One of the founders of the New Narrative movement in contemporary poetry, Mark Jarman recovers lost storytelling traditions in a poetry that is grounded in specific places (California, Scotland, and rural Kentucky) and specific times (particularly his childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s). With partner Robert McDowell, Jarman was the cofounder of the Reaper, the primary organ of the New Narrative movement. Jarman has often advanced highly polemical arguments for narrative poetry as an antidote to what he sees as exhausted lyric and meditative modes of contemporary verse. But his collections of poems are more convincing arguments for narrative, demonstrating a growing facility with all aspects of the art. However strident the Reaper pronouncements may have been at times, Jarman's poetry is not strictly narrative but combines narrative, lyric, meditative, and dramatic elements with increasing skill.
Born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, on 5 June 1952, to Donald and Bo Dee Jarman, Mark Jarman is the eldest of three children. His father was attending the College of the Bible (now the Lexington Theological Seminary) when Mark was born, and a year later the family moved to Santa Maria, California, where the Reverend Mr. Jarman served the First Christian Church. When Mark was six, the family moved to Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, where his father was pastor at the St. Clair Street Church of Christ as part of the U.S. Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Fraternal Aid to British Churches. In 1961 the family moved to Redondo Beach, California, where the elder Jarman was the minister for the South Bay Christian Church. Mark Jarman's childhood, divided between Scotland and California, became the primary subject of his first full-length collection, North Sea (1978); the struggles with religious faith that he experienced as the son of a minister and grandson of an evangelist are also important subjects, particularly in The Rote Walker (1981); likewise Jarman's adolescence in Redondo Beach provided inspiration for some of his mature poems, such as "The Supremes" and "Cavafy in Redondo," from Far and Away (1985), and the title poem of The Black Riviera (1990).
Though Jarman was only twenty-six when North Sea was published, he had already distinguished himself as a poet. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, he studied with Raymond Carver and the poet George Hitchcock, editor and publisher of the influential little magazine kayak. By 1974, when Jarman received his B.A. in English literature with highest honors, he had also received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for poetry from the San Francisco Foundation and had published an impressive chapbook, Tonight Is the Night of the Prom (1974). At Santa Cruz he also met McDowell, with whom he was to found the Reaper in 1981, and Amy Kane, whom he married on 28 December 1974.
From 1974 to 1976 Jarman attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop as a teaching/writing fellow, studying under Marvin Bell, Donald Justice, Sandra McPherson, Stanley Plumly, and Charles Wright and earning his M.F.A. in poetry. Jarman then taught at Indiana State University, Evansville (now the University of Southern Indiana) from 1976 to 1978, the University of California, Irvine, as a visiting lecturer (1979-1980), and Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky (1980-1983), before settling at Vanderbilt University, where he is a professor of English. In addition to his teaching and editing, Jarman has also received three National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry and a 1991 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. He lives in Nashville,Tennessee, with his wife and their two daughters, Claire Marie and Zoë Anne.
The chapbook Tonight Is the Night of the Prom explores the material
of Jarman's California adolescence. Although Jarman was barely
past adolescence when he wrote the poems, they are remarkably accomplished;
indeed, many of them were published as early as 1972 in magazines such as kayak, Antaeus,
and Poetry.
At once elegiac and tough-minded, the poems explore an adolescence lived
on a "strip of sand littered with strange,/ intolerable acts--trash cans aflame,
/ perversions coming on the tide like grunion" ("Elegy for Redondo Beach"). The speaker laments the loss
of this seamy landscape now that the "city fathers" have "lined the Esplanade
with lamps / to flood the beach with decency." If this apprentice
work seems of a piece with the fashionable surrealism of the 1970s, the surrealism
is suited to the material--the landscape of southern California mirrors
the furtiveness of teenage sexuality, and many of the poems distinguish
themselves from run-of-the-mill verse by their early indications of Jarman's
gift for narrative.
Jarman returns to California and adolescence in
the poems
of his later collections. But first he turns to his childhood in North Sea,
particularly to the years his family spent in the linoleum-factory town of
Kirkcaldy in Scotland. The volume consists primarily of shorter lyrics, and
some of them seem unnecessarily hermetic. Jarman seems to have deliberately
abridged his narrative, perhaps because of his Iowa experience. But
some of the poems show the benefit of his apprenticeship, succeeding beyond
the poems
in the 1974 chapbook. In "My Parents Have Come Home Laughing," the speaker's parents return from a feast
for Robert Burns; their ribaldry about haggis and Burns's "Nine Inch Will
Please a Lady," which might well have been the whole substance for the younger
Jarman, gives way to his tender recollection of a somehow comforting primal
scene:
There are other moving poems about family life in North Sea, such
as "The Crossing," and the love poem "Lullaby for Amy." The latter poem's
refrain, "The earth is a wave that will not set us down," later serves as
the epigraph to Jarman's watershed collection, Far and Away. The increasing maturity
and the unsentimental tenderness of the finest poems in North Sea more than make up for the
occasional emaciated lyric that mars it.
The Rote Walker combines the best strategies of the previous collections and
represents a further advance in Jarman's poetic growth. The subject matter
is fraught with conflict, examining his rejection of rote faith in order to
find poetic faith, more sacred because it is more hard won. The book is framed
by poetic musings about the secular folk song "Greensleeves" and the Christmas
carol with the same tune, "What Child Is This?" In the poem "Greensleeves" the speaker, fooling around
on a piano,
recalls only the melody of the song of the same name:
In "Does the Whale Diminish?"
the speaker questions his father's rejection of the drunk, the wife beater,
the bigot, and the one who "was merely suspicious." But rather than chide
his father, the speaker recognizes that "all of us" are "suspect," that there
is some essential truth in the father's view of him as an "ungrateful son
/ ... lost in impossible poems." The speaker empathizes with the father's difficulty
in deciding. Similarly, the title poem inverts the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed
the first to recite their assignments / for they shall be first to forget";
"The meek do not want it") but ends echoing T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1943): "The end of
the task / is to forget the task." As critic Peter Makuck says, "Buried in
his No he [Jarman] has found a Yes."
In addition to the primary theme of the poet's struggle with the faith of his forebears, The Rote Walker
also contains accomplished poems that are harbingers of Jarman's recent
work. In "Los Angeles" Jarman
returns to his southern California adolescence but
with the distance of maturity and a moral stance that was undeveloped in his
apprentice work. The speaker, a "preacher's kid," recalls an adolescence
devoted to fast cars and "girls with flammable skin," but he realizes he has
rendered the city and his past "out of reach":
Far and Away returns again to the lost landscapes of Jarman's adolescence and
represents a breakthrough in his method and techniques. On the dust jacket,
Jarman characterizes the poems as "experiments with narration and the reconstruction
of experience. Today the part of L.A. where I was a teenager bears little
resemblance to what it was then. And yet my backward look isn't altogether
nostalgic. I have no desire to return to the past, only to recover some lost
people and places." Indeed, the best poems in the volume eschew the nostalgia common to lyric remembrances of things past; Jarman
both trusts the compelling subjects of his narratives and paradoxically maintains
a moral distance from those subjects. Invoking the great poet of memory, in "Cavafy in Redondo" Jarman notes that "Our ruins run back to memory," and
he
recognizes "the magnet of nostalgia." The speaker of the poem
refuses to give in to sentimentality, noting that, like the remembered teenager
on the make, the past can often "flatter, listen / cajole, make little whining
endearments, / plodding ritualistically among landmarks." Similarly, the widely
praised poem "The Supremes"
compares the speaker's nostalgia for his "innocent" teenage lust,
as he watched the black singers on a "portable T.V." at the now defunct "Ball's Market,"
to his nostalgia for the vanished landscape of coastal Los Angeles.
From the perspective of an adult on an airplane "leaving ... for points north
and east," the landscape (and by implication the early Supremes) can "still
look frail and frozen / full of simple sweetness and repetition." But this
is only a trick of perspective: the truth of the story belies the falsifications
of nostalgia. The speaker and his friends who had huddled around
the television "in wet trunks, shivering" were really ignorant "tanned white
boys, / wiping sugar and salt from [their] mouths / and leaning forward to
feel their song." Furthermore, the poems imply, sentimental nostalgia is a tempting
though untenable stance, but neither is it "acceptable / to cough with cold
or shiver with irony / at your own home / or at the amusement of your family"
("Far and Away").
In Far and Away Jarman returns to some of his most powerful subject matter with
a newfound poetic distance, and the extended narratives "A Daily Glory" and "Lost in a Dream" cover new ground in terms of poetic technique.
In these poems Jarman works with longer lines, a change that is important
for his later poetry. In The Black Riviera two poems, "The Mystic" and "The Death of God," employ lines reminiscent
of those
of Robinson Jeffers, about whom Jarman has written, and Jeffers becomes a
central presence in Jarman's book-length narrative poem Iris (1992).
Whereas the poems in Far and Away are narrative experiments,The Black Riviera
(cowinner of the 1991 Poets' Prize) shows Jarman in full command of his narrative
powers. As Andrew Hudgins notes in his jacket blurb, the poems "tell fascinating
stories and meditate passionately on the nature of storytelling." Even the poems
that concern Jarman's southern California past operate in a larger
historical context. In one of the finest, "The Shrine and the Burning Wheel," the speaker witnesses "a gang
of boys" setting fire to a bicycle tire in the parking lot of a Quick Stop.
This scene of meaningless violence occasions a meditation on art, transcendence,
and history, in which Edna St. Vincent Millay, assorted Shriners, Edgar Bergen
and Charlie McCarthy, Janis Joplin, and the Boy Scout Expo all figure in the
speaker's recognition that "Transcendence is not / Going back / To feel the
texture of the past." Rather it involves a "poetry of heaven and earth" that meshes
personal with public history, despite the feelings of meaninglessness inherent
in the postmodern condition. Although Jarman values family history, in the
broader historic and geographic contexts of these poems, "the black
box / Recorded with the last message of childhood" threatens to become "gibberish"
("Between Flights").
Like the muffled stories of adults that the child in "Story Hour" hears through the walls, personal
histories alone are "full of lacunae / Fragments in a burning hand written
/ On less than water--air." The child's feeling that he is the sole audience--that
he holds a magical power--gives way in maturity to the recognition that "I
have no such power." The true power of stories, as the final poem in the book
suggests, involves the active making of one's own narratives
in the context of history and of the world. The speaker's nostalgic reminiscence about a long-ago story must finally give way to
the present--a moment with his daughters in an imperfect world where a blue-white
flower grows, incongruously, next to the "Sanitary Sewer." Though the story
of "Miss Urquhart's Tiara" exerts a powerful influence on the speaker, his
daughters' "pressing close" enables him "to close the book" and return to
the problematic present. The Black Riviera demonstrates not only Jarman's masterful
command of narrative technique but also his sophisticated understanding
of the ways in which narrative masters and commands human beings and human
histories.
The lengthening of the poetic line and the relative lengthening of the narrative
pace in The Black Riviera (there are seventeen poems in a fifty-four-page volume) anticipate
Jarman's Iris. In long, Jeffers-like lines, this novel in verse tells the
story of its title character. Iris, a young mother in rural western Kentucky,
has an obsession with "a paperback of poems, / The only book from college that
she'd saved, Robinson Jeffers." The poem charts over twenty years in Iris's
often unhappy, yet heroic life in terms of her lifelong argument with Jeffers's
"inhumanism." The poem reaches its climax when Iris, along with her hitch-hiker
companion Nora, finally makes her belated pilgrimage to Tor House. Late in
the poem,
Iris recapitulates her story to Nora:
Jarman's accomplishment is remarkable for a poet of forty. Especially
in his recent work, he engages both the personal and the public in increasingly
fruitful ways. Though David Wojahn, among others, has taken some New Narrative poets
to task for failing to create stories of "deep delight," it is clear that
he finds Jarman an exception. Whether, as Wojahn states in his jacket blurb
for The Black Riviera, Jarman "can win back for poetry many of the readers it has lost
in recent years" remains to be seen. But in terms of expanding the range of
technique and subject matter in contemporary poetry, Mark Jarman is an innovator and
one of the finest contemporary narrative poets.
the strength to keep laughing breaks
In a sigh. I hear, as their tired ribs
Press together ...
And hear also a weeping from both of them
That seems not to be pain, and it comforts me.
A longer meditation on the family history
and the family name, titled "History,"
concerns the child's (and the adult's) need to make a name for himself. The poem
culminates in a prose meditation about the "logic" of "a child who believed
his name could be magical." The child's logic, Jarman says, "is also his selfishness":
"I wanted my name to have a meaning of utmost secrecy. I did not want ever
to mistake my identity for the one my family gave me."
A scrap of melody,
it is the one piece
I ever played well; my heart
is still in it, too.
It is possibly this
that I mean. So much meant
to be lost is saved.
the city like a model
of our past, under glass.
At times, we kneel before it,
worshiping our lives there.
At times, we hover over, knowing,
helpless, looking on.
You'd think with
all the death in it, my life
Would be a tragedy. But I've kept my real life a
secret--reading Jeffers
And trying to imagine him imagining someone like
me. It's when he says
He has been saved from human illusion and foolishness
and passion and wants to be like rock
That I miss something. I think I have been stead-
fast, but what does rock feel?
Deciding that
she likes Jeffers best when she feels his wife's human presence in the poetry,
Iris ends up rejecting the tragic view that so tempted Jeffers. Discovering
the "secret lodge[d] with her," that Tor House and even Jeffers's Hawk Tower
were built for human reasons, Iris enters "The house where pain and pleasure
had turned to poetry and stone, and a family had been happy." By mastering
her own narrative (indeed by reinventing it), Iris manages to
transcend the potential tragedy of her life by rejecting the "hardness" of
her favorite poet. Iris is an ambitious narrative that should do much to
enhance Jarman's already secure reputation.
Writings by the Author
Books
Tonight Is the Night of the Prom (Pittsburgh: Three Rivers, 1974).
North Sea (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1978).
The Rote Walker (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1981).
Far and Away (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1985).
The Black Riviera (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
Iris (Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line, 1992).
The Past from the Air (West Chester, Pa.: Aralia, 1992).
The Reaper Essays, by Jarman and Robert McDowell (Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1996).
Other
"Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers and the New Narrative Poetry," in Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism, edited
by Fredrick Feirstein (Santa Cruz, Cal.: Story Line, 1989).
"Poetry and Religion," in Poetry After Modernism, edited by Robert McDowell (Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line, 1991).
Further Readings About the Author
Peter Makuck, "Sensing the Supreme, Working the Self's Heavy
Soil," Tar River Poetry, 22 (Fall 1982): 44-53.
David Wojahn, "Without a Deep Delight: Neo-Narrative Poetry
and
Its Problems," Denver Quarterly, 23 (Winter/Spring
1989): 181-202.
About the Essay
Written by: Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University
Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets Since World War II, Third Series, 1992, pp. 156-161.
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