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Editor’s Note: The arts are a significant thread in the fabric of Rockland County. They inspire, enrich, and chronicle our lives. They also play a role in our economic well-being; theater, writing, dance, crafts draw us to spaces. They invite strangers to share in our bounty. They are an indelible contribution. Welcome again, Christine Potter, a poet, to RCBJ.
Conversational Magic: Julie Agoos
By Christine Potter
A few weeks ago, I had the joy of joining an event Rockland County’s poet laureate, Juan Pablo Mobili, compared to Woodstock—funny, but not entirely a joke. It was an SRO poetry reading called Having Come This Far, organized by Juan, librarian John Aiello, and The Pearl River Library. “SRO” and “poetry reading” are not terms that come up in the same sentence often! The poetry scene in this county is alive and very well.
Anyway, that reading was where I met Nyack’s Julie Agoos, a poet highly deserving of the crowd who came out that night to hear her (along with Tim Doyle, Maureen Henry, Wally Glickman, Brian Kates, and yeah, me). Julie taught for decades at Brooklyn College/CUNY in their poetry MFA program and has also been a member of the creative writing faculty at Princeton. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Above the Land, one of her four books. Her poems can seem plain-spoken, almost conversational at times, but they skip along above the conversation and land the reader somewhere outside of time. There is magic in them.
When I asked her about how she started writing, she sent me a wonderful email full of family stories about advertising jingles and childhood ambition. I loved it because it was so like my own childhood; I did ad jingle parodies also. Here’s what she said: “The other night at dinner with my nephew, my brother and I were remembering an advertising jingle we composed for the classic Brylcreem hair styling cream in about 1964, when I was 8. We set it to the tune of ‘On the Street Where You Live,’ and it began, ‘People stop and stare/at my greasy hair…’ and then the first chorus soared: ‘And oh, that towering feeling!/ Just to know you won’t stick to the ceiling!’ It was an instant classic in our family.”
Friends, this is how poets start out! Julie also says that “nonsense and making up plays” had a lot to do with her career. Me too, me too! Here’s a poem from her 2008 book Property. It’s got a magical, out-of-time feel to it. It’s also a ghost story, a very compact one. While the poem is certainly not conventionally funny, its odd but somehow not out-of-place diction and imagery are droll. I really like it. Plus, local shout-out!
Reading of Nyack
The key was in a planter by the door
in a handmade envelope with my name on it,
so I let myself in, sat down amid her linens
and her books, the drying flowers;
and set my book down and my pen beside the vase,
the small black diary she kept
lying facedown on the desk that had been
her mother’s; and I confess, I opened it.
And had been reading for about an hour
when a blur of motion in the hedge
where more species summered than I could observe
caused me to look out: why, there she was, again –
dressed in the selfsame uniform
(beekeeper’s hat, fishing vest, hunting gloves ), and
tethered to a thick extension cord
that hung down through the white oaks
as if it fell directly from the sun,
and in her hands the heavy shears with which
(as quickly as I might have read the words )
she brought the hedge down all around;
as if at some electrical command
as unrestrained in power as death had made her.
So: a ghost—connected to/powered by the sky? And the key in a “handmade envelope with my name on it.” That’s almost like one of Edward Gorey’s faux-Victorian picture books. The somewhat antique diction: “I must confess” and the “blur of motion in the hedge where more species summered than I could observe.” Plus this ghost apparently hunts, fishes, and keeps bees! Who is this apparition? Who is this not-unexpected visitor? And what is there not to love about this poem?
Agoos says the way an overheard conversation sounds can set off poetry in her: “For me a poem often starts with a sensation of rhythm/dance, or a phrase whose grammar catches at me, or a kind of transition or tension between rhetorical tones I get absorbed in, as if I’d just heard someone speaking and want that voice with all its qualities of pace and emphasis and sound and volume to continue.” She told me about reading a book on capitalism while watching the demolition of a house next door to hers during the pandemic. A “transition or a tension.” Maybe cognitive dissonance? Tension often sets off poems in my world, too. It sparks the imaginative leaps. Here’s another poem of hers that plays with diction and an outside-of-time world. It first ran in The New Yorker, and is included in her 2015 book, Echo System.
Cold War Free Radio
I say Wilcox
On your side of the pond
The deer have free run of the park
Or that’s the way it was then what
Not so anymore dear Burke that fence
Runs now like a net
The deer fight tooth and claw
To get over over here
Ha ha the skies extending what are they still
Grey and wet and green cool grass
Still crowded in fog as was or have such
Things then heated up there since
By God things are stark yes enough
And ever in contrast to what they were last
As no one knows better of course than yourself of which
To whom we oversold the old script once
Come come there must be at least some proxy law
To thaw one’s ancient cargo in as then I’d bet
It’s a mindwarp in truth in fact at best
That nothing remains of that time at all
But the station clock and the chalice cross
And the pith helmet and the oxygen tank
And the jelly spoon and the box of milk
And the yellow grey mustard tin
And the musterfields croaking with frogs, ha ha . . .
I love this poem. The title says “Cold War” and “Free Radio” both, so Radio Free Europe? Ah, but this is a poetry, not an equation. Radio Free Europe was indeed founded during the Cold War—1949—but hmm, the dialogue between the two speakers in here… Okay, they are certainly male, but I hear their speech patterns as a bit earlier in time than that. It’s a dialogue, and I love the way the two voices harrumph at each other about the deer and fences and the weather. And I adore the lines all twisty-turned with “of which” and “to whom.” Maybe it’s a pair of British gents who were already old in the late forties? Or maybe I’m just being too darn literal.
I especially smiled at “Come come there must be at least some proxy law. To thaw one’s ancient cargo in as then I’d bet.” And what is “the old script,” anyway? It doesn’t matter. This is how old guys harrumph.
But then, in the final quatrain, that list of Great-War-sounding objects, and for a few lines the diction is a little more traditionally poetic—but then, in comes that last line: “And the musterfields croaking with frogs, ha ha . . .” Musterfields are places where soldiers gather and train. So now there’s nothing there but frogs. The war is over. And the final “ha-ha.” And in the list, an oxygen tank, which brings to mind the WWI use of gas on the battlefields.
Great poem. And sure, droll—but as much as Wilcox and Burke are ha-ha-ing at one another, it’s more than a little dark.
Julie Agoos’s time in the classroom has informed her poetry. She loves kid energy, and credits it with bringing her out of herself. She says “I feel like my students have taught me pretty much everything I’ve learned about language in my adult life, and the last 30 years at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York especially have been a total dream job.” That’s a strong statement coming from someone whose poems are so much about spoken language, its rhythms and quirks. And here, too, I relate. I taught high school. My kids did the same for me.
Agoos writes daily and revises ruthlessly. She felt Nyack’s pull from the middle of the Tappan Zee Bridge, she says, on one of her many trips back and forth from NYC to New England, her first home. And she met a man from Nyack and married him. I swear, this county has its nets out for poets!
Here’s one more poem by her, because I love Nova Scotia, and because brutal deportations are again in the headlines. During the eighteen century Acadian Clearances, England kicked French settlers out of the Canadian Maritimes and parts of Maine. Maybe you knew that. But unless you had a good history teacher or studied it in college, you might not have. And of course, during the Vietnam War, some American pacifists fled to Canada.
READING OF NOVA SCOTIA
I.
We hear that in the wood the draft resisters
live on in a fear like anger.
To the East the rocks the sea combats
break into thrones. All else
is as calm as the mornings are
when the light is just risen to reveal the coast,
as if the ship had finally come,
the long fog been taken up –
Then the news. Then a walk
to the headland where two bays divorce
and a lifeguard stands in rain however long
the tourists come to comb for shells,
read aloud, bird watch – anything
but think more on that war, or this one.
II.
The locals and the tourists look the same – damp!
As when I bent over the shells
along the beach and saw the stones
had taken on their coloring –
So many were there, equally lost!
Turn a stone and find a hoard of shells.
The word the guidebooks use for what the French
endured three times in less than fifty years
there is: expulsion. Twice they returned. — Acadie,
crest of a beauty no one owns:
when I expel my breath my life goes on.
Gorgeous images and look at the work the work “divorce” does in this poem! Also the word “thrones.” I admire the first stanza in the poem’s second section, especially the line “So many were there, equally lost!” This is a fine poem about exile. It’s from Julie’s book Property.
If you’re shopping locally this year (and I hope you are), all four of Julie Agoos’s books are available at Big Red Books in Nyack.
And speaking of that, a quick plug: my own new chapbook Before The World Was on Fire is also for sale at Big Red Books! And I have a full-length collection called Why I Don’t Take Xanax® coming out this winter. Fear not; it’s the opposite of an anti-pharma screed. To demonstrate, here’s its title poem. Have a magical holiday season and I’ll see you in the New Year.
Why I Don’t Take Xanax®
Because the sky outside right now is both
grey and violet and enough leaves are gone
that I can finally see it from my desk. Because
pills only teach you how to swallow. Because
it’s late but not yet evening. Because my cat has
jumped off my desk and I can type without her
tail on the keyboard. Because there are too many
rattling bottles in the world and I do not want
another one, or anyone’s permission to own it.
Because it’s gotten dark but the sky is still violet.
Because my worries are two screech owls, talking
back and forth, somewhere up the valley. Because
screech owls are quite small and almost invisible
by day, with dappled grey feathers like tree bark.
Because 2 AM is relative and it’s not 2 AM yet.
Because 2 AM passes like a stranger whistling
on his way home. Because I never wanted my
heart to walk a straight line in this magic world.
