Tasty Man-Candy... with an MFA!

Man, I feel like a preteen girl first discovering Ricky Nelson! (Or Davy Jones, David Cassidy, cute not creepy David Bowie, Simon Le Bon, Aaron Carter, Justin Timberlake or whichever Jonas brother isn't already taken.)

Except my man-crush is a 58-year old English teacher at Vanderbilt who looks like a cross between Rodney Crowell and Floyd from the Andy Griffith Show. Ladies and gents, Mark Jarman!

I guess I should begin with his poetry. Man, I'm near swooning - I haven't had a discovery like this since Stephen Dunn or A.E. Stallings!

Descriptions of Heaven and Hell 

Mark Jarman

The wave breaks

And I'm carried into it.

This is hell, I know,

Yet my father laughs,

Chest-deep, proving I'm wrong.

We're safely rooted,

Rocked on his toes.

Nothing irked him more

Than asking, "What is there

Beyond death?"

His theory once was

That love greets you,

And the loveless

Don't know what to say.

Pretty good, right? Wrong - listen to the man read it. It's AWESOME.

He even puts most of the line breaks in just the way I like it: very brief pauses in the thought for line breaks, longer pauses for ends of sentences, longer still for a new stanza. NOBODY reads their own stuff this well.

Then there's his background - his father was a pastor who moved the family to Scotland for the poet's formative years. He met and married a soprano, studied with some heavyweights like Raymond Carver, then just wrote and taught for his career. That sounds awesome. And eerily familiar.

Plus the fact that he's one of the champions of New Formalism, something I identify with but can't quite seem to write most of the time. I'm all about the use of rhyme and meter, recovering all that unfashionable stuff. When everybody else wants to be Bukowski, it's cool to try to be Robinson Jeffers. It's hip to be square, man.

And finally, the thing that turned me on to him in the first place...

That Teenager Who Prowled Old Books

Mark Jarman

That teenager who prowled old books to find

Any argument with a whiff of the Holy Ghost—

I meet him again in his marginalia,

Which ignored the human sweat and stink and marked

Those passages that confirmed what he was hunting.

There was the milk white hart of evidence.

There was the hound of heaven, italicized bold,

Like an angry footnote chasing it off the page.

And there were the hunters, in pursuit themselves—

Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Marcus Aurelius—

Who did not know he knew what they were after.

And so he missed a lot, all of it human,

Even while scribbling black and blue Eurekas!,

Bleeding through pages backwards—irrelevant notes.

It was all about something else, which he didn’t see,

As philosophers mounted their lovers from behind

And felt their limbs go dead from the toes upward,

And poets kissed a mouth that fastened tight

And locked tongues and tried to catch their breath.

"And so he missed a lot, all of it human." Story of my life, man.

Dang it, he wrote this poem and I should have beaten him to it! I can't tell if I want to kiss him or punch him. Or write him a valedictory ode.

I wrote a long time ago that Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible" stole my life story. Mark Jarman did it again.