Homage to Jay Meek, Part Three, by Yahya Frederickson

Yahya Frederickson
The third installment of the notes from the 2015 AWP memorial panel honoring the late poet, novelist, teacher and editor, Jay Meek. The panel included brief talks by Jay's daughter, the poet, musician and scholar Anna Meek, Thom Tammaro, Jane Varley, myself and Yahya Frederickson, with a special contribution by Jay's wife, the poet and scholar Martha Meek.

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.

*    *    *

            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 exciteda 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 thosewhat 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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