Toby Altman

"One of the places my desk has been. Denver, April or May 2021."

Readings

A work of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how has that shifted or remained constant for you over time

The Voice of the Poet: Elizabeth Bishop. Audio Cassette, 2000.

When I was a child, my father and I would drive to the desert. We would drive in the early spring, when it was cool enough to walk in the desert, carrying a heavy pack, mostly in silence, tracing the course of gravity with our boots into high-walled cloisters of green: the canyons. Driving to the desert—on I-80 through Nebraska; following a dirt road through the back country—we would listen to a tape of Elizabeth Bishop reading her poems. Robert Lowell too, though I have less to say about him. “One Art,” “At the Fishhouses”—instruments of absolute precision, carried through the air in her heavy, stricken voice.

I was at an age then, say thirteen or fourteen. I was at an age where it had become necessary to find the folds and creases of language. Then there was Bishop, with her cool geography. Her language, which one might compare to the herring: flourishing in the depths, moving at occult angles through the sea. Sebald: “The routes the herring take through the sea have not been ascertained to this day.” At its usual depths, impossibly vibrant. In the fisherman’s net, dull and glowing. “Once the life has fled the herring, its colours change . . . when dead, it begins to glow.”

I could not say, exactly, what I learned from listening to Bishop, over and over again, as my father drove across the west in his green Suburban—a car he purchased from my mother’s ex-boyfriend, then refused to sell, reasoning it had done enough damage already to the earth and should be quietly retired from its consumption of fossil fuels. I did not learn anything particular or nameable—some specific aspect of the craft. I learned something more permanent than that. “These nets do not enclose the catch, but rather present a kind of wall in the water which the fish swim up against in desperation until at length their gills catch in the mesh…”

Walking in the desert, one encounters boundaries. On one side of the barbed wire fence, public grazing land, where cattle have pummeled the land into barrenness. On the other side, extraordinary green—more than you thought possible in such places. Walking in the desert, one crosses these boundaries, unhooking a loop of barbed wire, stepping through. One learns to protect and respect them: close every fence you go through. Bishop, I might say, taught me where those boundaries are: she showed the geography of the poem, its little stamp of green earth, fenced all around. And she showed me how those borders might begin to flower—to become almost erotic in their flourishing.

Later, I would come to conceive the poem differently. If I had to make a statement about my poems now, I might say: I try to escape from poetry through poetry. I am always failing to do so. It is a kind of dance I do: cantilevered, syncopated, a little tipsy. As the herring, fighting to escape the net, throttles itself in its native element. Did I learn this unsteadiness, this stagger, from Bishop? No, not quite. But I am still traveling with her voice.

Writings

from “Essay on Ornament”

Steadily, you discover ornament. Folded
ornament, and violet.
Aggregate, volatile, vagrant—
not a structure, but a texture:
resonating with the manifold
immediate.
And I would be diminished,
volatile, radiant:
the carcass of an orange,
trampled on the steps of the subway.
To experience, in restraint,
all the secrecy of sickness.
We will be speaking of nothing else.

And though I know that sight
is domineering, theoretical,
subdued, as the dyer’s hand,
&c.
my mode here is fundamentally
visual: standing back, letting
the eye act. To assemble, as marble does,
larger than the singular—
those impurities that circulate
within the stone

soft intrinsic ornaments:
the fingers or
the lips. The interior of the ornament
which is like
the exterior. Unbearable and therefore
unbelievable, the tenderness
of such pleasure.

The memory of it is like a yellowness
of the air. When I began
this study of cruelty—to be more
precise, this study of duration—
I would’ve, I wanted, I traveled there.

I who sing the tenderness
of property—momentary
as light. Whose history is
excavation, fingering the shale,
its oliy interior,

so that architecture can have
its encounter.
The land is lost to its uses,
which never cease.

We are approaching the limits
of vision. And that is what fascinates
the eye. These complications, involutions,
in which the brittle becomes
liquid, cankered. The elaboration
of a set of spines, which, when deployed
will catch the light—at once beautiful
and armored, ornament purely as such.
So that watching it, watching
light transpire across its surface,
we had given up being so exact—
that vision can be so sweet,
and its limits too.

The landscape, which is endlessly
purchased.
No, not endlessly.
Its substance, like moth-eaten
velvet: flaking.
And in these apertures, pockets of cold
and still water.
Suggesting it has already consumed
delay, other acts
of intimacy and provocation.
The condition of mud, which is
the condition of shadow.
In relation to radiance but
beyond it: cool and lengthless,
as beauty is; as beauty
cannot be—

It becomes the task of the architect
to translate the thistle into stone.
The flower, which is made up of seeds,
emerges from the stalk.
Every day, the body arriving, or
arriving at the body.
A kind of knowledge which is swooning
without meaning to, falling backward,
to touch the crocuses, their tentative
private bodies.
And the pigeons nesting in a bed of nails—
So much of what is seen and said
being lost to metaphor, therefore,
once again, on the roof of the City Museum,
St. Louis, pigeons nesting in a bed of nails,
this day, February 29th, 2020.

Toby Altman is the author of Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, forthcoming) and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017), as well as several chapbooks, including Every Hospital by Bertrand Goldberg (Except One), winner of the 2018 Ghost Proposal Chapbook Contest. His poems can be found in Gulf Coast, jubilat, Lana Turner, and other journals and anthologies. He holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Toby recommended Kelly Krumrie to Etcetera.