Contradance

by John Peck

Overview

In a country where much of the prominent poetry seeks to affirm the fleeting present and its changing values, John Peck’s poetry comes as an important, if unlikely, gift. Peck’s verse deals the cards of the fragmentary, ideogramic, juxtapositional, and elliptical through the deck of normally discursive syntax. Echoing late high Modernism, Peck’s work, in the words of novelist Joseph McElroy, is “a way of seeing things,” confident “in the packed vividness of the referential.” Avoiding the narrow identity- or group-specific viewpoint of some of his contemporaries, Peck invites us to enter the larger humanscape and unearth with him unnoticed connections to our shared past and to one another. In Contradance, his ninth collection, Peck’s passion for inquiry and historical reflection has never been stronger or more beautifully embodied. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226652924
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/15/2011
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

John Peck is a freelance editor and translator and a practicing Jungian analyst. He is the author of eight books of poems, most recently of Red Strawberry Leaf: Selected Poems, 1994-2001, published in the Phoenix Poets series by the University of Chicago Press, and a cotranslator of C. G. Jung’s The Red Book.
 

Read an Excerpt

Contradance

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By JOHN PECK

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-65292-4

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Chapter One

    CENTURIES

    Keats stared at coiled hair—John
    Milton's—and felt blood
    drenching his face, as later
    he felt the same hot
    acknowledgment before a
    Greek cup, all life flocking there
    at full-bodied ease.

    And yes, there is that great one's
    unsurpassable
    doing, then the javelin
    thrown anyway, the
    uncoiling lunge off the block
    before that whisper over
    the shoulder, before

    they toss up the white flag at
    the finish. And yet
    beyond sparking hair, just past
    all those burstings in
    the young man, an opening
    onto fields, blown curtains onto
    standing bending weeds

    and the wind out of blending
    spaces, of what we

    call the centuries and then
    fall still before—that:
    it coming from where, and we
    weaponless, the forehead cool,
    unthought of. The whole

    of that already there yet still coming.

    in memory, Thom Gunn


    DAWN RENGA

    El aire de la almena — San Juan de la Cruz

    Mist from the mountain
    unraveling, or is it
    the mountain that tears

    Where lightning scattered the loons
    river steams up into day

    He of the Cross, hid
    in his bright darkness, lay
    stroking wind-washed hair

        Under the fan of cedars
        when the Lover struck his neck

    He mentioned also
    a battlement, the wind there,
    but no place was safe

        Beheaded with all others
        who suffered through to union

    Hold the affliction
    given, perceived by no one,
    until you can see

        all the rock ledges at once,
        all the climbers, swift seasons

    and it is the earth
    growing suddenly before
    a broad sky crumbling

        earth headless and giving birth
        to itself, warm wind steady


    CANTICLE OF THE WINEPRESS

    A chasm opened. Through Massachusetts day
    two-thousand-three it was Berlin, not the braying
    pre-war strut and wedding-feast beer foam
    but nineteen forty-eight's dead-drum

    expanses; not succulent
    vegetables heaped in the stalls of Schöneberg,
    nor spring through Karl August Platz, but the dragged
    claw through every wall's rent.

    Between two blonde bimbos into noon's lull
    I slowed among rubble,

    and that mute pair felt real, their forearms
    warm along mine, a tawny tiny wheat
    rippling them. Yet their eyes were tight
    crayon crosses, on forms
    smooth as a dress-store dummy's,
    side-falls flouncing their shoulders—
    bleached by the hedge-fund years
    or screen stars from my childhood baked barmy.

    A hatter hunkered, pounding
    velvet that he pulled and pinned around
    egg shapes. Up to his shins
    piled the cuttings, strewing lemon, soft greens,
    violet and raspberry from his shears,
    and though I tried to break free, his wares
    fascinated my zombies

        and in the year that it was
    the underskin of stone shone through, as dust
    shines through dust after days of fire and the pulse
    of its mica wavelength chills:
    Gloucester Point lay winking flat east,

    yet if the hatter who only seemed busy
    was still mad, then what was I?
    Berries staining their splints, woozy
    tricolor peppers trucked to the Kreuzberg, frenzies
    of cut blooms in sunny gusts—these compressed
    across the mesh in his vats,

    then smoothed and drying in those mothy helmets
    still guzzling the grape's pulpy drool,
    siphoning attention through their wicks, all
    thickly into the briared foliage that forgets.

    I knew that the unfortunate bear up
    or rage loose, while the oblivious regroup
    around the necessary as their shaken good—
    dew bunches along a scythe's oiled blade—
    but what I knew stood impotent. Already
    what those dolls wanted saturated my power,
    troughed scarlet gargling the brain's cauliflower
    into solar stillness, the blast of it steady.

    And just so I was squeezed into the winefat,
    where though it crushed me I too was that shoulder,
    in the drench of its raiment and wool one long scour
    swiping to loom clean through two-way light,

    with one motion my sloshing step in that place
    through all my blood.
          Thus the price of release,

    for there was none now with me,
      for I had rolled dumb through my anger and trampled out
        a fury that I recked not, the stain of it
    soaking my shirt. And to whom shall I report?
      For I had gone among a throng
        yet of the people there was none with me.


    FLOWERS AND BIRDS OF THE FOUR SEASONS ...

    Flowers and Birds of the Four Seasons
    with Sun and Moon
    films of matter upon matter
    compactly, intriguingly, and

    came Chernobyl.
    And through
    the sleep of one witness a clod
    at terrible
    velocity passed her. Screamed.
    We call it matter, dubbing it
    stuff—all which fosters surprise when wraths
    burst neutrally, keenly, from it.
    And the momes rath

    outgrabe.
        Our race
    is that
    woman of means with middling
    talent, the nice but pushy pupil,
    who came to
    aging Lizst—he, reduced
    to taking such people.

    This time she was
    halting in the runs, slowly repeating.
    He stood at gaze

    gripping his arm,
    then slammed
    both fists down. Enough! Don't you
    know who I am?


    SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

    Oak benches in the meetinghouse parked swept wings in tight formation,
      strategic bombers mothballed in the Mohave, around the aisle left clear for
      George Fox's dreams of quakes and volcanoes.

    What had flown into itself was still arriving, its long touch-down narrowing
      the shimmering far tarmac.

    Quakers and No-Nuke grayhairs, with cloud piling tremorless midday, faced
      two hibakusha waiting to testify through their bespectacled translator.

    Hiroshima's Khota Kiya stood at attention in solar tie to debrief headquarters,
      the coal red on his tongue after some sixty years. I walk, can talk, work. My
      government wish strike Article Nine. I come here your country thousands miles.
      Useworduvmouth! I can walk, talk. He was my age.

    In what world if not this one has he already scaled the barrier dune,
      his mount slipping nine times but achieving the crest with his mutilated,
      shining tenth form? Here, it flashed once, going in.

    That night in the grass, the unmown cosmos, October fireflies left their lights on
      for the last time, low far lanterns.


    GIOVANNI, WOULD YOU ...

    Giovanni, would you
    see me
    alle cinque, Chiesa Nuova?
    To talk. I have to.

    Overworked teacher
    and weary
    paterfamilias,
    shy would-be searcher ...

    we had been guests
    at a friend's.
    Now I sat where the Corso
    Vittorio thrusts
    widest, the smooth steps ripple
    away from the barney church
    and pigeons breathe
    stertorously
    among bronze hours, and watched a protest
    march gather hoarsely

    in the oblong square,
    the blind
    gypped by the state led there
    by the blind to roar
    through their bull horns
    and step off
    in waveringly good order.
    A cart of melons

    got sideswiped by
    a leathery
    motorcyclist, who doffed
    helmet and drew up to the splatter
    and paid for three more than he had smashed.
    The old man twittered.

    A waif on crutches
    swung and
    swung through the mess with whoops
    kicking swatches
    of rind, a crone
    cackling
    back of him filched one up
    to taste, alone....

    Then it was those
    I'd remarked
    other evenings, now
    among strangers, haze
    from the late rush
    acridly
    holding the heat, and the whole
    air of it threshing slowly and greatly
    up through
    that vast parlor, none of us
    explicitly
    invited, over our criss-cross
    making for the blue ceiling
    with a sound never quite spoken out
    and a fragrance
    obscurely of the occasion,
    of all those there met—

    so I sat for three hours,
    and the desperate man never showed,
    who in his rare delicacy
    had dispatched
    all that company, all
    those beings to me—

    their half- or no greeting,
    or straight on,
    aiming at something we sensed,
    moving, or waiting—

    my appointment
    was with them,
    and now, these years since, with
    this deep content.


    TO THE ONE WHO STOLE MY BOX OF TOOLS

    The way a man's knees lie one over the other
    when he sleeps on his side, the knob of one in the valley
    hollowed just shy of the other—that is the way the legs
    on those calipers that you now own, the forged ones
    with their full-moon hinge, will nestle into each other
    if you have any sense in disposing them in their lift-out tray.
    The whole kit is now lift-out. You have forcibly
    reminded me of that: life is no possession
    but an inherence, and the Italian martello
    retains its self-presence no matter your hand. And may it
    fall just shy of the nail head into the face of your work
    with the same reminder to you. I speak you no malediction.
    It behaved that way also with me. Nor do I propose
    to haunt you with my own presence, as Chief Seattle
    advised us that the spirits of his sons and daughters
    would stand beside us in our factories and offices,
    and lie alongside us in our beds, and mingle with us
    at our weddings and funerals. The crystals of my sweat
    in the knobbly cherry-handled screwdriver will merge
    into your sweat as themselves, their two poisons
    of sodium and chlorine neutralized in a balance
    pungently, immemorially impersonal.
    They shall arrive, my impromptu colleague in labor,
    in the same way that parallel universes ooze forth
    from the black scalding cauldron of hyperspace
    and the souls in them, and the souls in ours, engage
    in sleepless commerce although we sleep, go out
    on missions we know with tasks we very well know
    and tools that have become second-nature, although still
    we sleep, waking more tired, a bit sore from the carry
    and mute transposition. May you slowly learn to haul these facts.
    What you heisted greets you with the completed faces
    of the desert hermits and communards after they had
    stolen themselves from the Nile towns, and Rome, and Greater Greece
    in the imperial diaspora of anchored ground, and enters
    your hand as they passed tabooed boundaries, complete
    in demeanor of usefulness: this universe to that universe,
    trekking to reinstallation in a mud cottage
    as fresh as its own face—having seen through everything
    and thus speaking only to the bulls-eye, utile
    and melodious, discourse going compactly and tartly
    and mind entire from middle heart to middle heart
    and gut to gut. Wherever you came from, they came from
    behind and beside you, ready for new use, so that
    courtiers at Rome traveled the seas to use them.
    That is the kind of face looking up at you
    out of the bed of that dinged box, and when you sleep
    it is their piercing and serene cheerfulness
    that rests alongside your uneasiness. Life is not a thing
    that we have, it is being seeking employment. Do you not wake
    at times gifted with the shudder that an instrument
    has made its way into your presence, waiting for you
    to recognize yourself as the quondam user and itself
    as something that will continue? It colonizes your rooms
    with citizens of presence, completed inhabitants
    of process. They, now, will be able to enlist you.
    That which you are in your short-breathed shapelessness
    they will employ to make into another shape
    and then migrate into finer grasps. Those men and women
    of the Egyptian badlands seem to us maniacs
    in flight from body, family, and taxation, who only
    wished to serve with flesh more completely what flesh
    honed and oiled can serve beyond even athletes and legionnaires
    and temple prostitutes: maximally tooled.
    You have chosen the path of separation, like Nietzsche,
    who feared toads and frogs and loathed swamps and the mire
    yet raided the tool kit of Sophokles. When Vaughan counseled
    Run for the mire! he wanted the all-out, not the tormented.
    What you got will get you for the getting: what any of us takes
    was meant to attend to us. Plotinus said it was only fitting
    that Providence reach every being and that its job be
    to leave no single one of them neglected. So, too, will it
    look after you. And among its means henceforth will be
    the Japanese pull-saw unforgiving in its draw, the ibis-headed
    tack hammer that must land like Baryshnikov, and
    the nested hex wrenches that fold into themselves like banked
    organ pipes seen small, from down the length of the nave,
    just before the organist lays on Bach or Lizst
    or wild Jehan Alain from the pedals and manuals.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Contradance by JOHN PECK Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Centuries
Dawn Renga
Canticle of the Winepress
Flowers and Birds of the FourSeasons . . .
Society of Friends
Giovanni, would you . . .
To the One Who Stole My Box of Tools
Club W.
Avedon in his last days . . .
New York Sonnets
     The Battle of Anghiari
     To Melville with Pry-Bar
     Aquarius
     Green, Yellow, Red
     I Hear You Calling
     Philosophia, East 65th Street
     A Bridge Beneath
     Inwood Hill
     The Project
     Children's Zoo
     Vitrine
     The Web in Central Park
     Anfiteatro Flaviano
     The Chrysler Building, Met Life, Trump Tower
     Liber Studiorum
Hammonassett, Connecticut
A Veteran
Duchess
Book of Serenity
Fire
Papyrus Fragment Egerton 2
1618
From the Factory in Wolfsburg
Incomings
Four Rivers and the Pennsy Yards
Contradance
Out of strife, peace: . . .
Venice's last . . .
Across and through— . . .
R. M. R.
Book of the Dead? We Have No Book of the Dead
Violin

Notes

Editorial Reviews

[I]t is the extraordinary fineness of intelligence and heart at work in these poems, their music, and their sensuous and exact images, their scrupulous conscience, that can win for their readers what is so difficult, a vision of art and life bound together by both justice and love.

Notre Dame Review - Joseph Donahue

This is a deeply intellectual, deeply profound poetry.

PN Review - Joey Connolly

John Peck is unique among contemporary American poets for the burnished, intricate density of his thought and the rugged, even gnarled lyricism of his lines. The ghosts of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Avedon, Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Melville, and a host of others stalk gravely through the steps of Peck’s Contradance, their spectral presences a ghostly counterpoint to the poet’s preternatural awareness of the buzzy, blooming confusion of the present moment: ‘Life is not a thing / that we have, it is being seeking employment.’ ”—Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University

Mark Scroggins

Praise for John Peck

“John Peck may be the best American poet whose name you’ve never heard.”—Peter Campion, Poetry

— Peter Campion

Poetry

Peck (The Broken Block-House Wall) is known for writing difficult poetry, and this volume is no exception. Most poems here, though they begin in a real or relatable world, such as the diner in the title poem, come off as cold and intellectual, reading like vehicles for name dropping (Dante, Milton, Baudelaire, etc.) instead of meditations on our collective humanity. Even the "New York Sonnets," which sound as if they would be the most gritty and down to earth in the collection, remain distant. In "Anfiteatro Flaviano," for instance, the grime on a New York building transports the speaker suddenly back to the Coliseum in ancient Rome. How? Or consider "To the One Who Stole My Tools," whose title (reminiscent of Steve Scafidi's "To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire") prepares us for a humorous poem that never arrives. VERDICT Either Peck writes for a very specific academic audience, or he writes for no audience at all. What Matthew Rohrer says about W.S. Merwin can be applied here: "It is remarkably, emotionally monovocal."—Stephen Morrow, Ohio Univ., Columbus

Library Journal