Yesterday, as usual, my Facebook newsfeed was crowned with the day’s birthday exchanges and Facebook’s reminders to add my wishes to the walls of three or four friends. But just below that cluster, I saw another post, remembering Craig Arnold. Yesterday was the 44th anniversary of his birth. All day, I saw the quiet memorials and made my own, remembering too my uncle who would have turned 51 last week…
Birthdays, anniversaries of deaths—our calendars call us back each year, and we can look at the month and see those numbers floating toward us, sometimes anticipating the day with joy, at others with sadness, sometimes closing the calendar, sometimes even looking away until the day, or something else, surprises us.
I was talking about Craig just a few weeks ago, with D. A. Powell, after his reading at Emory University.
Powell had just placed his papers in Emory’s archives, under the care of Kevin Young, the curator of poetry manuscripts, who hosted the reading. Powell is a wonderful reader (a video is embedded below). He knows the rhythm of each poem so surely; each pause was excruciatingly, deliberately significant, prismatizing the double- and even triple-senses of phrases. And he’s a master of the threshold, announcing by another, expert pause when he’s about to enter a poem and when he’s about to depart.
This was never more clear, and never more dramatic, than when, toward the end of the reading (this runs from 40:00 to 42:20 in the YouTube embed below), Powell turned his reading copy over and recited Robert Duncan’s “Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing.” Powell’s introduction to the poem dedicated its recitation, acknowledging a debt to Duncan, but the care with which he recited the poem—drawing Duncan’s breath through his own, Duncan’s voice through his own—was a clearer and more potent dedication.
Powell’s recitation, especially this moment, reminded me of Craig—an anticipatory anniversary, an accidental anniversary. Craig had that capacity, to enter a poem suddenly, deliberately, fully, inhabiting its breath with his breath, having left the page on the podium or, at times, on the floor. He’d recite his own poems, he’d say them, perform them.
But, too, when you were with him, at times, another’s poem would rise through the throat, and I remember, in Powell’s reading, a moment, driving across Colorado or Wyoming with Craig, when he began reciting another poem of Duncan’s, so, in that room, Powell’s breath inside Duncan’s breath inside Powell’s, was Craig’s breath in Duncan’s in Powell’s—and so a call not just to memory but to feel the breath of others in my own, and to feel the love they gave their breaths.
Recite, one of my dictionaries suggests, comes from the Latin re (again) + citare (to summon). To summon again, not just the words, but the breath—this calling creates some of the most haunting, some of the most fulsome and wonderful readings, whether or not the poet is away from the page or working from it. When the invitation is right—to return to a thread from a few weeks back—it doesn’t seem to matter how long the reading is; one wonders how one would tell, with so much time compressed in the lungs, with so much time abridged in the anniversary.
Today is yesterday. Is last year. And last year is now.