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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Death and Donald Revell

(MUSIC PLAYING)

CURTIS FOX: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, Death and Donald Revell. In 2008, Poetry magazine published a poem by Donald Revell called simply and ominously, “Death.” With a title like that, you would think it's going to be heavy going and dark, you know, like death. But listen to how it begins.

DONALD REVELL: “Death calls my dog by the wrong name.”

CURTIS FOX: Death got his dog's name wrong. How scary is that? And then... 

DONALD REVELL: “A little man, when I was small, Death grew / Beside me, always taller, but always / Confused as I have almost never been.”

CURTIS FOX: No Grim Reaper here. Death in this poem is kind of a big brother who never leaves you alone. The poem caught the eye of Craig Morgan Teicher, and he has written a poem guide for it in the Learning Lab on our website. Craig is a poet and essayist, and he joins us to guide us through Revell's reading of this very, very unusual poem. Craig, what can you tell us about Donald Revell that will help in our understanding of this poem? I know that he's a translator as well as a poet, and that he's also a practicing Christian, but I don't know much more than that. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. I, I mean, Revell is, I think, one of the few poets of faith. I mean, he's a, he's a religious poet who is as much a religious poet as he is a poet in the tradition of late 20th-century experimental American poetry. Those two things are equally true about him. And in a way, they've become more true, both of them, about him as he's aged. 

CURTIS FOX: So, he's gotten more Christian the older he's gotten.

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: And I would say more experimental. He's also one of the few poets that, that I can think of who can really write a celebratory poem. 

CURTIS FOX: And in, in your piece, you said it was a happy, he could write happy poems. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. And I, and I very much consider this one of them. 

CURTIS FOX: When we were discussing doing this, you said you loved this poem. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Oh, I do. 

CURTIS FOX: So, briefly, without getting into it because we haven't heard it yet, but tell us why you love this poem. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Well, I mean, you know, any poem called “Death” is, is going to catch my eye just because... 

CURTIS FOX: Yeah. It's going to go right at it, isn't it? 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. And it's just, I don't know, I, I think grief and loss and finding ways of mediating them and describing them are two of the central reasons for poetry to exist. And so, just the title grabbed me. And then, I, I mean I remember reading it in, in Poetry, and I was already a fan of Revell's work, but I read that poem and I just thought, wow, this is the best and strangest poem about death I've ever read. 

CURTIS FOX: Well, we're going to go through the poem bit by bit. And just a quick programming note for listeners. We've gotten a couple of emails complaining when we break up a poem and comment on it between stanzas, and that's, that's fair enough. But normally we don't break into them, but for longer poems like this one, we do now and then. And in this case, if you can read and listen to the poem without interruption on our website, you just type in Donald Revell's name and it will pop up. Anyway, know, we do like to get comments, even critical ones like that. So, keep them coming. Craig, let's turn to the poem. What can you tell us briefly to sort of set it up in our brains? What are we going to hear? 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Well, we're going to hear a very unusual narration of a kind of a lifelong encounter with a personified version of death. And rather than, as you say, being a Grim Reaper, he's a companion, a shadow, a version of the self, I think, more than a brother. 

CURTIS FOX: Here's how Donald Revell introduced the poem when we recorded him reading it in 2008. 

DONALD REVELL: This is a poem that arose in the days after my mother passed away. And in those days, what I found myself missing most keenly and immediately was my mother's unique vocabulary. For the sake of this poem, the word “hooey,” which meant anything nonsensical or beneath our notice. 

CURTIS FOX: OK. Let's hear the first stanza of the poem. Here's Donald Revell reading “Death.”

DONALD REVELL:

(READS EXCERPT)

Death calls my dog by the wrong name.

A little man when I was small, Death grew / Beside me, always taller, but always / Confused as I have almost never been.”

CURTIS FOX: No Grim Reaper here. Death in this poem is kind of a big brother who never leaves you alone. The poem caught the eye of Craig Morgan Teicher, and he has written a poem guide for it in the Learning Lab on our website. Craig is a poet and essayist, and he joins us to guide us through Revell's reading of this very, very unusual poem. Craig, what can you tell us about Donald Revell that will help in our understanding of this poem? I know that he's a translator as well as a poet, and that he's also a practicing Christian, but I don't know much more than that. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. I, I mean, Revell is, I think, one of the few poets of faith. I mean, he's a, he's a religious poet who is as much a religious poet as he is a poet in the tradition of late 20th-century experimental American poetry. Those two things are equally true about him. And in a way, they've become more true, both of them, about him as he's aged. 

CURTIS FOX: So, he's gotten more Christian the older he's gotten.

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: And I would say more experimental. He's also one of the few poets that, that I can think of who can really write a celebratory poem. 

CURTIS FOX: And in, in your piece, you said it was a happy, he could write happy poems. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. And I, and I very much consider this one of them. 

CURTIS FOX: When we were discussing doing this, you said you loved this poem. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Oh, I do. 

CURTIS FOX: So, briefly, without getting into it because we haven't heard it yet, but tell us why you love this poem. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Well, I mean, you know, any poem called “Death” is, is going to catch my eye just because... 

CURTIS FOX: Yeah. It's going to go right at it, isn't it? 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. And it's just, I don't know, I, I think grief and loss and finding ways of mediating them and describing them are two of the central reasons for poetry to exist. And so, just the title grabbed me. And then, I, I mean I remember reading it in, in Poetry, and I was already a fan of Revell's work, but I read that poem and I just thought, wow, this is the best and strangest poem about death I've ever read. 

CURTIS FOX: Well, we're going to go through the poem bit by bit. And just a quick programming note for listeners. We've gotten a couple of emails complaining when we break up a poem and comment on it between stanzas, and that's, that's fair enough. But normally we don't break into them, but for longer poems like this one, we do now and then. And in this case, if you can read and listen to the poem without interruption on our website, you just type in Donald Revell's name and it will pop up. Anyway, know, we do like to get comments, even critical ones like that. So, keep them coming. Craig, let's turn to the poem. What can you tell us briefly to sort of set it up in our brains? What are we going to hear? 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Well, we're going to hear a very unusual narration of a kind of a lifelong encounter with a personified version of death. And rather than, as you say, being a Grim Reaper, he's a companion, a shadow, a version of the self, I think, more than a brother. 

CURTIS FOX: Here's how Donald Revell introduced the poem when we recorded him reading it in 2008. 

DONALD REVELL: This is a poem that arose in the days after my mother passed away. And in those days, what I found myself missing most keenly and immediately was my mother's unique vocabulary. For the sake of this poem, the word “hooey,” which meant anything nonsensical or beneath our notice. 

CURTIS FOX: OK. Let's hear the first stanza of the poem. Here's Donald Revell reading “Death.”

DONALD REVELL:

(READS EXCERPT)

Death calls my dog by the wrong name.

A little man when I was small, Death grew

Beside me, always taller, but always

Confused as I have almost never been.

Confusion, like the heart, gets left behind

Early by a boy, abandoned the very moment

Futurity with her bare arms comes a-waltzing

Down the fire escapes to take his hand.

CURTIS FOX: So, like you said, Death turns into a character, Craig, and, and is sort of a doppelganger, a version of the self, as you said, who has always been there. But why is Death confused and why has the poet almost never been confused? That's confusing to me. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Well, it's a doppelganger, but it's also, it's kind of like Peter Pan and his shadow or something, where ultimately Peter Pan has to grow up. And maybe sometimes the shadow is ahead of him. Sometimes he's ahead of the shadow. And I think Death is confused because Death can't actually do what it's meant to do until the end of a life, right? 

CURTIS FOX: Right. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: The speaker's looking around and saying, I want to do this, I want to do that. You know, there's all this exciting stuff in the world. 

CURTIS FOX: Yeah. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: And Death is like, wait, but aren't I supposed to make you die? You know? (CURTIS FOX LAUGHS) So, I think that the speaker never being confused is about the speaker acknowledging his own vitality. 

CURTIS FOX: And that vitality has an erotic bent to it. There's this wonderful image of futurity with her bare arms coming a waltzing down the fire escapes to take his hand. That's some sort of erotic adventure that’s suggested there. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. And it's sort of a, a very quick narration of adolescence in a way. 

CURTIS FOX: And he grew up in the Bronx where there are lots of fire escapes. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: And he's a poet like that too, where you, you're going to find his own history, kind of secretly embedded in the background of the poem, where if you didn't know that he'd grown up there, that you wouldn't realize that was sort of autobiographical. 

CURTIS FOX: So, that explains the confusion, but what about “Confusion, like the heart, gets left behind /Early by a boy.”

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Well. I, you know, I think, I mean, there's something in there about masculinity and about how we grow up and forget the world of emotion and feeling being all around us. You know, as we grow older, we become more contained in ourselves, our memories, our consciousness. 

CURTIS FOX: And chasing, chasing girls for boys. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: And, and chasing ambition and chasing goals, and chasing our own memories. 

CURTIS FOX: So, the poem goes on with the speaker chatting kind of flirtatiously with Death. 

DONALD REVELL:

(READS EXCERPT)

"Death," I said, "if your eyes were green

I would eat them."

For what are days but the furnace of an eye?

If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul,

I would rebuild it:

Green inside of green, ringed round by green.

There'd be nothing but new flowers anymore.

Absolute Christmas.

"Death," I said, "I know someone, a woman,

Who sank her teeth into the moon."

CURTIS FOX: That's a fun passage, actually. The sinking your teeth into the moon is, is, is funny and, and charming and, but help us make sense. What's he up to in this passage? 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Well, this is, it's interesting because in his reading of the poem, this is the first place where he, his voice moves up above somberness a little bit. Hmm. This part is, on the one hand here about flirting with Death and looking Death in the, in the eye as it were. 

CURTIS FOX: So, that, that line—“For what are days but the furnace of an eye?”—that's an incredible line to begin with. But it seems to be vaulting us beyond time and space. It's saying there, there's something out of an illusion about time itself. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: I mean, I, I think he's always gesturing toward a kind of visionary relationship to life where you can either take life literally or you can experience it with your imagination or, or some combination of both. So, the eye is kind of the sensory world, you know, I see it. And so, I believe it's there. And the furnace is sort of the imaginary world, which is, you know, I can layer on top of what I see, what I believe, what I feel, what I imagine. 

CURTIS FOX: You know, he spells eye, E-Y-E, but I also think there might be a pun in there, a, a furnace of an eye of, of a self. But what are days, but the furnace of the self. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: And it's a, I mean, it's a sort of a popular one in poems. You know, of course, he's also talking about mortality. So, the days are when the self is slowly worn away, burned up. 

DONALD REVELL:

(READS EXCERPT)

For what are space and time but the inventions

Of sorrowing men? The soul goes faster than light.

Eating the moon alive, it leaves space and time behind.

The soul is forgiveness because it knows forgiveness.

And the knowledge is whirligig.

Whirligig taught me to live outwardly.

Shoe shop. . . pizza parlor. . . surgical appliances. . .

All left behind me with the hooey.

My soul is my home.

An old star hounded by old starlight.

CURTIS FOX: There's a lot going on in that stanza, Craig. And, and you point out in your poem guide that soul for revival really means soul in the Christian sense. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: It's the Christian sense, and it's the Emersonian sense, you know, the over-soul, the essence. So, it's, it's the mortal soul, the thing that goes on afterward, but it's also the distillation of the essence that, you know, in this sort of portal for living people into the visionary. So, the, the poem is also essayistic. Time is only going to pass for you to the extent that you let it or to the extent that you cut yourself off from your kind of visionary existence. And so, then you have the soul going faster than light and eating the moon alive, leaving space and time behind. My favorite word in this poem is whirligig. 

DONALD REVELL: “The soul is forgiveness because it knows forgiveness. / And the knowledge is whirligig.”

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Such a strange word. 

CURTIS FOX: Meaning constantly changing. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yes. It's, it's what he's advocating for, right? He's advocating for a sense of oneself as not someone who lives a linear life that ends in death, but as somebody who is constantly changing. And yeah, it's going to move on. 

DONALD REVELL: “Whirligig taught me to live outwardly. / Shoe shop. . . pizza parlor. . . surgical appliances. . .” 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: He's just quoting from the signs on these stores. 

CURTIS FOX: I imagined him walking in the Bronx. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: If he stops believing that the knowledge is changing, Death will be less confused. Death is all about finality, all about definitiveness. You know, the story ends... 

DONALD REVELL:

(READS EXCERPT)

"Death, I ask you, whose only story

Is the end of the story, right from the start,

How is it I remember everything

That never happened and almost nothing that did?

Was I ever born?"

CURTIS FOX: He seems to be having fun with death here. Death's only story is the end of the story. And the speaker has his limited memory and his ample imagination. He's almost mocking death. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: He doesn't think of death as an enemy here. He thinks of death as someone with whom he's partnering on a kind of education. The self has to learn about endings from death, and death has to learn about life from the self. And then when the two are done learning, that's kind of the end of life and the end of a poem. 

CURTIS FOX: And then the poem takes a darker turn. 

DONALD REVELL:

(READS EXCERPT)

I think of the suicides, all of them thriving,

Many of them painting beautiful pictures.

I think of boys and girls murdered

In their first beauty, now with children of their own.

And I have a church in my mind, set cruelly ablaze,

And then the explosion of happy souls

Into the greeny, frozen Christmas Eve air:

Another good Christmas, a white choir.

CURTIS FOX: Now, I'm actually troubled by this stanza, which is probably the most Christian part of this poem, because correct me if I'm wrong here, but Death seems to be a release for the suicides and the murdered children and the people burned to death in a church. Kind of a happy release into something heavenly. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. But also, I think the imagination enables them to be reborn. I think it's the most extraordinary moment of the poem. It's really where he's having a vision in which the most tragic of sufferers is reborn and redeemed. And, and I think the thing about this poem and what makes it not exclusively a Christian poem is that he's proposing at some level, or at least, we can take away from it that Heaven is the imagination, right? I mean, that it's, it's an imaginative realm accessible to all of us. Now, if we share his Christian beliefs and take it more literally than maybe it's a, it's a location to which one can go. But I think in this part of the poem, for me at least, Heaven becomes the imaginative space in which you can imagine, quote all of them thriving. 

CURTIS FOX: Now, I have to say, that's, that's the part of the poem I just don't emotionally buy into it. To me, to me it seems like wishful thinking. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: But it is. I don't know. But how? I don't know. Wishing is, wishing is a big part of what poets do. It is wishful thinking. And, and of course, it's, it's the saddest part of the poem because, well, I mean, it's the most tense part of the poem because, of course, you can't bring these people back to life. You can't give them what they never had. And, and that's what makes the poem so sad. But also, it would be much worse if you couldn't even imagine them having those things. And I mean, and the capacity to imagine anything, which I think is almost always tinged with some sadness is maybe our compensation for everything and certainly for Death. 

CURTIS FOX: Let's hear it. Let's hear how the poem ends. 

DONALD REVELL:

(READS EXCERPT)

Beside each other still,

My Death and I are a magical hermit.

Dear Mother, I miss you.

Dear reader, your eyes are now green,

Green as they used to be, before I was born.

CURTIS FOX: As a, as a wonderful and, and in Death and the, and the, and the poet are together as a magical hermit, he says. And he draws his dead mother and us readers together in a kind of, kind of communion. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah. It's quite extraordinary. He's, I mean, you know, I was talking before about how really Death and, and the speaker of this poem have to come together over the course of a life. And have to kind of get each other, understand each other. And I think here's where that happens. They get each other by now. And so, he equates Death and the self. They're one thing. And in the same way he equates the mother and the reader, because the mother and the reader are both the distant inaccessible addressees of the poem. They are the same as far as the poem is concerned. They are the person to whom the poem is spoken that can't be seen, can't be touched. Because in the one case of course, the mother is dead and the other case the reader is anonymous and on the other side of a piece of paper. And so, we end up being in part the thing that is grieved because we're, we're across this distance that can't be crossed. And it's tragic. And it's also very beautiful because we can get this close, we can be addressed by this poem. And, and if we read it and read it deeply, we come back toward its speaker. 

CURTIS FOX: You know, it occurs to me listening to you, that every poet, every major poet especially, has a very distinct attitude toward death. For Sylvia Plath, death is kind of a demon lover that she quotes. For Philip Larkin, death is, is the ultimate unspeakable dread. What's the attitude toward death in this poem that he brings? 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Well, it's I mean, it's a, it's a Christian one. I think it's a rebirth. It, it is a release, as you say. But it's also, he's struggling in, in his faith between whether he believes more in, in being a poet or being a Christian. You know, because I think also death is the spur that makes poetry happen. It's also a poem where he's trying to accept death, the death of his mother and, of course, his own in the future. And he's trying to find language that will help him not to be afraid. 

CURTIS FOX: And to help us as readers, not to be afraid as well. And does he succeed for you? 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: More than, than anybody else, I think, any other poet. I mean, you know, the thing about Larkin is Larkin is just utterly literal. He's just terrified. 

CURTIS FOX: He's totally terrified. (LAUGHS) 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Larkin is always fighting his considerable imaginative powers. I mean, those powers are in constant combat with his considerable skepticism about anything being transcendent at all. 

CURTIS FOX: Yeah. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: And I think for Revell, he's a lot more drawn, in a way that is childlike, to transcendence. He wants to believe it, you know? He doesn't always. There's a struggle here. But he, he's certainly rooting for the transcendent end of things. 

CURTIS FOX: Craig, thanks so much. 

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER: Yeah, it's a pleasure. 

CURTIS FOX: Craig Morgan Teicher's poem guide to “Death” by Donald Revell is in the Learning Lab section of poetryfoundation.org. Do let us know what you think of this podcast. Email us, [email protected], or post about the podcast on social media. It helps get the word out. You can link to this episode on SoundCloud and you can subscribe to it in the iTunes store. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet for Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.