Half Starts and Trail Offs

Skin on Raindrops: Mort and D’Agostino

Apr 19

MeredithUncategorized 1 Comment

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I haven’t set too many guidelines for myself in this month of poetry blogging, but one guiding idea was to highlight lesser known poets, or at least the poets who aren’t known and anthologized all over the place. So this week, I thought it would be fun to highlight poets I’ve known, either as teachers, classmates, or friends. There is something about knowing the poet that brings the writing to life. And, when you have the opportunity, meeting great poets–whether they’re sitting next to you in class or reading from a lectern,–just makes this all more real. The idea of “Poet,” the iconic image of this grand master of language, falls away a bit and you understand that it’s the life lived and the time put into writing that makes poetry.

Also, as a note,  I considered breaking it into the Baltimore and the Cape Girardeau Schools (sorry, I couldn’t help it), but I think I’m going to let them mix and mingle.

Today, I wanted to focus on two poets whose words have gripped me and made me wish I could do what they do: James D’Agostino and Valzhyna Mort.

James D’Agostino

I met Jamie when I was in my last couple of years at SEMO: he taught classes and became a fixture around the English Department. I didn’t know him very well, but when his book, Nude With Anything, came out, I was startled (in the way that good poetry has of startling) by the amazing way he had of pairing words and his ability to break lines exactly where they wanted, needed, to be broken.

a little storm on which the sun was kind
of shining made a monochrome
of many things, and silver light, day

enough to feel assured we fully understand
the impact of skin on raindrops…

-from “Against Vanishing”

The broken shade of huge pines
describes a husband and wife
driving through it, less simple

than the central problem
of their snowscape, namely,
the August it was every morning…

-from “The Darling of the Mining Town”

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna is one of my teachers in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore. Originally from Belarus and only 2 years older than me, she’s had an amazing amount of success and has been called a “risen star of the international poetry world” by the Irish Times. She’s one of those poets whose writing seizes you by the throat and only lets you back down at the moment you’ve given up on breathing. And though her poetry is wonderful to read, it’s best to hear her read it. Here are a few of my favorite lines from her poems:

your body is so white
that it falls on me like snow
every night is a winter

-from “your body is so white”

the air died
strangled
between two bodies

-from “was it your hair you lost”

And because I mean it when I say you need to hear her read, here is a poem that she reads over an animation done by the Poetry Foundation: