn’t long before I got a letter
back [my first name back then was “Todd”]:
I was pretty excited—a half-sheet! NDQ
letterhead! Personally written! With
appreciation and advice! Rejection is
rejection, but I couldn’t help but feel encouraged by the editor’s careful
response. (How often does a writer
receive such personal care and concern from a journal editor?). As I was taught to believe, a personal
response means that I should send more poems.
So I revised and
revised, sometimes all night long, and composed more poems. After some months, I mailed Mr. Meek another
submission of poems.
And. . .
I think Jay knew more about my poem
than I did.
In terms of publishing in North Dakota Quarterly, there’s not a “ happily
ever after” ending to this story. But in
terms of learning more lessons from Jay, there definitely was a happier ending. Fast forward seven years: after seven years overseas,
I returned to the Upper Midwest to earn a doctorate. I had chosen the University of North Dakota
for my doctoral study because it was closest to my ailing parents and it
offered a Creative Dissertation option.
My advisor was Jay Meek.
I’ll always cherish the sensitivity Jay
brought to workshop. His advice, like
his rejection letters, was carefully wrought:
thoughtful, understatedly encouraging, and oftentimes downright oracular.
When I think of the quintessential
Jay Meek poem, I think of a poem characterized by careful detail. Like an enameled filigree brooch, a Jay Meek
poem can dazzle the reader’s eye with detail.
It can wistfully recall the grandeur
of the past. But it’s far from a poem of
“good ol’ days” nostalgia. Instead,
while being conscious of the glory of human ingenuity, it is also aware of obsolence. It realizes the flaws of ourselves and our contraptions.
A Jay Meek poem is also confessional,
but not in a self-absorbed manner. For
example, take a look at “The Week the Dirigible Came”:
After the third day, it began
to be familiar,
an analogue by which one could
find
himself in finding it, so
whenever it came
outside the window what came to
mind
was how marvelous and common
the day was,
and how expert I'd become at
dirigibles.
When it stayed, I felt the
agreeable confidence
that comes from having a
goldfish
live four days. So I began to watch its shadow
passing through back yards,
only once
looked at the tie-line swinging
from its nose.
How much it seemed to want an
effigy, a fish,
something that might save it
from being
simply a theory about itself,
and on the fifth day
old ladies came stomping out in
their gardens
as the shadow passed under
them,
and in the woods hunters fired
at the ground. The sixth day rained,
but morning broke clear and the
air seemed grand
and empty as a palace, so I
went out,
looked up, and the sun crossing
my nose
cast such shadows as sun-dials
make,
and I knew whatever time
had come was our time and it
was like nothing else.
The poem contains
one of those—what I call—“reflexive” lines. It’s as if a
mirror is held up to something and the idea of that something stares back at it. Which is the more real? The speaker exclaims, “How much it seemed to
want an effigy, a fish, / something that might save it from being / simply a
theory about itself.” This “reflexive
line” is part of Jay’s imagistic signature.
Jay’s poems are inhabited by an
amazing cast of occupations: illusionists,
mimes, and palmists; by woodsmen and hunters; bathers and young skaters; Cornish
miners and Greek waiters; by druggists; opera singers and jingle dress dancers;
horn players and violin makers; by stevedores and passengers; and the homeless.
Their cityscapes include opera
houses and dance pavilions; museums, planetariums, aquariums, and zoos; rotundas
and esplanades; mansions, glass solariums, and carousels; grain elevators,
missile silos, and sewage lagoons; parish churches, county jails, and cabanas; balconies,
platforms, kiosks, and terminals.
They are bustling with trains and cable
cars, steamers and Norwegian freighters, frigates and gondolas, wheelchairs and
bicycles, B-52s, and (my favorite) a wagon of cabbages.
In his article "Inadequate
Memory And The Adequate Imagination" from American Poetry Review, F.D.
Reeve, who was one of Jay’s friends and co-anthologists, explains what I
consider to be the movement inside the quintessential Jay Meek poem. Reeve says that the past is reconstructed
“not as a chronological sequence but as a series of expanding waves: as the
rings enlarge, the imagination dominates until its adequacy generates the
imagery. From a set of fond pictures of a past, or lost, time[,] we are
encircled by a new, demanding, but plausible consciousness.”
Many of Jay’s wonderful poems fit
this description. However, I’d like to
switch gears and share with you “Poem for a Future Academic”:
I've loved having words to live
with,
and in twenty-five years
it'll be the twenty-fifth
anniversary
of the words to this poem.
Don't look in it for hidden
meanings.
What I've written
is what I meant, and I meant to
hide
nothing from you.
When students write their hard
poems,
be generous with them,
but do not call them creative
writers.
I think they are poets.
Myself, I never wanted to be a
poet—
I write what I write.
And I hope you will like what I
write
without feeling my work
gives you an importance
you haven't already found in
yourself.
If some day you teach my simple
lyric,
do not call me
by my given name,
and do not leave my name on the
board.
I've loved the chance I had at
life.
Twenty-five years!
O, if you can make my life your
living,
I hope you eat well.
Do not hate the poets of your
own time.
Tell your students I said
hello.
Thank you.
—————————————-
Works Cited
Meek, Jay. “Poem for
a Future Academic.” Earthly Purposes. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon U,
1984.
——-. “The Week the
Dirigible Came.” The Week the Dirigible
Came. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-
Mellon U, 1988
.
Reeve, F. D. (Franklin D.).
“Inadequate Memory And The Adequate Imagination.” American
Poetry
Review 32.3 (2003): 11-13. OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson). Web. 9
Mar. 2015.
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