The Best in Poetry

 Field is a literary magazine of "contemporary poetry and poetics" published by Oberlin College Press. Editors David Young and David Walker have done an impressive job of assembling some of our finest poets and commentators for this particular issue.

The magazine opens with a delightful surprise for admirers of Philip Levine's work.  "Philip Levine: A Field Symposium" gathers a representative, chronological sampling of Levine's poetry and follows each one with what amounts to a combination explication/valentine by some talented writers and thinkers.  The poems, for those familiar with Levine's work, are "To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop," "Animals Are Passing From Our Lives," "They Feed They Lion," "Let Me Begin Again," "The Fox," "The Two," and "Call It Music."

Kathy Fagan, a former student of Levine's, recalls how he would shake poems over his desk "and listen for the ‘real stuff,' the good stuff, for any stuff to fall out of them."  Plenty of stuff falls out of Levine's poems here (as well as the rest of the magazine). The stuff I would want to gather up and reread on a daily basis constitutes his poem "The Two," an unsentimental look at two working people who might or might not be lovers.  ("‘And the lovers?' you ask.  I wrote nothing about lovers.")  It's a textbook example for aspiring writers of how to convey true feeling without crossing over into the sentimental.

Tom Sleigh tells us about the "two kinds of people in this world: those who really believe that Phil Levine is old, and those of us who know better." He goes on to say that "in [Levine's] life and work, he refuses to be a victim of what you might call ‘senior porn.'"  This refers to the propensity of aging poets to become sagacious and abstract by dispensing wisdom to the young.  Sleigh believes that "the older Phil gets in calendar time, the younger he gets in poetry time."  Of "The Two," he writes, "It's a poem that I don't entirely understand, which is why I keep reading it."  I think that's a refreshingly honest observation.  Good poems might not be fully clear to us, but the fact that we keep being drawn back to them is a testament to their accomplishment.

Following the symposium, Field treats us to another surprise--two new Philip Levine poems, "A Wall in Naples and Nothing More" and "Scissors," a prose poem.  Fagan and Sleigh are right:  These are the works of a youthful spirit, from which plenty spills out for us to love.

Shirley Kaufman, an award-winning poet out of Seattle and San Francisco and now living in Jerusalem, is a major talent.  She balances a poet's economy of words with a maximum amount of thought and feeling.  Her style is unmistakable, her voice one of a kind.  The poem "Care" begins:

If I spoke to you now
something I'd say
formed out of words
you could recognize
what would you hear?

"Care" is about the way we communicate, the gulf that lies between what we say and how it is interpreted.

Saying and hearing
live in two separate
worlds and we can't
always bring them
together.

It's a quiet poem, as deceptively simple as can be, and yet it is complex in its vision and leaves us with no answers.

Waves of meaning
lap over each other
and leave only froth
on the shore.

Her second poem in the magazine, "Pushing," is about time and aging and the way we stave off both.

You keep me
young I tell you
the way I do always
though it's not at all true
so I go on squirting
and spraying
putting my strawberry
lipstick on

Thematically, "pushing" reminds me of Bruce Springsteen's lyrics for "Atlantic City."  We make the best of the inevitable, "pushing," as Kaufman writes,

my body up the hill
the way I keep
scrubbing pots
with steel wool after
the pad is worn out.

If Philip Levine and Shirley Kaufman were all Field had to offer, it would be enough.  But it offers us 29 more poets, 44 more poems to relish.

Of these, I noted two standouts.