Phoenix Poets

Peter Campion

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226077253
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In El Dorado, Peter Campion explores what it feels like to live in America right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Splicing cell-phone chatter with translations of ancient poems, jump-cutting from traditional to invented forms, and turning his high-res lens on everything from box stores to trout streams to airport lounges, Campion renders both personal and collective experience with capacious and subtle skill.

ELEGY WITH TELEVISION

I.

A clearing in the pines and snow swept

around a square of earth. Our steaming breath.

The way one window frame from the condos

imprinted down my eye because we all were

weeping and everything went streaked then vivid.

Kneeling to the patch of Astroturf

to scatter my handful of soil . . . it hit:

the sobbing like a plunge to a reservoir

of heat beneath the rib cage—submerged

then up, then plunged again—was not because

her fingers in her wedding photograph

twisting to clip her veil (so delicate)

were ash: she still was there. Her Auntie Wisdom

simper imploring us “Oh, please enough”

beneath her own wet eyes was palpable

as snow on gravel. Only looking up

from the ground now: where to find her? Where render

this sheerest feeling toward her?

In her ranch house

wedged to a wicker cabinet, her TV

fluttered above me all the afternoons

my parents dropped me there. And the stories

up on the screen. And the crinkle of banked fire

her old retriever snored beneath. So close

to permanence: the warmth she carried round her

loomed as an element my life could enter.

Over us now the window frame ballooned.

It showered blue and silver, and was gone.

We walked the trampled path behind the priest

back to the idling purr of the warm cars.

II.

I’m reading scholarship about TV.

The writer claims it streams two ways at once.

It pours the aggregate inside the home

so people of every race and cheetahs

in the Okavango, sales on furniture

and faces of refugees (some flattened ghost

at least in digital particulate)

all overflow the limits of the place

we’re watching from. It also filters out.

The spectacles of public life now shrink

to the console. And what gets blinkered off

turns easier for power to control.

I’ve drifted from the theories. But a trace

of networks cinching us between what screens

we’re allowed to see—from the side porch, June heat

still thick at evening: the street lights strung

in forced perspective could be bastions, driven

into whatever’s out there as inside

(shivers branching the gut) white heat coils down.

Long corridors. A whiff of disinfectant.

The complex she endured the last ten years

until she swallowed the pills she stashed (how long?)

for when it came to this. But came to what?

The feeling she was losing the mind she used

to feel she was losing it? The corridors

like tunnels of pastels, kitsch wreaths, her neighbors

glaring from neighbor masks? But she was lucid.

Just days before, her voice on the receiver

growling about “that fool” the President.

Her congregation, though the priest at last

ran interference, wanted to refuse

her burial rites: as if the universe blared rules

as firm as walls and all beyond were night.

And yet her plot: the cube with its five sides

of glinting earth and one of open air

could be an emblem of the self, the recessed

volume displaying all it also hides.

Corrections penciled on the article

she almost finished. And the paper whites

leaked their sweet ammoniac reek

among the slats of sun and the dust whirl.

III.

A girl in Kansas on a snow-swept hill

where the Command and General Staff School

skirts the Missouri, you crouched to aim your sled.

And stopped.

Figures were circling a black tree.

Two soldiers lifted a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• El Dorado
• Securities
• Boston: Red Hair
• Concourse C
• Danielle
• Letter from Ohio
• Car Radio Near Cleveland Near Dawn
• 1995: The Sawtooths
• Chicago: The Congress Plaza
• Salt Water
• Cuyahoga County: Smoke
• 1986: Recurring Dream
• Daughter
• 1986: The Court
• Villa Sciarra: Azaleas
• Rome
• Over Greenland: Flight 107
• Blue Figure, Dogu Period
• Elegy with Television
• Vermont: Blood Brook
• After Baudelaire: “I Have Not Forgotten …”
• Los Angeles River
• Vermont: Gile Mountain
• Indy Car
• Dandelions
• Notes