New Poems by Ralph Angel

- By Ata Moharreri

“True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind.
She imagined that she took his remorse in hand and changed
it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all his shame
away and turned it into something useful.”
              -- Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”

Good poems are hard to find. A good poem doesn’t have to be short. It doesn’t have to be loud. Hell, a quiet poem can leave us frozen in the heat of the final moment. I recently read some of Ralph Angel’s newest poems. They were fun. They had something to say. They intensely expressed feelings and ideas by the use of a distinctive style and rhythm. For example, here’s “All Night Long” from his forthcoming book, Your Moon (2013 Green Rose Poetry Prize):

All night long the moon is wandering behind the clouds
and upon the water. All night the flickering

in shop windows across an empty street, in the small
café that won’t open for hours, if at all

today, where fish skins have yet to be swept
from the floors and the air stale

with drink. All night long
the faint outlines of faces you’ve loved

and forgotten, and a bicycle
tied to a tree. A rat plops from a fence

and if you listen carefully you might hear
the first stirrings in the harbor

or the cry of the gulls
and catch yourself mumbling

and not know who in the world
you are talking to.

“All Night Long” uses anaphora. The repeated phrase, “All night,” works a few different ways. It ties images together, creates a rhythm, and introduces an addressee.

Nature images—which ground a reader—and cityscapes are brought together by way of this expression. Tension is created by the juxtaposition of the natural world and the man-made world between the lines.

The recurrence of this phrase also creates a rhythm. It slows down the expression. “All night,” and then “All night long,” gets a one-beat trochee and then a two-beat spondee and then three (with a stress on “long”). A sense of urgency starts to build up each time the phrase comes back into the poem. That kind of repetition creates a form—which you hear—and then shatters it.

The third use of the phrase “All night” introduces a “you,” an addressee. At that point, the utterance travels into the interior of a human self, remembering the “faint outlines of faces you’ve loved/ and forgotten.” Put next to concrete images, such as “a bicycle/ tied to a tree,” the line creates a kind of anxiety.

It’s easy to overlook the little words, such as “if” or “and,” which also work, by way of repetition, to drive home the final idea, releasing tension. The whole poem gets undercut at the end. The drama between the speaker, addressee, nature, man, and the interior world, is elevated with the final meditation: “catch yourself mumbling/ and not know who in the world/ you are talking to.” Damn. The anaphora not only builds a world of images and generates music, it also raises the stakes of poetic expression.

The end of Mr. Angel’s poem hurts,  and intrigues. It’s sympathetic to human nature, which reminds me of another poet, writing all the way on the other side of the country, Franz Wright. In Wright’s new book, F., “Four In the Morning” is the first poem.

Wright ends with this three-line thought: “No one is here./ No one was there/ to be ashamed of me.” Like Angel, this final expression comes after grounding the reader in natural imagery, “Wind from the stars.” There is tension between the world and the self, a drama which gets played out in concrete images next to human utterances.

In The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens wrote, “there are degrees of imagination, as, for example, degrees of vitality and, therefore, of intensity. It is an implication that there are degrees of reality.” Ralph Angel’s poem presents one conception of reality, without asserting it as the sole source of expression for existence. “All Night Long” creates a world and a kind of life worth living, even if doing so publically sets up only one stage in the endless study of existence, the heroic subject of all study.

The poems in Your Moon are very human, readable, and digestible. They are not avant-garde, cryptic, or erudite. To quote Jean Valentine, “Ralph Angel’s poetry is inventive in its language and its look at things; it is free and alive; it is like no one else’s, and it belongs to everyone.” These poems might lead you to others: Cesare Pavese, César Vallejo, Juan Ramón Jiménez, or even Miklós Radnóti.

Angel’s poems travel. They start in one place, emotionally or physically, and then end up elsewhere. Something is at stake, something happens, and the vulnerability of that something evokes a compassionate, human response. I’ll close with another example, a second poem from Your Moon:

Holding You Sober Close to Me

The city’s
behind us. The water’s calm. There are many heads
above the water.

Show me a victim and I’ll show you
a bathroom—a man slathered
in honey, a carpet

of flies.

Orange blossoms
and salt. Even the creepy doorman
tastes the salt

in the air.

If a child’s brought in, well, that’s something
different. We don’t want
our animals

to suffer.
You’re the last person on earth
Prepared for the death

of your parents.