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188 Lucifer Matches”: Epistles and Other Conversations (The Epistolary Lyric) Jane Satterfield As I write this week, there is almost too much to report. Close to home, the local drama that’s played out to vast acclaim on HBO has left two dozen murdered on Baltimore’s gritty streets. Car bombs go off daily in Baghdad; senators debate a proposed “troop surge”; the Iraqis themselves criticize the delayed security plan; still no solution—political, humanitarian—to the bloodshed in Darfur. Meanwhile, other inconvenient truths come home to roost: there’s ice storms, gale storms, tornadoes, and floods—unexpected weather conditions appear across the globe. The loop of the updated banner on flat screen TVs, desktops, BlackBerry devices, and cellular phones is a snake biting its tail. The world too much with us, indeed. In the face of headline news, the poet’s sometimes seems a tiny voice, and the lyric itself may seem irrelevant, indulgent, inadequate—an idiot’s tale, signifying nothing. “Poor words,” wrote the anonymous journalist huddled in a cellar as Berlin fell into the hands of the Russian army, a reflection of deepest regret at the horrors her writing was made to contain.1 And yet, day after day, as the atrocities of war swirled around the beleaguered city and its citizens, she returned to the page. Her account—chronicle and elegy—attests to the redemptive power of language: at one point, she transcribes from memory a couplet from Horace onto her building’s damaged wall, an aide-memoire from her past’s more civilized terrain. The gestures of the lyric, as Plath put it, watching her infant dance in the dark of an icy winter night, are “warm and human”; their light “Bleeding and peeling / Through the black amnesias of heaven.”2 In his essay “The Government of the Tongue,” Nobel Prize–winning poet Seamus Heaney addresses this very issue—the “great paradox of “ )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 “lucifer matches” 189 poetry and the imaginative arts in general.” “Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught,” he writes, “they are practically useless.” After all, as Heaney reminds readers, the “efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank.” And yet, he continues, “in another sense it is unlimited. It is like the writing in sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.” Heaney refers, of course, to a singular moment in the Gospel of John, where Christ’s intervention saves an adulteress . Although the content of the invisible script is never revealed, John’s account makes it clear that its impact is immediate: the crowd, dispatched by guilty conscience, is soon dispersed; the woman has narrowly escaped being stoned. The social order has been momentarily disrupted: something has happened—there has been a response. Like that compelling and mysterious script, poetry, in Heaney’s view, is “arbitrary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase. It does not say to the accusing crowd or to the helpless accused, ‘Now a solution will take place,’ it does not propose to be instrumental or effective. Instead, in the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.”3 I discovered this essay in the days following the televised annunciation of the first Gulf War when the image of the Baghdad skyline in predawn light, crossed with the green-flared tracing of missiles, played and replayed in mind and on-screen. The strangeness of the moment—that narrowing of time where something happening at a distance was brought unbearably near—commanded attention. The unsettling effect reminded me of Wilfred Owen’s letters from the western front, where the details of daily life—lovingly rendered—stand in stark contrast to the brutalities of war. At one moment, Owen describes the difficulties of gathering necessary equipment; in the next, he observes, “We were stranded in a certain town . . . the place was like a bit of Blighty, all hung with English greetings and Miseltoe [sic].”4 Poetic insight often arises from crises of life or craft, out of the invisible script of events that pass unnoticed at first, their influence more obvious in retrospect. At the time, I thought there was no seismic shift in my approach to craft, though retrospect might suggest otherwise...

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