Homage to Jay Meek--part 4 of 4

The final 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 segment represents my own speaking notes from that day. 

Hello. I'm William Stobb. I was a student of Jay’s at the University of North Dakota, and Jay meant a lot to me as a teacher and friend. I’m really pleased that everyone’s speaking a bit about the diversity of Jay’s work, and about the pleasure of corresponding with Jay, and about his presence, his temperament, his discerning and compassionate teaching.

I’m going to speak exclusively about poems from Jay’s 1989 book Stations. Though I value other works of Jay’s, Stations has been a nearly constant presence in my life for the last 25 years. It’s a traveling book—with poems set in many different places, many poems set within acts of travel—and I carry it with me when I travel. I know it’s a hyperbolic idea, but ever since I first flew in an airplane, I’ve felt like it’s important to be ready to die when you fly—could there be a commercial jingle in that? I guess probably not. But of everything I’ve read in my life, the poems in Stations are the things I want to look at when I’m in a position to really address my mortality. Not that I’d scramble to read a few stanzas as my jetliner plunged toward the Earth, but, in a moment where I feel a desire to value my life, to reflect and be mindful, the poems in Stations are the texts I most want to read.

Jay’s poems have perspective about the value of human gestures. There’s a moment in the poem “Vienna in the Rain” that can serve as a starting point. After describing visits to the homes of Haydn and Schubert, who contributed so much valuable song to humanity, the poem turns to another kind of mortal reflection.

How stunning it was on the train to Vienna

that moment in the mountains

we moved into a curve, during another rain,

when I saw our engine

enter a tunnel and I recognized what force

I was joined to, as though my next seconds

were suddenly inevitable, continuous,

which had felt separate from me

until then, when I wanted to see everything,

and I looked at the sheer face of the rock

with snow high in its crevices,

then I looked at the rain heavily falling,

and we went into the mountain

where deep in myself I did my best to sing.

As usual, Jay’s language is finely tuned to the moment it enacts, creating for the reader an interior and exterior landscape. But mostly it’s the idea of a force that we are joined to that sticks with me, here—Jay’s recognition that our travels are metaphors for or manifestations of another kind of journey that we’re always on. 

A recognition like that can be calming—the frenetic pace of a day moving through terminals and stations can be disconcerting, and a poem that takes me to the center of the experience of travel can help me to let go of anxiety, to recognize the inevitability and continuity, and … well… it’s better for me not to sing, but perhaps just to calmly breathe.

Not that Jay’s poems are always calming, meditative presences. There’s a wide affective range in Stations that I really value. I love the complexity of this moment from the beginning of “Various the Works that Rise Among Us.”

One time I walked into a passage

at the base of a pyramid,

but the pyramid was in a museum

where the hieroglyphs

that meant the words of the god

were kept behind glass,

so when I put my hand over them

I felt only a warm brilliance,

much like the roof of a new car.

Here, the concealment of the image’s context—“but it was a pyramid in a museum”—modifies but doesn’t erase the original awe of walking into the ancient structure. As the language preserved there is revealed, there is power in those words, yet the power is also associated with the bemused, slightly defeated recognition that the display is reminiscent of a commercialized sensation. There’s a complex ambivalence, here, that strikes me as an under-recognized subject position in a contemporary world—awe and commerce, reality and artifice, ancient history and the real objects of our own time, like cars, which also gleam in the heat of our nearest star. I love that a poet like Jay can recognize these complex positions and honor their various perspectives.

Another example of this ability to recognize emotional complexity, to make an art that’s uneasy with acts of display (which, of course, the poem itself is), sticks with me. It’s the poem “Coming Down to the Water,” with its harrowing opening vision of the devastating bombing of Hiroshima:

In Hiroshima, the old people

came down to the river

because they were thirsty,

and when they bent their heads

to the water drink

many fell in and floated away.

That day from the rubble

there were some who cried out,

“Help me, if I may ask.”

What are customs and manners in the face of the most destructive forces of war? They are small, real things. Though the explosion itself is not described, the poem achieves juxtaposition in terms of scale of action and manner of action. For me, the humanity of that moment has always been very simply, matter-of-factly stunning.

From there, the poem slides to a viewing of the strange daily custom at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where each morning, ducks ride the elevator down from the penthouse, and are chaperoned by an “elderly gentlemen” who “marches in gold braid” into the hotel fountain. People come to see the tradition play out, and Jay describes the scene in the poem.

For more than half a century

there have been ducks

walking up the red carpet,

and today there are children

from the inner schools

who clap at the wonder of it,

and if there’s anything

at all charming to it,

it’s the charm of what passes:

nothing is decided or compromised

or irreparably broken

except that each morning

for fity years the ducks

come down to the lobby

to swim in the marble fountain.

There’s an indignity in the moment’s display—the quaintness of it presents a false or highly simplified sense of the value of orderliness, and I love that Jay makes a poetry that can itself be an incredibly finely tuned artifact—note the delicate ambivalence of the proposition in the final nine lines—which also serves to point toward the artifice of display.

As a full example of how finely tuned Jay’s poetry can be, I’d like to read the full text of the poem “Voyager Music” because, more than most of the poems, the fluid affective range and broad scale of reference have a powerfully ambivalent effect on me. The poem is so beautiful, and articulate, and also a little tragic, and a little despairing, and also courageous.

In Manhattan, over the intersection cement dust is blowing,

as if the tops of office buildings were crumbling. . . .

I lay my head back and look at the stars in the planetarium

where the universe is manageable,

given to music, and where I can learn names for major stars

as if they were kinds of flowers,

fields of them, one blurring into another from this distance.

Of course, even if the world is round

it doesn’t mean the sky is. But if the projections show us

one of the ways we have to imagine,

and if out of the darkness Aeschylus calls the spangled robe

                        of night

we have made metaphors as another sort

of planetarium, we come down at last to where the light is,

illuminating the songs that represent us in deep space,

some record of our having lived

if only as an example

of what men and women severely missed, being so nearly able.

A dozen years ago, I went on snowshoes along the Kennebec

to see the river iced over.

Down there, I thought of swans migrating at such altitudes

and so late in the season

sleet covered their wings until they grew heavy with it,

and came down in deep woods.

And having swans in mind, I thought of the particles

that move through each of us,

invisible, continuous, passing through our bodies and houses

like a pettiness compressed

to an intense power, neutrinos plunging through the core,

when I saw out on the river

some young skaters moving toward the near bank

and going out again, slowly,

coming together at times, and at times turning in a circle

with arms around one another,

absolutely silent except for the whispers of their blades

as they moved back and forth, coming together and parting.

This fluid range of material and affect, the large and small scale brought together in such effortless movement, the artificial representation and the incomprehensible reality of space, of particle physics, both honored, both recognized within the ample world of the poem—you know… whatever the nature of my own attachments to Stations might be, Jay’s work doesn’t just deserve attention for its skilled craftsmanship. Almost thirty years past its publication date, “Various the Things that Rise Among Us” still understands essential characteristics of who we are. It still sees us; it’s still contemporary.

Let me conclude by looking at another meditation that remains surprisingly timely, despite its title: “Toward the End of the Millennium.” I’d like to leave you with its best energies, which I hope can carry us all forward beyond today.

Set in Manhattan, the poem begins by reflecting on the labor that served to build the infrastructures of our own time, before reflecting on the collections of objects in museums. “Alive now, I think of museums as holding places for plunder / and the expressions of power, the best of the worst lived through…. it’s a wonder our belongings haven’t gotten up and left us to look for a happier time.”

As the poem moves toward its conclusion, it directs a hope toward us—a hope that is bodily, a hope rooted in the beauty of the natural world, a hope that we might take strength from deep awareness of ourselves.

Whatever emblems of power the ages have lent us in keeping,

I hope that in our quiet passing

the new millennium will take shape in an openness and courage

visible to us deep in our lives,

as though we were divers looking up through the green water

where a swimmer passes overhead

and over the swimmer light diffuses through the whole world.

Thank you all for being here.