"The Blues Have Wings": Poems from Unpoetic Times

by Alice Templeton

Even When We Sleep, Marilyn Kallet, Black Widow Press, Boston, 2022, 152 pages, $18.95, blackwidowpress.com

THE PRESENT MOMENT is rich with poets born in the mid-twentieth century who have studied and practiced poetic expression for their entire lives. One of these lifelong poets is Marilyn Kallet, professor emerita and former director of creative writing at the University of Tennessee, two-term poet laureate of Knoxville, and author of twenty books, including criticism, translations, anthologies, and eight volumes of poetry.

Kallet's recent collection Even When We Sleep is a testament to the wisdom and skill she has acquired over decades of writing, reading, and teaching poetry. The book borrows its title from Paul Eluard: "Even when we sleep we watch over one another.…" The line conveys the tender, communal temperament in this volume of odes as the poet invites the reader into her daily world of poem-making under the shadow of the pandemic. Most of the poems are arranged in narrow couplets or tercets on the page, a visual form that welcomes the reader with an earned ease that is her stylistic hallmark.

Kallet's writing recalls Neruda's odes and William's legacy of particularized, plain-spoken poetry. The poems take up her usual preoccupations: her stable marriage and home life, her Jewish heritage, a lifelong attachment to France, verbal playfulness, vibrant sexual energy, and a feminist poetics that views writing as a vital act of interconnection:

Rimbaud

was wrong: I

is not "someone else."

I is all of us,

on a stroll to meet

the new, the guileless,

and the oldest

blossoming trees—

long-flowering ones

we yearn to sing

& become.

(From "Letters from Earth & Sky," page 78)

If Kallet's darkest personal topics are behind her, sexual desire still throws its curves, the body politic suffers unsettling changes, and history delivers shocks. New subjects, and old subjects made new, offer themselves up: the rash of antisemitism since 2016, Covid and the resulting shutdown, personal losses of varying consequence, and the poet's current prospects for revitalizing language.

Thematically, the poems range from the consciously wacky ("Fifty Shades of Gluten") to the deeply serious ("Violins of Hope, Knoxville"). However, most exist in the median zone of the odic tradition, in a playful but never belittling attention to the connection of poetic language to the thing praised. The poet often lectures herself to lighten up and "help the poem forget," advice that serves as both an aesthetic reminder and a mental health necessity in a time of contagion and political chaos.

Kallet's poems do not shout their politics. Instead, her work undertakes the most basic political project in poetry's reach: to engage the world as it is, clearing the way for imagining what is possible. The poet's task is to "sing the unsung," "create beauty," and partake of the energy of "the erotic" (in Audre Lorde's expansive sense of the term). For a poet with Kallet's tools and gifts, this is more a challenge than a monumental problem. Still, a public crisis looms. Isolation strains the spirit, as the poet longs for letters and connection: "…Words // hold us. / Without them, / days taste the same." [page 23] But letters do arrive, in the form of everyday objects that offer practical lessons to the maker of poems. The natural world even supplies helpful teacherly handouts in the guise of fallen bark and leaves:

…We

frail peeps are stuck

in place. But you

show beauty

shaped

in place, offer

hand-outs

on

being

rooted.

(From "To the Wizard in Fallen Bark," page 93)

With her characteristic wordplay and gentle humor, the poet responds: "Delicate letter / from the earth, / I read you, soft / & clear." [page 92]

Direct address and imperative voice recur throughout the collection. The language of recipes, horoscopes, instructions, and blessings alert both poet and reader to the ethical dimensions of poetry. These quotable gems of ars poetica—"…If you must lose, // compose"; "Turn elegies / into odes"; "Sing the unsung"; "'As if' buys us dead air"; "Keep it light"—imply (without foregrounding) the constant temptation to overstate and abstract, and especially to elevate grief and grievance at the expense of love. "A couplet," Kallet playfully reminds us, "should not / require an attorney." [page 131] In less playful terms, "You can't say, 'Every day is a wound,' / while bones are being / shattered." [page 137]

Stripped of context, these catchy phrases sound like workshop tips, new-age aphorisms, or advertising taglines. Or tweets, a favorite medium for Kallet. Yet in context, they most resemble prayers of preparation ("let the words of my mouth…") or an athlete's pregame mantra ("watch the ball, follow through…"). They are only beginnings, and with seamless ease and humor, the poem quickly moves out of their generality into livelier language:

If love whispers,

listen. If

love shouts, send

it to its room.

Your body

is love's room.

Listen.

Take dictation.

(From "If Love Whispers," page 137)

The domestic dailiness of what follows the second "if" surprises, waking the reader to the deeper pleasures of embodied listening.

Ars Poetica enters Kallet's poems through narrative means as well, as in "Ode to the Silvery Pillowcase":

Your elegance recalls my

mother, how she shopped thrift

when we were poor, scored our threadbare

Persian rug and had me ink in

the bald spots when I was eight.

I'm still filling in blanks,

aiming to revive what's faded.

In every register, from witty wordplay to lyrical solemnity, Kallet takes seriously the modernist charge to "make it new."

No matter the subject or tone, erotic energy drives Kallet's poems, even the ones that are far from sexual. The capacity for unexpected pleasure marks the arrival of love, an uplifting newness that she never squanders. For Kallet every subject is potentially life-giving, every connection speaks of deeper ones. In "Ode to My Lost Glove," she states a creative challenge—"turn elegies into odes"—then pursues it to the poem's final blessing:

Stray glove-sister,

may you be found by

some shivering soul

scurrying down Clinch,

down

South Gay

toward bright lights,

bold players,

buttery lobbies humming.

Like most blessings, this one imagines a future, a field of possibility in which imagination comes alive and far outshines loss. Under the lights of downtown Knoxville (to join in Kallet's contagious verbal games) mourning becomes electric.

A beloved mentor to scores of writers, Kallet has always been deeply involved in various poetry communities and continues to lead annual workshops at the Virginia Center's residency in Auvillar, France. Throughout this collection, Kallet converses with her poetic predecessors and peers, including Neruda, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Harjo, Clifton, Stafford, Rich, and others, as a way of restoring her faith when poem-making seems impossible. In "Anyone Can," the poet, suffering from tooth pain and writer's worry, ponders a deceased colleague's regimen of writing six lines every day. "They don't have / to be good. Just get out / of your own way."

That rotten year,

in my gums,

in my country's polity.

The oaks drop

gold notes on the lawn.

They don't have to

be pulled.

Six lines.

The page knows

its own gravity.

Trust poetry, Kallet concludes, and language will do its surprising work of revival.

The poems in Even When We Sleep are full of ease and space. But most of all love—of husband, of daily life, and especially of poetry, even in a time that feels spiritually depleted and "unpoetic":

"Oh the fine days

of unspeakable joy."

Hélas, Verlaine, these

unspeakable days

are not carefree.

Tell Rimbaud we're done.

I'm thankful to be cooped

with a good man,

grateful that the blues

have wings.

(From "The Biggest Blue Jay," page 85)

The blues indeed have wings in this collection. And Kallet never overplays. Practiced and sure-handed, she is comfortable with less—less language, less metaphor, less loss. The result is energetic clarity and a roomy generosity expressed in poems that readers, especially those who are poets, will want to revisit many times:

So wrap yourself in

hope & a mask

and walk—greet

that family at

the end

of the block.

Silky

petals

drop

like divine notes,

& no one

gets

hurt—be

like that,

soft,

kind.

(From "Letters from Earth & Sky," pages 77-78)

Good advice in any historical moment.

Alice Templeton's new poetry collection is The Infinite Field. She is also the author of a critical book on Adrienne Rich's poetics, and scholarly articles on contemporary poetics, cultural criticism, and literary theory. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Calyx, North American Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Point Richmond, California.

— posted February 2025