Jake Adam York is a true Southern Gentleman, and his poems are products of his gentility, his demeanor, his wisdom, his manners. And they are mannered, aren't they? Extraordinarily civil, regimented in their diction, these poems tell their hard truths gently. To paraphrase the author, their lungs are full of lullabies. Even when (especially when?) they sing of desolations.
Yeah, I'll say it: reading Jake Adam York is like drinking the smoothest of Bourbons. There's deep comfort in his words, and a hand at the ready to tip more whiskey in your waning glass. "Old as you were when you died / I climb into the range that swallowed you, / kicking through your lizards, / the thrasher’s dig, quail-call / and snow-capped sparrows / to find you reaching out..." What careful, metered articulations he draws in his work. What sincerity. Jake Adam York’s poems don't lie. Ever.
Thanks, Jake.
***
Letter to a Friend
To N., from Denver
Friend, I’ve read the letter’s vanishing,
displaced by e-mails, text-messages,
tweets, and indeed, the largest thump
the mailman leaves me
is always the Wednesday circulars
proposing full-priced meats
as sales, though I leaf through every one
hoping that an envelope
may fall, as I scan my inboxes
for the occasional name of someone
I’d like to buy a beer, the one message
in a month that doesn’t mean
more work, so it’s good to hear from you,
to receive such tidings, and I hope
this finds you well, wherever you are.
June is closing here,
and the locusts no one should have planted
are at last in full leaf, including
the one outside my study window, finally
clouding away the heat
so it’s possible to linger in the empty house
and hold a sentence on the tongue
like a taste of scotch you breathe over
until it opens its story of home
and you believe, you truly believe
you can see some Scottish glen,
the small town where anyone could tell you
that shirt isn’t doing anything
for your complexion, though
they’re kind enough to let you stand
as the breeze offers clues of branchwater
sweetened by limestone’s kiss,
hectares of barley ready to graduate
from the lectures of the sun, you
can almost taste the place itself
and so for a minute
are a citizen of this little town.
More and more, the house
is like that, a hideaway that keeps unfolding
into itself and so gets bigger
each minute, until Sarah comes home
and it contracts again, with all
its conversations, like this one we’re having,
however protracted,
like all letters, exchanges offered in comfort,
no need to rush. Tomorrow
or tomorrow, when Sarah leaves, again
this letter’s here, and I return
to this place where I imagine we’re sharing
a dram or a beer or a cup of tea
and working through some idea
of what it means
to know each other, how Glissant says
partial harmonies arise everywhere
and converge toward a generalized disharmony,
meaning there is no
one tone or center, so everything’s like
an Ornette Coleman album, everyone
trying to balance one vamp against the next,
and the rare chorus involves
as much divergence as convergence, one
horn angling off in another direction,
or those Don Cherry sets from cafés in France,
the intros all in English,
the music in some other language altogether,
or the brilliant negotiations
in Mingus’s “Folk Forms I” from the Live
at Antibes album,
a phrase proposed and repeated back
and built up until they’ve found
a way of playing off one another
that says something
about what it means for everyone to be
in the same place in the same time
in a way that no one has to be silent
in order to listen.
So Glissant says we renounce the indivisible
and learn a new way of approaching
the world and this really is how each day is
here, the real letters
arriving from every quarter and everything
falling not exactly into place
but into places, so when I read your letter
I am here, where you
have found me, but also there, and sometimes
so vividly there you have to be here,
too, to keep everything in balance,
so while you are reading this,
again the sun rolls iron-bright against
the cobalt of the Colorado sky
even as the night’s cool still circulates
in all the rooms so you
won’t get hot until the sun’s about ready
to set, I am back in Alabama, maybe,
lying in the field my great-grandfather
terraced seven decades ago
where now only moonlight gathers
and wait for the dark to deepen
and the stars to double, because memory
is like this, not a book
or even a room, but like the night sky,
each point with its own space,
its own system and maybe planets even,
some older than others,
drawn together in a story so they’re all
happening at once, or I am
eating breakfast again on the Plaza
in Kansas City, my grits
and grillades, after a weekend
of barbecue and barbecue, maybe
better pictured miles south, and maybe
you are here too somewhere
or we are both back in Denver,
drawn taut and also frayed
by this relation, and maybe we are both
caught in that moment
at the convenience store when we
come up short for the Gatorade
and the granola bar and the dude behind us
kicks in the fifty cents
and says What’re brothers for? or we
are in Atlanta at dinner where someone’s
talking about how the moons
of your fingernails could be
taken as a measure of race and they look
at mine and say You sure
you’re all white? You know how this is,
whoever you are,
you’re also the character in the story
someone else has in mind, and so,
you’re always two or three or more
different people, which is why,
friend, though I can’t remember right now
where you’re writing me from
or even where we met, I guess it doesn’t matter,
because when you’re quiet
and anonymous, I imagine you
are the part of me that imagines me
in a photograph or a kind of movie,
that watches me do
everything I do, that sends me a drink
from the other side of the bar
so I know I’ve been seen or a letter
from the other side
of the country, say L.A. or Ithaca
or New Orleans, that lets me know
I’m also there, the story of me
having brought me there,
invited and so invented into a room
where the light’s strange enough
to be peaceful, compendious,
and we can settle back
into some talk someone else might
overhear and repeat inexactly,
creating yet other versions of ourselves
that stay there
in some conversation neither of us
will remember or forget, one
we might even imagine when everything
goes quiet and these letters
fold in on themselves again,
into everything. Then, friend,
wherever you are, you are also here,
wherever this is,
and you don’t recognize anyone
but the bartender is leaning over
and putting the full glass on the napkin,
from your friend.
***
Gambel Rose
after William Gambel, ornithologist, naturalist, doctor — 1823-1849
Old as you were when you died
I climb into the range that swallowed you,
kicking through your lizards,
the thrasher’s dig, quail-call
and snow-capped sparrows
to find you reaching out
in the one deep-lobed oak
the Rockies know, the tree
that returns your reach
by taking in and giving off
all it can, grasping Turbinella,
Chinkapin, Mohr,
the Harvard, the Arizona, the Gray,
the one fiber that ties them all
the thousand miles on to the sea.
On one rare leaf
your ten fingers reach
to every point on the compass rose,
and I wish I had your maps
to know the proper turn,
what each direction means,
which stream to pan for your bones.
Your chickadee leads on
into cold and snow,
and I see your passing through.
I’ll be slow following, far behind
with nothing left to name
except this place where I turn back,
which I name for you.
***
Somniloquy
What I say dreaming
drifts out the window,
collects itself
beneath the hedge.
Accent, inflection
go out walking,
a stop in each Broadway bar
where what I say
buys drinks and everywhere
tells my I love you
to someone new.
What I say
is having fun
in the porn arcade,
the techno clubs,
beneath the bridge,
this echo that says
I’m there,
evidence coalescing
in some unknown listen
till someone says
they saw me last night
and I am left
to wonder them
outside my building,
three-story stilts
or tall ladder catching moon,
and someone else asks
who’s that girl I was with
or why I hate them,
till I see myself
split at intersections
walking four routes, more,
through the town, a pollen
drifting for fertile ears,
while suggestion’s children
crowd beneath my window,
notepads open,
lungs full of lullabies.
***
About the Poet:
Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems—Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the Elixir Press Prize in Poetry, A Murmuration of Starlings (2008, Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition and the 2008 Colorado Book Award, and Persons Unknown (2010, Southern Illinois University Press)—and a work of literary history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (2005, Routledge). Originally from Alabama, he now lives in Denver where he is an associate professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver. He edits Copper Nickel with his students and colleagues and serves as a contributing editor for Shenandoah.
On the identity of The Nepotist:
One version of me imagines The Nepotist is me, and that I'm waking up and editing in my sleep. Another version knows it's someone else and that, when the Foetry.com was torching everyone, I had a conversation about this sort of thing with someone I know who is not me, but that version of me doesn't remember who I had the conversation with. A third version of me begins to speculate and creates a list of candidates, based on visible contacts: John Gallaher, G. C. Waldrep, Aaron Anstett, Kevin Prufer, a sentient Facebook cyborg, Richard Greenfield. A fourth version believe that for The Nepotist to maintain the secret, he or she will have to publish him- or herself eventually and the answer will lie among the included, which again, leaves open the possibility that The Nepotist is me.
