Fred Muratori is an established and respected North American poet whose poetry remains, however, not very well known. In a strange sense, this odd oversight is serendipitous, as one of the most pressing themes in his poetry tends to be the tension between the effort to establish things – whether it be sense, self, significance, or situation – and what remains unrealised in this, both in the sense of what passes beyond our comprehension and consolidation and in terms of what does not come to fruition, what establishment fails to deliver. Although he has been publishing his work since 1975, with over 175 poems published in some 120 literary journals, Muratori’s verse remains obscure, unheard of by most, perhaps partly because he is the author of only one two published volumes, a limited edition chapbook called
The Possible, released in 1988, and one book of poems now 14 years old,
Despite Repeated Warnings. A librarian and bibliographer at Cornell University, Muratori is a poet that falls behind the curtain of the academy as an institution of knowledge production, operating not from the lectern but instead out of the place in which the knowledge of the academy resides, is resourced and made possible, namely, the archive. His poems feel inflected with this central and yet concealed positionality. The possibility of what can be done or said, what can be referenced or restored to mind as is promised by the archive, is always set off against the irrevocability of what has been done and said, what has been inscripted in a certain way in the archive or lost to it completely, in Muratori's world and his verse tirelessly investigates the ways in which all directions in our lives are so freighted by this selective, uncompromising history, a history which does not force fate upon things per se but which haloes all attempts at escape with the desperation and beauty of the certitude of their own inevitable foreclosure.
Muratori has not only worked as a bibliographer but as a factory worker, a retailer and a teacher before that – all three of which seem to leak into his poetry as well, not least in the capacity for his language to cross so seamlessly between three distinct modes of discourse: the instructional mode, the worked assemblage, and the sales pitch. His sensibility draws together a scholar’s sober, cloistered speculations, a laborer's keenly practical eye for construction and measurement and a trader's insider familiarity with the nature of desire, turned about and put to use in his work to interrogate the promise of the cure all solution and the language of the quick sell that looms so large in American life.
On the back cover of
Despite Repeated Warnings, Muratori’s work is described, in part, as defining "a place where nature, faith and love fail to console". This most certainly cuts to the core of a certain despondency this poetry evinces like soft black rain, a particular emotional resignation in a world where the systems we depend become truly known to us only in the jaws of their very breakdown. Indeed, in response to this disintegration, it may almost seem like Muratori’s writing retreats to a refuge in stoicism as it describes ideals unravelling, prospects unfolding into blank rangeless terminations, people discovering that that they will never be anything other than what they so hopelessly are. However, if one looks closer, it becomes clear that stoicism is less an element of the poetry than the fatigue and the insight into relentlessness that draws one to hold that problematic position in the first place, as if one could become hermetic enough toward the world to ever withstand it. Muratori inserts himself within and
before that desire to be closed, to bear the world in silent isolation, to be stoic, and in inventing so many scenarios in which something is undercut, something becomes lost, or something arrives ruined, despite stoicism, he pulls apart the possibility of a stoic response altogether, forcing us back out into the actual trauma of irrevocability and what it means to continue in the face of things that cannot be taken back, including the ways we acted ourselves. His words can almost seem like ice they’re so immaculate and frozen but they burn and the searing sensation the coldness causes is the point.
As a poet, I find Muratori to be of such interest to me because his work is so intrepidly wedded to a certain refusal to think any loss or pain without the presence or sensitivity that remains behind to feel it; the absence or obliteration is always lensed through the resolute remainder, the scattered but irrefutable sentience – which is us – that comes to know it is so transparently there through the violence and incompleteness it is forced to repeatedly experience. In my personal favourite poem of his, 'On the Third Day', he says, "Regret was not invented or designed from need. It / was crosshatched in our molecules, embedded in soil, / waiting for attention." This notion that the irrevocable is cellular, environmental and awaiting cognition – not the simple effect of the mind’s awareness but the precondition for it – is vital for, in this statement, we have one of the key notions of his work: that the way we miswrite and are miswritten into our lives is an
inhabitation constantly structured by its determination in the form of
choice itself so that remorse is the understanding that we have operated inside contingency incorrectly and that this is the very definition of consequence for us all. In this sense, regret was most certainly not invented or designed from need but from
preference, as it is not history alone that ruins us so absolutely but also the history-making process of our meagre freedom-making efforts, that longing to liberate ourselves which binds us up so precisely in the barbed wires of the disaster we’re always trying to abscond from, bringing the futility of our efforts back to our attention in the form of our capacity to try.
It must be added that Muratori’s vision is not fatalistic, however. No, it is far too reconciled to the ruthlessness of how open the universe actually is to simply declare that everything is decided for us. As he notes in his new work,
Nothing in the Dark, a co-optation of the noir form into the structure of the prose poem, as hermetic as one wishes to become, as pure a product of one’s own directedness through the days, like an arrow toward a target, the operations of the unforseen and the unseen traumatically intrude to radicalise you with possibility again and again. He writes:
"I observe, I act, I observe myself acting, I record the observations in something approximating a dream diary. I discover evidence, connections that can't be diagrammed, only assumed from variations in the patterned behaviors of others. Two of Felice's fingernails are chipped. They were not chipped yesterday. Something has happened. Something new has entered the known universe, and once again that universe is open to question."
This observation is critical. Although the ‘I’ of this piece presents itself mechanistically, as a sort of notation device for its own activity, this notation effectively providing the reason it acts at all, to trace its own map, it finds it cannot close itself off enough in this reporting. The universe is open again to question – to interrogation, not registration – in the doubled figure of the two chipped nails that carry information of an event that happened elsewhere, outside the scope of one’s own sentient recordings. The "variations in the patterned behaviors of others", of the "connections that cannot be diagrammed", except to say that they exist and cannot be diagrammed, is what renders meaning meaningful, is what precludes some sort of retreat into a world where – because we have expectations of it in advance – hurt does not have to happen. Something else is always happening somewhere, history is eternally plotting arbitrariness against you and you cannot avoid it. And, despite repeated warnings, it compels us to relent, to become agents in the world, to submit to it and thus become active inside of it for action is always carried out in the shadow of the unavoidable, to hand ourselves over to all this futility in some ruinous but tender way: "The driver, / typical as suicide, is tied to the wheel /and headed for the life / I learn reluctantly to trust." In the midst of this mix of relutance and trust, of destination and the wayward drive toward it, Muratori’s poetry offers up a faint glimmer of elusiveness and ineffability that draws out some prospect of viability within the whole overdetermined, structurally overwhelming, decision driven mess. Even the language of these poems, so ornate and crystalline at points it could almost become chandelier, never neglects the agility words need so direly to express meaning in the face of this interdependence of predetermination and senselessness and that fact – along with the fleetness of his language in terms of its ever-alert arrangement in the text – means that his work is often nothing short of aeronautical, in the strictest sense of the word - each verse an airfoil creating differences in pressure so as to be able to maintain its flight.
Too little attention seems to have been cast Muratori’s way so I give my blog over to his work today. I hope whoever reads this, enjoys him.
***Poems
Richard Oeleze, Die Erwatung 1935-361.from Despite Repeated WarningsCapturesFinally the evening
catches up with me.
I was smug at noon,
thinking I had lost
its scout, my shadow,
through the morning’s
plot of feints
and subtle dodges.
It crept back at one.
It was only having lunch.
By five it slipped ahead
of me, taunting,
and my eyes became
mistrustful as it pooled
in rifts and hollows.
Now the sun is falling
quite perceptibly
and the sky is scarred
with livid contrails.
The hills have lost
themselves within
a single spine, black
against the limit
of this world.
Caught again, as I
always will be,
I fail to discern
my hands and heartbeat
from the night. I only
live one life
but each day something
in it happens,
unrecollectable,
that almost makes me think
I almost got away.
***
Christ Brings Light to the ProvincesLight was all the rage that year
and when he claimed it
the populace fell round itself
concentrically in swoons
and offered him their loyalty,
their sons, their feisty goats.
Tired of stubbing their toes,
of groping for doorknobs in the dark,
they called on him to end them,
imagining the afterlife as advertised.
He only stood there, fragile
as a seahorse tooth, holding
their dogged love like a bag
filled with broken glass.
Then he walked right past them
till he came to the forest
of a nation without eyes or windows.
There, rising up on just one inhalation,
he smiled down benignly on the trees,
then burst the air sharply
like a ruptured hive of livid bees,
shedding scales and ashes
in a blizzard of redress.
***
The Psychiatrist to His Favorite PatientOnce you receive the heavy gloves,
the coat that whispers like a serpent
when you slide your arms along
its inner skin, there is no cause
I can make for you. I just wave
and pack the snow to slippery glass.
When the window skates down sharply
on your hand, breaking no bones
but reminding you that openness
is transient, a placebo for the guilty
then you’ll know the world can’t
love you always, or keep your diaries
secret anymore. I’ll help you find a road
that follows as it leads.
I know the pet names of the pharaohs,
and I know the names you call
your separate fingers, their quiet journeys,
their returns. It’s my job
to say you’re doing fine, keep trying.
It’s my feral pride, my prize deception.
When you listen and take heart, I’ll cast
my bones in random clutters with your own,
I’ll lose myself to you whenever you are lost.
***
The Stoic Tries to HelpI’ve eaten year-old steaks and lived,
forced myself to think
of nothing but infinity
yet kept my brains intact.
And though I’ve lost a score of loves
so deep they twined around
my bones like copper veins, I learned
again to relish sleep
and the American short story.
Don’t ask me how I do it.
There are no charms and aerosols
that I can recommend.
Next time you chase a midnight bus
or a woman who’s fled,
sobbing, from a restaurant you
picked, just look for someone
snickering nearby, his fingers
burning from the cigarette
he thinks he’s tossed away.
***
VITA POETICAThere are words I need.
They are not near men.
-- Charles Simic
Always just you and me, long after
everyone has eaten, after children hear
the whispered
ever afters in their sleep
and lovers part to let their bodies dry
against designer-patterned sheets.
Just you and me, alone, awake
to meter out the lineation of our life
together, the slack and stress of it,
peripheries I barely sense
while you describe, or circumscribe.
There were – are – other men and women,
and other pacts made out of earshot
no less intimate or impossible, no more
desperate than ours, no more removed
from human pulse and commerce.
Sometimes I can’t remember what I am.
The night unfolds me like an unsigned
letter, lets me fall into a world worn
metal-slick and featureless by wind
and constant silence. I need you then
as I would have needed graceful arms
around my waist, a sleepy, reassuring kiss
below my ear, had things been different.
Defined in context by a touch, that life
would also be articulate, but wrong.
***
Despite Repeated WarningsCatalpa trees converse in summer wind.
Imagine that they whisper
hurricaneas leaves display their sequin sides and spin
wildly around, portending violent rain.
Our oldest instincts help enforce their hint:
the street is vacant as a lunar plain.
(Existence would rest lightly on the mind
if every omen were as well-defined.)
No slouch myself, I also run inside
and watch a film about an alien spore
that duplicates the human race, hiding
in basements, slowly taking human form
while people sleep (a kind of homicide
that kills the soul), becoming you before
you are yourself. Mother is not mother.
Each loved one is an odd, familiar other.
The breaking clouds pour out a hard white noise.
Above them, geosynchronous with earth,
a necklace of steel satellites hangs poised
in space. The images they send are worth
a thousand inner jolts: small Moslem boys
caressing automatic rifles, birth
defects near toxic sites – a longer list
would only overstate my gist,
and what good would more overstatement do?
We’ve seen our share of wailing women comb
through rubble for their sons, more than a few
recorded tests of the latest doomsday bomb.
If I’m no longer me, and you’re not you,
what can these signals mean to us, hearts numb
from life lived second-hand, the dreams we keep
as lovers growing monstrous as we sleep.
***
The Real MuseHe hovers at the back door,
biting his cigar, always buttoning,
unbuttoning, his raincoat.
He is nondescript, no long scars,
no fierce recession of the hairline.
When I approach him he acts
as if he owns the place: an impatience
with the lawn, that nailed-down look.
I’ve met his kind before.
The phone calls that precede them
are hysterical, cluttered with loud radios
and voices gathering coherence,
then the dial tone, the quiet.
They never mean me any good.
But now one waits for me again,
shadows darkening above his upper lip
as if the things he’s about to say
were burning their way through.
This time the stories have beginnings
and smell of incense, at times of brandy.
As I fall into his tales’ reach
he frisks me for an inner life,
leaves me wordless, mistaken,
one doorway from the perfect ending.
***
Dreaming of ConnecticutEven forests small as parking lots
are fidgety with game:
quail, pheasant,
the snide, reductive fox.
I could park anywhere. Instead
I stop my car beside a fractured elm.
As is typical of dreams, the street signs
have been switched. They’re written
in an alphabet of pumps and axes.
Just the same, this is home
as a liar might remember it.
I pass the pup tent I was crushed in
when the dying apple tree gave up
its heaviest limb,
and there, next to the house
some friends burned down for fun,
stands the doctor who delivered me,
the little girl he holds at gunpoint
cracking cough drops with her teeth.
Own up, Connecticut.
You were never like that.
You were the birch I stripped of bark,
Thinking
Dead Sea Scrolls, papyrus
of the patriarchs. You were
oak leaves in my shoes, mountain laurel,
hunks of hematite
discovered like doubloons, other kids
with names as long as mine.
Without you, I’d have never known
of Yankees, Charter Oak, what it means
to live so close to Yale and not get in.
I wake up in a room where a radiator
hisses me like Hamlet his mimes.
A change of clothes, a doughnut,
and I’m waiting in the snow for a bus,
its back end trailing gasoline
as an insect trails blood. The driver,
typical as suicide, is tied to the wheel
and headed for the life
I learn reluctantly to trust.
<<<>>>2.poems after 1994On the Third DaySubsidence left the continents, their cooling chimneys
dry and black against the newly-reddened atmosphere.
We have only myths as witnesses, like second minds
that know before we know yet ride our stooping shoulders
down the parrot dark, keeping silent as we strike out
to the left or right, both directions bent for sadness.
Regret was not invented or designed from need. It
was crosshatched in our molecules, embedded in soil,
waiting for attention. Choices, choices. Our hearts swoon
as if from joy or late Cretaceous winds. What can we do
to keep from being inevitable? We can create
the past that would've happened. You remember: sunlight
through the seams and contradictions, a yellow jungle
of geometry beyond the kitchen door, a breathing
sky. Ours, nearly ours. We did insist it in our bones.
***
BirdwatchingBy the fountain people gather to examine it.
Its feathers heighten in the breeze, and the dogwood twig
it perches on sways, but the bird stays, examining
them back. I have never seen such colors says the man
whose dusty hat has blown across canyons and rested
in the shadows of fiery buttes. A woman whose dress
waves smoothly as a field of blue alfalfa before
a hailstorm says, It must be rare because it calms me..
Others nod and hum agreement without meaning to.
Two children, one of whom will see a planet not yet
known to us, run hide-and-seek among their parents' legs
and will not remember this moment, which plays no role
in the shaping of their souls. The bird raises its head
and takes flight, its wake a gold hem on the rolling air.
The people go their ways, bearing a fatal anger.
***
Examined LifeMeditation augurs failure. To huddle inward
means a station missed, cuffs uncaught on thorns intended
to present the rose, Charybdis hidden under ponds
of Monet's lily pads, under love too foolishly
professed. Had the world been cast for our amusement,
our enterprise and lust, we'd never heed our minds,
their interruptive voices like a mother's call to milk
and softened sheets, the bed from which we would not wake.
Our eyes would glide through blurring vistas, purposeful
but willing to be lured if new transgressions meant new
sight. Now every vantage snares us, words set words in chain
reaction through our heads until associations
blunt to proof, intentions dress as acts: a severed life
packed and waiting for two cabs. Configure it this way:
the rain mists lightly on a street, our minds wander.
***
The ObviousKnow the obvious or fear it. Why pretend the air
is empty? Here in our acute democracy each
person occupies a piece, then leaves it for the next,
undiminished or good as new -- or better -- with scents
of soap and lightly sauteed onions. Try striding through
5th Avenue at Christmas time and notice air change
hands, the street become a centipede of opposite
intents, flowing pros and cons in search of an hypothesis.
You might pass the very soul who knows what's innermost
about you -- what you force out of your mind at dawn
or else start work an animal. Look, there goes salvation
in a pair of skintight jeans! You missed it but it was
beautiful, and meant for you, its body heat still hanging
in the waiting space. We take the emptiness for fact,
that flagrant vacuum, so plainly personless, a guise.
***
The AppearancesTime takes shape or seems to only as it disappears:
a tulip lost in fields of matted weeds, something in
the eye that exits only when the weeping starts,
when other, better selves work free of sublimation,
telling us they could have, could have been had we become
them as we'd wished, before the wishes stopped and turned to
day on day on day of movement for the sake of movement,
an army of alternatives dismissed for want of interest.
The layering continues, the coarse protective strata
build until the earth is no more than a muffled
pied-a-terre equipped with beds and mirrors, shades and
dead bolt locks, its clocks all hurrying to start again.
Some people have their memories embossed or bronzed or
published as if true, still fish poured from buckets over
ice for our consumption, so alien we think they move.
***
BachelorsDevoid of daughters here, for each of them is fated
to the tabletop as though to white Moroccan sand
and heads lift not to light but only to shadow,
passing motion just a flicker on the iris
which washes out to rim unfeelingly, mechanical,
the ball-and-socket block-and-tackle clockwork
meshing at a level so interior and unsurmised few
instruments can plumb its measure. Listen flush
with them to no essential music but the brush
of silver knives on china, sighs well-spersed
and nectar slow. Admire linen suits unchinked
by accident or faux pas at the velvet rope. Say
nothing on your way home of the love remaindered,
of air that seems euphoria spread thin enough
to pass for struggle, or for struggle that has ended.
***More of Muratori's poetry can be found
here and
here and
here and
here.
<<<>>>3.from Muratori's new work in progress, Nothing in the Dark, a prose-poem noir:News today that more planets have been discovered. Of course astronomers don't see them as they might gold or turquoise spheres in a telescope's lens, as ringed and polar-capped ball bearings circling orange suns. These planets are no more than infinitesimal but consistent diminishings of invisible light read by state-of-the-art sensors and transmuted to a binary code interpreted wishfully as "planet." My apprehension of the events around me is no more direct, an empiricism of derived and interpreted impulses. I observe, I act, I observe myself acting, I record the observations in something approximating a dream diary. I discover evidence, connections that can't be diagrammed, only assumed from variations in the patterned behaviors of others. Two of Felice's fingernails are chipped. They were not chipped yesterday. Something has happened. Something new has entered the known universe, and once again that universe is open to question.
* Extreme actions can be motivated by nothing stronger than a desire for change. A wife poisons a husband or a husband shoots a wife, and afterwards, in court, will make a point of saying It was nothing personal; I just couldn't live
like that anymore. The human race invents new definitions for
like that every day: I couldn't stand being trapped another minute. I couldn't live knowing that the present was my future. I couldn't go on being the one less loved. I couldn't stand feeling like the center of someone else's universe. Your
like that is probably in there somewhere, growing in the back of your mind right now, like interest on an unwise loan.
* The apartment was empty except for some worn and sagging furniture, a few blurry prints of Impressionist paintings, and an ancient, cabinet-style record player. The man I needed to question had left so quickly that he'd forgotten to turn it off. Amid the record's scratches and pops, I recognized the music: Bill Evans playing "My Foolish Heart" at the Village Vanguard. Sweet, sad, fragile on top, knowing and resilient underneath. It was the song you played for your date once both of you knew this would be the night you'd sleep together for the first time. It was also the song you'd play alone in the middle of the night of the day she told you that it was over. Judging from the open bottle of Jack Daniels on the battered night stand and the overturned shot glass on the carpet, the presence of a single, aluminum frozen dinner tray in the trash, I guessed the latter scenario. Maybe I didn't need to find and interrogate him, after all. Maybe he didn't know anything I hadn't already figured out. I left the apartment with an unsettled feeling, angry at myself for empathizing so readily with a stranger whose only connection to me was a few notes on a piano played decades ago by someone long dead. I walked home in double time, needing a drink, wanting as much as I'd wanted anything to hear that song again from beginning to end.
* My dreams nearly always have endings—clear denouements in which I am either proven to be right or wrong, final moments in which the previous millisecond's surreal mysteries are explained in a flurry of prepositions and pipe smoke. Mundane as it sounds, I dream of my work, of who I am when I am awake, although my dream-self occasionally wears large rubber masks in imitation of wolves or lizards. This morning, for example, just before I woke to the yellow tetrahedron of sun on my bedroom wall, my dream ended with myself and a short, portly Englishman jovially discussing our brilliant solution to the case of the purloined radish. Each of us seemed far too willing to share credit for this little triumph, and had the situation occurred in real life, I would have been troubled. One of us would be hiding something. But no, since the context was completely fanciful, we could be nothing but two thoroughly humble and honest men who breathed water and spoke a language resembling Russian heard through a plastic tube, rewarded enough by the simple fact that we had once more made it through till dawn without sacrificing a single grain of sand.
**More
here and
here and
here.
<<<>>>
