Matthew Minicucci and Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Alan May: 00:04

Welcome to The Beat. Today, we’ll hear Matthew Minicucci read three of his poems: “On Camping;” “On Conversations;” and “On the Time It Takes to Fire Thirty Rounds from an AR-15.” He’ll follow by reading two poems by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Song” and “Brightness to the North.”

Matthew Minicucci: 00:30

Hi, my name is Matt Minicucci, and I'm fortunate enough today to be here, reading a few poems from my newest collection, Dual, which came out October twenty twenty-three from Acre Books, at the University of Cincinnati. Dual does a lot of things, but its primary goal is to think about the grammatical number of the same name, which we no longer have in English, but is related to ancient languages, specifically, in this book, ancient Greek. You think about languages, you think about the singular and the plural, one and many, but for many ancient languages, including ancient Greek, there was the dual, things that come in pairs, things that are inexorably connected, and so this book is really thinking about pairs, natural pairs, and the five sections are really trying to examine those pairs. The three poems I'm going to read for you today come from one of the middle sections of the book called "Confessions," and interested in what the relationship is between what is confessed, and, perhaps, what is true. Thank you for listening.

"On Camping"

For each person I’ve said I love you to, the lie was always there but wasn’t understood until some later date. Dormant, perhaps; some recessive gene that finally finds a part in this stage production. Sudden context, like reading the Iliad and realizing sure, there’s anger, but before that there’s just a lot of camping. And what strikes me most is the scepter of Apollo slowly slipping out of Chryses’s hands as he loses everything in the sounding sea; black ships. Or how he, like any other father, invokes revenge not as a single stroke but a thousand bites. Smintheus, the literal mouse god, or maybe just some flea that won’t leave me. You need to understand that there’s this particular tree, hemlock or poplar, at this particular campsite where she told me all of this; lectured through the long line of her lips like ships parted and imparted. That love was a word that could be pushed like pumice stone in a glass of water: light, and porous, and impossibly afloat.

"On Conversations"

There was a moment I realized prayer is just a conversation with who you’d rather be. In this same way, confession builds a narrative in what should be a poem. But who am I to judge? Who am I to hold your cheek, that jawbone, in a way that resembles justice or war, because they follow in sequence like schoolchildren hopping in each other’s snowy footprints. I am something of an expert on the thing not said. I excel at the implied expectation, this vast disappointment. You met me at a strange time in my life: all relish and old boots; a hat that never leaves the bookshelf. I wonder who we’re talking to in the night? Do the stars know they sit like impossible children in the distance? So quiet except for a twinkle here, thermonuclear explosion there. Emptiness filled with metallic sounds and deadly radiation. But what isn’t, you know? When I was a boy, I prayed on one knee because I always thought myself a knight: armored, and armed and long and, of course, cold.

This next poem I began in twenty eighteen, and I have, sadly had reason and cause to add to it over the years. It's titled "On the Time It Takes to Fire Thirty Rounds from an AR-15" and it begins with a quote from George Herbert's "Easter Wings" --For if I imp my wing on thine, Affliction shall advance the flight in me.”

One hundred and sixty-five wingbeats from a ruby-throated hummingbird. Nearly six hundred from that same hummingbird in front of a perched female. Two hundred and seventy from a ladybug, or thirty less from a monarch butterfly. Only fifteen from a swallowtail butterfly, loping when compared to other insects, but it gets the job done. Five hundred and forty beats from a bumblebee. Almost one thousand from an ordinary housefly. An incredible eighteen hundred from a mosquito creating that ubiquitous buzz, but glacial compared to a midge at more than three thousand wing beats or the ivory-billed woodpecker, which is recorded at more than eight beats per second, so twenty-four, give or take, per two-point-uncertain-decimal seconds, repeating. Fifty-one for a bat at dusk, of course, it’s dusk here and the truth is I began writing this poem the last time that this happened. And when I say this, that unspecific demonstrative pronoun that points so carelessly at the ladybug crawling along my hand or the butterfly on our porch, it’s because I can’t bring myself to say what else this stands for. Because it’s dusk and night comes with wings, or cape; simple shroud or sickly pall that seems to swallow all of these things.

The Beat was kind enough to let me read a couple of poems from a famous poet, to share with you all, and the first person I thought of, and the first person I will always think of, is my mentor and friend the late Brigit Kelly. I met Brigit when I was twenty-seven and just a very, very new poet, and I feel like she was one of the finest poets of the twentieth century, and, perhaps I saying that because she was my teacher and my friend, but I also think that it's true, so, um, please enjoy these poems from Brigit Kelly.

"Song"

Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree. All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing the song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then they lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly the way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away besides which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined. The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school and then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything. The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks. The head called to the body. The body to the head. They missed each other. The missing grew large between them, until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until the drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills. Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder, sang long and low until the morning light came up over the school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped.... The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after the night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit. The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night she heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke to give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats. She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily that he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn, and the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called and called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling Like the feeling of stones gouging the soft undersides of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body by the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles at the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take these things away so that the girl would not see them. They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat. They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke.... But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job, whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark. What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them, long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen, pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song, the low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call. Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

"Brightness from the North"

Bright shapes in the dark garden, the gardenless stretch of old yard, sweetened now by the half-light as if by burning flowers. Overture. First gesture. But not even that, the pause before the gesture, the window frame composing the space, so it seems as if time has stopped, as if this half-dark, this winter grass, plated with frost, these unseen silent birds might stay forever. It seems as if this might be what forever is, the presence of time overriding the body of time, the fullness of time not a moment but a being, watchful and unguarded, unguarded and gravely watched this garden—the black fir with its long aristocratic broken branches, The cluster of three tiny tipped arborvitae damp as sea sponges, the ghostly sycamore shedding Its skin, and the sweet row of yews along the walk Into which people throw their glittering trash... And who, when the light rises, will come up the walk? We can say no one will come--the day will be empty because you are no longer in it. We can say the things of the day do not fill it. We can say the eye is not filled by seeing nor silenced by blinding. We can say, we can say your body appeared on the table, and swiftly disappeared—do not let the sun go down on the dead figure, do not fix the dead figure in mind, the false face, remember as you should remember, by heart, in the garden's dark chamber—and the ground took the body and the ground was pleased. And oh, now, the busy light comes too quickly, the gray grass unrolling, birds mewling in the trees, dawn raising the walls of day, the rooms the we live in, our murals, pictures of gardens and residing deities, things painted on plaster to keep the dying company, a toppled jar, a narrow bird, an ornamental tree with no name, and crouched beneath the stone table, the lion with four heads, who looks this morning as he rises from the shadows, like a creature who carries on his back the flat and shining earth.

Alan May: 16:32

You just heard Matthew Minicucci read his poems “On Camping,” “On Conversations,” and “On the Time It Takes to Fire Thirty Rounds from an AR-15.” He followed with two poems by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Song,” the title poem from her 1995 book, and “Brightness to the North,” from The Orchard, released in 2004. Kelly’s poems were recorded with permission from Boa Editions. Matthew Minicucci has published four collections of poetry. His most recent book, Dual, was published in 2023 by Acre Books. His poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review. He’s won the Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award, the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Parks Service, and the James Merrill House, among others. Matthew Minicucci teaches at the University of Alabama as an Assistant Professor in the Blount Scholars Program.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly was born in nineteen fifty-one in Palo Alto, California. Her first book, To the Place of Trumpets, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was published in nineteen eighty-seven. Her poems appeared in The Best American Poetry series, The Nation, The Yale Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and others. She won awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, the Whiting Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. Her third book, The Orchard, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Kelly taught at the University of California-Irvine, Purdue University, Warren Wilson College, and the University of Illinois. She died in October of twenty sixteen, in Urbana. You can find books by Matthew Minicucci and Brigit Pegeen Kelly in our online catalog. Also, look for links in the show notes. Please join us next time for The Beat.