Mark Jarman
Mark Jarman Poems
Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully--
Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform
...
The wave breaks
And I'm carried into it.
This is hell, I know,
Yet my father laughs,
...
There they are again.It's after dark.
The rain begins its sober comedy,
Slicking down their hair as they wait
Under a pepper tree or eucalyptus,
...
They were talking to him about resurrection, about law,
about the suffering ahead.
They were talking as if to remind him who he was and
who they were. He was not
...
My parents have come home laughing
From the feast for Robert Burns, late, on foot;
They have leaned against graveyard walls,
Have bent double in the glittering frost,
...
In Ball's Market after surfing till noon,
We stand in wet trunks, shivering,
As icing dissolves off our sweet rolls
Inside the heat-blued counter oven,
...
To raise a stump of rock into a tower, rolling a stone
in place as the years pass.
Strangers who only know your silhouette bid it farewell and
travel to Japan,
...
Sick as it approaches, sick as it departs.
In fall the hulks of burned out houses stand unrazed.
...
There is a Renaissance painting of paradise
In which people, still in their human bodies,
Are embracing as if they'd just arrived in paradise
...
Roland was a Paladin of Charlemagne,
And he was my mother's cousin. The Paladin
Served Charlemagne and died, blowing his horn.
The cousin spent a day with her at the fair
...
Black Phoebe
Highwayman of the air, coal-headed, darting
Plunderer of gnat hordes, lasso with beak -
...
To lie in your child's bed when she is gone
Is calming as anything I know. To fall
...
How do you turn into a flower of the field,
the lily clothed to make Solomon rue his glory?
...
Tall blades of tufted grasses, keep on flowing.
Towhees like good ideas, keep on flowing.
...
Mark Jarman Biography
Mark F. Jarman is an American poet and critic often identified with the New Narrative branch of the New Formalism; he was co-editor with Robert McDowell of The Reaper throughout the 1980s. Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of ten books of poetry, two books of essays, and a book of essays co-authored with Robert McDowell. He co-edited the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism with David Mason. Jarman's awards for poetry include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award, three grants from the NEA, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets' Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine.)
The Best Poem Of Mark Jarman
Ground Swell
Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,
Going on sixteen, like a corny song?
I see myself so clearly then, and painfully--
Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform
Behind the candy counter in the theater
After a morning's surfing; paddling frantically
To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,
Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's
Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.
Is that all I have to write about?
You write about the life that's vividest.
And if that is your own, that is your subject.
And if the years before and after sixteen
Are colorless as salt and taste like sand--
Return to those remembered chilly mornings,
The light spreading like a great skin on the water,
And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,
And--what was it exactly?--that slow waiting
When, to invigorate yourself, you peed
Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth
Crawl all around your hips and thighs,
And the first set rolled in and the water level
Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck
The water surface like a brassy palm,
Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.
Yes. But that was a summer so removed
In time, so specially peculiar to my life,
Why would I want to write about it again?
There was a day or two when, paddling out,
An older boy who had just graduated
And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,
Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,
And said my name. I was so much younger,
To be identified by one like him--
The easy deference of a kind of god
Who also went to church where I did--made me
Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.
He soon was a small figure crossing waves,
The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,
Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name
Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise
To notice me among those trying the big waves
Of the morning break. His name is carved now
On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave
That grievers cross to find a name or names.
I knew him as I say I knew him, then,
Which wasn't very well. My father preached
His funeral. He came home in a bag
That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.
Yes, I can write about a lot of things
Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.
But that's my ground swell. I must start
Where things began to happen and I knew it.
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Please print Mark Jarman's poem, GRID -- a truly great poem.
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4/23/2024 7:34:35 AM # 1.0.0.1119
Please print Mark Jarman's poem, GRID -- a truly great poem! Thanks.