Oscar Oswald

Readings

A poet from your hometown or current (or past) location and how knowing the location affects your reading

Yvor Winters (Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence, ed. Thomas Parkinson, University of California Press 1978)

I grew up in New Mexico, and I recently moved to Idaho, for a job. The summer before I moved, I bought a book in Chicago, from Uncharted Books, collecting the correspondence between Hart Crane and Yvor Winters. I didn’t know much about Winters, and I’d heard Crane’s letters were superb. I pocketed the book, got a new job, and got to Moscow. A year later I opened the book only to find that Yvor Winters lived in Moscow before me, that the correspondence begins in Moscow, in a period after Winters left New Mexico, like me.

I didn’t and don’t know what to do with this, but the geographic parallels are true. Having read the book, my impression is that Crane is sincere, passionate, and bold, while Winters is a problem: too severe regarding Crane’s ecstatic poetry, and homophobic regarding Crane’s sexuality. But Winters is interesting for his opinions of the modernists: he deviates from the modernist-approved narratives of Pound, Williams, and Stein, implying an aesthetic in the letters that oddly straddles quaint, sickly-sweet Victorian-esque poetry with the flamboyance of WCW and the forms of Mina Loy. It’s not your typical view. While there are few of Winter’s letters in the book, you can infer from Crane’s responses that Winters was reading a lot of cool stuff — but he chose not to go there in his poetry.

This troubles me because I’ve lived the places Winters lived. And like Winters, I may be remembered by my friends as simply a strange, backwards man living in a panhandle. I don’t know Crane but I know lots of folks with lots of umph. Hopefully it carries in my work.

Robert Creeley, A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays, (Four Seasons Foundation, 1970)

Robert Creeley holds to life I think in ways that other experimental writers miss (I say this from experience). It’s why the category ‘experimental’ for Creeley can feel reductive. There is a breadth to his writing and when I think of it it looks like a white adobe wall. I always think of adobe walls when I read him. Perhaps that’s because we both lived in New Mexico, where adobe is a civic requirement.

Adobe walls are quiet, soft; they are shaped warmly and often curved, with inconsistencies; they are old, though commonly renovated if they are real; and I remember noticing them as a child when it was cold, the time to be thankful for a wall. An interior adobe wall is also a white page — and many of Creeley’s poems are like white pages with words, not poems on paper.

Creeley was a looming mystery to me in Santa Fe. Growing up, I met people who knew him but not a word about his poetry. Going to school, I had teachers who read him, and they advised ‘just read him.’ So I did. He was there in the beginning — his books, like him, floated all around New Mexico — and from this geographic pollination he’s become a bedrock of my poetry.

It’s Creeley's duty to the commons — to all that is available of emotional, intuitive perception — that pressures me and pushes me when I’m in a lull. I think he gives us the license to be people speaking in our poems — not notions of people or themes of people, but us with our intangibles and incoherences and rhythmic (illogical) connections. The work of New Mexican abstract expressionism (like Agnes Martin) is for me a transcendental individualism, the faith that form can speak to what is outside of the frame and make us live with it. I think Creeley can be included in this lot. There’s a lot of New Mexico I carry with me — Creeley and his chicken coop are part of it.

A poet or book of poetry from before 1800

The Book of Taliesin (c.1300; this edition trans. Gwyneth Lewis, Rowan Williams, Penguin 2020)
The Exeter Book Riddles (c.900; this edition trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland, Penguin 1993)

I was in Burlington, VT, at Speaking Volumes Books when I bought a copy of The Exeter Book Riddles. What I found was a transformative, almost modernist poetics of self-expansion, a poetics fueled by the active redefinition of the speaker every line.

 The Exeter Book is a surviving collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry, perhaps the best we have. It has a range of forms—not only riddles. But in the riddles, there this an excitement at the possibilities and limitations of definitive statements—from one definitive (“I’ve one mouth but many voices”) we go to another related one (“[I] mimc the jester’s japes”), and part of the play is the failure of these two true statements to add up to a third. It is a poetry of miscalculation and suspense—we are held in suspense from the first “I” statements to the end, and we are led to the wrong conclusions by logical deduction. And in this way it is also a poetry that anticipates Rimbaud’s maxim “I is an other.” Like that French rascal, the poets of the Exeter Riddles joy in the potential that runs at the crest of the words, each poem building to a tension between what has been admitted and what is withheld of the identity of the speaker. In its subterfuge and game I see Emily Dickinson in less interior form…

And then there’s Taliesin, a Welsh apocryphal mystic nationalistic warrior poet from the sixth century. The poems we have are likely not written by one person—instead, Taliesin operates as a sort of ‘prophetic voice’ that different poets use over time. He reads like a sterner Whitman with less glue between the lines. In place of brotherhood, there is warfare and metaphorical animism in which the whole world is strung by a poet’s hand—trees, rocks, water, and clouds relay to us a set of imperial allusions lost in time, but they are also simply stuff that glows in the gravity of the poet. And so Taliesin’s not Orpheus—these poems don’t have a fable or a lesson, except don’t fuck with Taliesin, and they are not about Taliesin but rather of Taliesin. These are blunt, straightforward, and clunky, like a D. H. Lawrence, and also tangential, with an intuitive, associative form, like Pam Rehm. Like the Exeter Riddles, there is a sense of active self-possession and self-fluidity on the page, as if each poem were not just in the voice of Taliesin but also making up this voice, like a performance or a monologue. Historically, this voice of Taliesin becomes a mouthpiece for a range of poets in different eras. Each boasts, each fights, each celebrates.

I’m attracted to these texts because they are so messy, unequivocal, and grandiose. I’ve always been interested in the fluidity of the “I,” in the “I” as a placeholder but also a vehicle. And in Taliesin we have this Taliesin persona as a vector, as a mask that poets can wear to speak truth to power or to power up the troops. Imagine some day poets adopting the name of “Kaufman” or “Coke” when they want to settle a score with society. . . I like the “I” that distracts and confuses as much as it reveals and connects. I like it that sometimes the “I” is simply fuel for things to say. And I find peace knowing there is contact to be hand from poet to reader even in the plastic voice. 

Writings

the country of my origin

and a place in depth no deeper than a spritz
out from a bottle onto skin,
a touch              light contact
limb to limb
in flashpoints through high wheat stalks burning
stretching past the eye, from corners of the mountains
down
  an eyelash fine,
copper on red grass,
embarkment
transit         act
in in form or in the constant
contact
sliding
west into a fulcrum vanish
voice with vanish mind —

Theocritean (I)

is there a still where I may drink my neighbor’s water
grey leaf flapping darker by its savor
I a little title named by one who is unsound

I bramble with the berry little word
I brighten in my pocket of it here
I pull a person with an oar this person is so stately
I describe myself and I

corner of my eye the whole world laughing I
I wager given world or grassless English eyes
the riverbank I fell into the river swift on purpose

I have only water
in the moon that shines be absent
in my hands I’m wrapping lemongrass
remove my name a little name a little lore

Oscar Oswald is a poet teaching at the University of Idaho. His first book Irredenta (Nightboat Books 2021) explored the visionary polemics of the pastoral mode. His essay “On Pastoral Poetry and the Language of Wilderness,” published on Lithub, tracks the context of Irredenta through its relationship to nature writing. Oscar’s current project is rooted in medieval literature and the intuitive poetics of the Black Mountain school. The working title is Stomaching the Middle World, a collection of open-form long sequences that interrogate poetics of place. Oscar’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Colorado Review, Seneca Review, and Volt, among other outlets.