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Poems - First Drafts - Bio - Mini-Review - Reviews - Essay - Interviews

Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems—Murder Ballads (2005), selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge's Prize, A Murmuration of Starlings, selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2008), and Persons Unknown, an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2010)&8212;as well as a work of literary history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, published by Routledge in 2005.

His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Diagram, Octopus, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals.

York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students and colleagues.

A fifth-generation Alabamian, York was raised in and around Gadsden, Alabama, the son of a steel-worker and a history teacher. In 1994, he took at BA in English from Auburn University. He continued on to Cornell University, where he earned an MA in English (1997), an MFA in Creative Writing (1997), and a PhD in English (2000) with emphases in American Poetry, history of poetry, and Creative Writing.

In 2011, York was Richard L. Thomas Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. In 2011 and 2012, he will be a Visiting Faculty Fellow at Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, where he will be working on a book about images and ideas of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary art, music, and literature.

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Poems - First Drafts - Bio - Mini-Review - Reviews - Essay - Interviews

A "Mini-Review" of Jake Adam York’s “Darkly” and “Narcissus Incomparabilis” by Zach Macholz, Contributing Editor 

Jake Adam York’s work is perhaps most associated with its historical subject matter: the Civil Rights era and in particular the stories of black men, women, and children who were the victims of racial violence in the Deep South and who became martyrs of that era.  Poems in his first two collections elegize these martyrs without succumbing to the kind of sentimentality one might expect from a lesser poet writing about such tragic history. 

The poems in his first two collections avoid sentimentality by refusing to rely on the historical events themselves or the readers’ familiarity with the events to create meaning. Instead, his poems push beyond the events themselves and become, in the words of Adrian Matejka, “part excavation and part reclamation.[1]”  This week’s two featured poems from Persons Unknown (Southern Illinois University Press Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2010)—“Narcissus Incomparabilis,” and “Darkly,”—continue in this tradition of excavation and reclamation, and do so in lines that are quite short, and help the poem lean away from the narrative and more toward the meditative and lyrical.

“Darkly,” examines the murder of Willie Edwards in 1957, but there are precious few details or lines that deal with the murder itself.  To be sure, there are a few lines and sentences that deal directly with details from the story, like: “So I look for that place in the air // where they held a gun / on Willie Edwards // and told him he could jump” or “when five men bent / in the diner’s greasy light— / …and planned to kill a man / they’d never seen,” but this poem is not a narrative of the event itself.  For the most part, this poem focuses on the landscape, on the natural and man-made features the combine to set the scene for the event of Edwards’ murder. Consider the opening sentences:

 

The moss never falls. 

However gray,

 

it hangs like shirts

left to weather and rag

 

over the road

and the dead-end rail

 

and in all the branches

from there to the shore

 

and then as far upriver

as you can see.

 

Here it’s only open water,

empty sky,

 

two ends of road no one uses,

landfill on one side, thicket

 

on the other,

the story of a bridge between.

The natural surroundings are foreboding: gray moss hanging from all of the branches “as far as you can see,” and “open water,” and “an empty sky,” combined to create a scene that is desolate and eerie.  There’s also a suggestion of the place’s distance and seclusion from civilization in “two ends of a road no one uses, / landfill on one side, thicket // on the other, / the story of a bridge between.” Clearly, this is a place largely forgotten by most people, a place abandoned and left to crumble, a place where there will be no passers-by. 

            Like many of York’s poems, this poem attempts to answer a difficult ethical question. In this case, the question is something like: How do we think about difficult and bloody chapters in our history in a way that is honest and helps us to understand them, rather than treating them reductively, or even dismissing them altogether?  The poem seems to answer this question in the lines: “To condemn is easy, you said, / to condemn is to turn away // where no one will ever understand.”  York’s poems do not condemn, and do not turn away, but rather, step boldly into some of our most shameful historical moments, and take a long, hard look around to see what they can see, and to report it back to the reader in a way that does justice to the moment.  In doing so, these poems elegize the martyrs, and also acknowledge the complexities of the moment (literally the moment of their deaths, but also the historical moment of the period) in a way that avoids the pitfalls of reductive thinking it would be easy for a poet to fall into when dealing with such a vile subject.  In the case of Willie Edwards’ murder, the moment itself is gone in the past, but as York’s poem proves, the desire to understand that moment is not gone, and neither is our ability to inhabit that moment through poetry. 

“Narcissus incomparabilis,” is a poem that deals not with a particular historical moment, but rather, with a decidedly lyrical one.  Narcissus incomparabilis is the nonesuch daffodil, a flower common almost nowhere in the United States except the Deep South.  The poem, written in the second person, reads as a list or series of instructions to the daffodil: “Lean down, lean down / while the light’s abducted,” and “Keep your own eye still / so no one catches you.”  This voice continues throughout the poem.  The poem reads essentially as a letter or list of instructions the daffodil at first, but when read and re-read, the poem seems less instructive than pleading.  The poem entreats the daffodil—symbolic of, and perhaps a metaphor for, the South—to

 

Lean down now,

creel of starlight and moon,

and reflect again

your inherited light. 

While these lines, in a vacuum, might seem instructive, consider the final two sentences of the poem:

 

Lean down now,

as memory hardens

its incomparable light.

Don’t let the sun

set on you again.

In the context of the body of York’s work—three books which he essentially views as pieces of one larger project—this seems to be a poem that goes beyond a particular historical event or moment and attempts instead to address the South, it’s relationship with the darker chapters of its history, and the manner in which Southern people ought to critically consider their region’s past. 

            Though they seem at first formally distinct from one another, both “Darkly,” and “Narcissus Incomparabilis,” share an important formal commonality: both use short lines, though for different reasons.  In “Narcissus Incomparabilis,” the short lines accentuate the notion that the poem is a plea or a prayer, being said gently, let out one breath at a time.  “Lean down now,” is a line repeated throughout the poem, and a line which, if it were longer, would lose a great deal of its power.  “Lean down now,” is a gentle command that must be followed by a pause, the kind of pause a comma cannot create without an accompanying line break.  To have written this poem in longer lines would have lessened the effect of this particular line’s repetition, and also detracted from the almost cryptic voice directing the daffodil.  In “Darkly,” there are also short lines, broken into couplets that move the poem forward steadily, in a measured way that contrasts the growing tension and eerie anticipation of something dark lurking in the surroundings being described. 

According to the author himself, the poems in this collection try “to feel the breath go out of things and then to invite the breath back in, so the poems can talk back.[2]”  Indeed, both of these poems breathe, and command the reader to breathe with them, in a way that makes me happy to lend my lungs to the cause. 

[1] http://word.emerson.edu/ploughshares/2011/04/01/poetry-dialogue-jake-adam-york/

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 Poems - First Drafts - Bio - Mini-Review - Reviews - Essay - Interviews

Craig Beaven reviews Persons Unknown by Jake Adam York from diode

Jake Adam York’s two previous books attempt to reinvigorate the idea of “Southern Poetry” or “Southern Writing.” With a few contemporaries—most noticeably Joshua Poteat and Brian Barker—he works through tropes of Southern landscape, the meaning of the south, its legacy especially concerning race, its literary traditions (with plenty of references to Faulkner, Dave Smith, et al.), but also the place and extent of lyricism in contemporary American poetry. The guiding light for these poets is probably the late Larry Levis, whose gothic style and extreme empathy and sympathy with the downtrodden and forgotten seems to direct or influence the direction these poets head off in, on their own explorations. Certainly his elegiac, Romantic, southern-gothic poems are the closest model for these writers, and they must take in his influence, even as they work through and extend it.

York’s latest book continues his exploration of the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, and while many of the poems are rooted in historical content, and are often about figures from history who were killed because of their race, the book is also an exploration of the poetic lyric and the poetic line (especially as it relates to the sentence). What is compelling about this book is not just its relation to historical events or facts, but also the power of York’s poetic ability, and his quest to extend lyricism to an almost extreme degree.

What strikes one most is the book’s outright beauty, and the poet’s determination to render all things in a brightly lit, still, eternal poetic landscape. This is an aesthetic quality but one that plays into the content as well—in these long, present tense sentences, stories from history continue to happen. This presents a kind of rhetoric about history, the legacy of racism in America, and how the present moment is informed by these shared tragedies.

But even as a rhetoric or “point” about American history, it’s the poetry of the poems that wins out. “Shore” is a representative piece from the collection. The poem attempts to bridge history—and anonymity—by recounting the death of Aaron Lee and Joseph Thomas. The context for the piece is a bit of literal sleuthing and researching in libraries and in the “field” as it were—

in a library’s dim, old bulbs’
dirty light scumming the emulsions

oil, that chemical sprawl,
that rainbow

the dead always leave behind.

Aaron Lee, you are a forgotten mile
in New Orleans East,

an alleyway of scrapyards and boxcars
and derelict homes, trailer parks
now laced as curtains
where the flood has grazed,

a place even maps might forget.

The poem laments the typical map of American consciousness, one that could forget the lives of two men who played an important role in civil rights. The extended lyric moment begins in the detritus and material evidence of history, but goes on to imagine Aaron Lee as a place that is a barometer—like curtains stained by floodwater—of destruction and loss. It is a complex image, conflating person with a landscape, recalling natural disasters like Katrina, and conjuring, without ever having to say it, the “tides of time” and the years as a passing current. Persons Unknown is almost solely comprised of such techniques and moments.

Some of the most interesting gestures in the book come when the author/speaker places himself within these historic locales, usually as an outsider wandering through a neighborhood, getting odd looks from the residents; and often as an apparition in glass, a reflection in a car’s chrome and a restaurant’s window. The poet becomes the invisible ferryman through these landscapes—there but not there, like the ghosts and memories he describes.

The longest poem in the book, “And Ever,” alerts the reader with an epigraph that the poem will be about (or for?) Medgar Evers. More than half the poems begin with either an epigraph (e.g. “for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959, recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959”) or with a setting (“Selma” or “Oxford”). These epigraphs do much of the work of situating us in a narrative or landscape, and free up the poet from having to present a lot of back-story or scene-setting. “And Ever” never has to bother with the history, but can present what’s at stake in a civil rights narrative through a variety of lyric and poetic devices. The poem begins with light,

You rise
to watch the leaves

breathe light to their edges
and burn,

drawing day from night
to wake the birds.

Are we the “you,” or is Evers, or is York leaving it ambiguous so that we may more deeply identify with the historical figure? The meditation follows the element of light through several sections; it becomes the glow of a television broadcasting JFK, the beauty of a firefly, and the ominous foreboding of headlights sweeping into a driveway. The poem is intensely lyric; York releases himself from having to stay too close to the “real” story and allows for poetry to emerge. The epigraph functions as background, and the poet invents and riffs away from the literal source. The poems in Persons Unknown hope to rescue the lost stories and figures by placing them into meaningful, beautiful poetic landscapes, and to sidestep mere history writing or exposition.

Will Persons Unknown—written by a white author, about African-American history—provoke any sort of response from literary theorists or even from mainstream media, the way a book like The Confessions of Nat Turner did in the 1960’s? It seems unlikely; the poems here are almost always ultimately about poetry, about memory, about history and history making, and about telling and speech; in fact, many of the poems take up the nature of language, speaking, and sound as their content—who is speaking, who gets heard, and who is listening to the poem? They are rarely—if ever—“about” race. If they spend time recalling black history, they eulogize and lament a world of injustice and ignorance, without ever crossing some sort of line that would make a reader squirm. York’s poems are, for lack of a better word, sad. They stand before these tragedies and mourn, knowing that to tell the stories is a kind of victory or duty, but that it will never be enough to change history or humanity. As the book acknowledges, as “protest” or as “monuments” the poems are as inadequate as any monument or gravestone. But as poems they succeed in amazing ways.  

Click here to read a review of Persons Unknown at Southern Literary Review

Click here to read "One of Us Is Already Gone," a review of Persons Unknown at The Rumpus

Click here to read Jake Adam York's Persons Unknown reviewed by Blackbird

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 Poems - First Drafts - Bio - Mini-Review - Reviews - Essay - Interviews

Click here to "An Unfinished Sentence," an essay by Jake Adam York at Pilot Light

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Poems - First Drafts - Bio - Mini-Review - Reviews - Essay - Interviews 

An Interview with Jake Adam York by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: I really like the short couplets you utilize in "Darkly." Typically, I'm a bigger fan of the long line, but here the short line paces the poem really well and makes much of the thick language and the movement of the poem itself from one image and subject matter to the next more accessible than a longer line might. Is accessibility something you had in mind when putting this poem together? Do you think much of the tradition of the form you use when you write a poem. Couplets, of course, are a form in and of themselves...