Lynda Hull's "Orinthology," Mark Doty

Lynda Hull's "Ornithology"

Introductory Remarks

I want to thank David for pulling this panel together; these have been extraordinarily moving statements. I want to acknowledge that some members of Lynda’s family are here today: her parents, Gene and Christine Hull, and her sister—thank you for doing this. And I want to thank Graywolf for bringing an essential text back into the light of print and available for new generations of readers.

I’m going to read Lynda’s poem “Ornithology.” And I’ll give you just a little bit of orientation for the poem. The speaker begins in Chicago; she’s out for a walk and an observation triggers the memory of a night in Kansas City, years before, when she and a friend went looking for Charlie Parker’s grave. And it might be helpful to know that the poem ends with a quotation from Parker himself, and along the way we are contemplating some ailanthus trees—those are those tough, urban trees with feathery foliage and red seed pods that seem to—that the more dreadful the conditions in which they are growing, the better they look. Here’s the poem:

Ornithology

Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty tree. Take a phrase, then fracture it, the pods’ gaudy nectarine shades ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest and tail feathers. A musical idea. Macaws scarlet and violet, tangerine as a song the hue of sunset where my street becomes water and down shore this phantom city skyline’s mere hazy silhouette. The alto’s liquid geometry weaves a way of thinking , a way of breaking synchronistic through time so the girl on the corner has the bones of my face, the old photos, beneath the Kansas City hat, black fedora lifting hair off my neck cooling the sweat of a night-long tidal pull from bar to bar the night we went to find Bird's grave. Eric’s chartreuse perfume. That poured-on dress I lived days and nights inside, made love and slept in, a mesh and slur of zipper down the back. Women smoked the boulevards with gardenias after-hours, asphalt shower- slick, ozone charging air with sixteenth notes, that endless convertible ride to find the grave whose sleep and melody wept neglect enough to torch us for a while through snare-sweep of broom on pavement,

the rumpled musk of lover’s sheets, charred cornices topping crosstown gutted buildings. Torches us still—cat screech, matte blue steel of pistol stroked across the victim’s cheek where fleet shoes jazz this dark and peeling block, that one. Vine Street, Olive. We had the music, but not the pyrotechnics— rhinestone straps lashing my shoes, heels sinking through earth and Eric in casual drag, mocha cheekbones rouged, that flawless plummy mouth. A style for moving, heel tap and lighter flick, lion moan of buses pulling away through the static brilliant fizz of taffeta on nyloned thighs. Light mist, etherous, rinsed our faces and what happens when you touch a finger to the cold stone that jazz and death played down to? Phrases. Take it all and break forever— a man with gleaming sax, an open sill in summertime, and the fire-escape’s iron zigzag tumbles crazy notes to a girl cooling her knees, wearing one of those dresses no one wears anymore, darts and spaghetti straps, glitzy fabrics foaming an iron bedstead. The horn’s alarm, then fluid brass chromatics. Extravagant ailanthus, the courtyard’s poverty tree is spike and wing, slate-blue mourning dove, sudden cardinal flame. If you don’t live it, it won't come out your horn .

Ornithology

Lynda Hull’s “Ornithology” centers on a compelling bit of narration; it just seems intrinsically interesting, a drunken all-night quest with a black drag queen to find the grave of a great jazz musician (and notable heroin addict). But I want to focus here on the ways this story is framed, the extraordinary apparatus of commentary, image and meditation that surrounds the tale. I’d argue that this scaffolding, in fact, is the poem; that is, the narration’s only here to provide a kind of hook, a focal moment which makes the poem’s larger gestures apprehensible.

The poem begins with an evocation of an ailanthus, a tough urban tree with feathery foliage and reddish seed pods that seems to thrive in the worst of conditions. The tree-ripe seedpods suggest parrots, and thus suggest the Charlie Parker album that lends the poem its title. There’s no action in that opening sentence:

Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty tree.

It simply places the tree before us, in a phrase with its usual syntactical order inverted, and then follows it immediately with a bit of reflexive commentary:

Take a phrase, then fracture it . . .

Thus the pattern of the whole poem’s been predicted; the text will present us with image and narration, but it will also tell us how to read what we’re given, providing a self-conscious commentary throughout.

“Take a phrase, then fracture it” is a good description of a working principle of jazz, and of the poem’s own syntax and lineation—it’s artfully staggered on the page, introducing air and hesitation. But it’s also a good description of reverie, the associative mode of thinking that provides the poem with its structure. The speaker’s thinking about Parker’s music while contemplating that flaming tree, and tells us

Thus we can move effortlessly into memory, and the poem’s offered us another description of its own method in that beautiful phrase, liquid geometry , an oxymoronic term that describes precisely the way that consciousness is both fluid and orderly.

The reconstruction of experience in memory lends it a kind of a heightened sheen, an atmospheric lighting borrowed from film noir, the risky old days gone beautiful through this lens. You can hear this quality in

Women smoked the boulevards with gardenias after-hours, asphalt shower- slick

or this bit of Hollywood:

matte blue steel of pistol stroked across the victim’s cheek where fleet shoes jazz this dark and peeling block

As much as Hull loves the sensuous glamour of those details, they cannot ward off a chill at the memory’s core:

the grave whose sleep and melody wept neglect

Nor can they erase the fact that the speaker’s own all-too-human life cannot quite match the effortless effects that the restorative agents of memory and artifice would like to achieve:

We had the music, but not the pyrotechnics— rhinestone straps lashing my shoes, heels sinking through earth

The question the poem has been circling becomes overt when the poet asks what can be made of the sad tombstone of an artist destroyed, and what can be made of this memory itself:

what happens when you touch a finger to the cold stone that jazz and death played down to?

The question is urgent because it is not academic; it is as much a personal quest as it is a consideration of Charlie Parker’s fate. And it has a very particular answer: “Phrases,” the poem’s only one-word sentence, a gesture which points to how essential and plain an answer it is. What we have, in light of erasure and ruin, all that jazz and death play down to, is the music we can make. That music, in Hull’s poem, carries us back through the past, in its beauty and brokenness, back to the ailanthus, with its brilliant colors arising out of deprivation, and finally to the poem’s final assertion of an esthetic credo, quoted from Parker himself. What ruins us, what carries us away, the wreckage around us—well, it can be lived out, can be lived into, and if we can do nothing else with it we can make music. This is another version of an emphatic statement of belief which appears elsewhere in Lynda’s work: “Better this immersion than to live untouched.”

These two statements— “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn ” and “Better this immersion than to live untouched”—are the guiding principles of a restless intelligence determined not only to give form to the troubling, roiling stuff of memory and of struggle, but to engage us in that form itself and its making, to understand how any artist, poet or horn player, makes out of love and trouble a pattern which, in the hands of masterful artists like Lynda Hull or Charlie Parker, outlives its maker, and transcends the circumstances of its making.