Julia Thacker TO WILDNESS, winner of the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry

Julia Thacker "TO WILDNESS", winner of the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, chosen by Paul Muldoon. 9/12 Ptown

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To Wildness is winner of the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and was chosen by the internationally acclaimed poet, Paul Muldoon. As Joan Houlihan says in her enthusiastic endorsement, “Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings (‘We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plums / when he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.’). Ancestral voices speak from the grave; fabulist figures like the girl buried with a finch tell their stories; and contemporary ghosts only the narrator sees abound ('Let me touch them as they pass.') A southern gothic atmosphere hovers here: shapes twisting in the dark and the language to conjure them near. What a rich and thrilling collection!"

Foreword by Paul Muldoon

It was in 1960 that Robert Lowell, the preeminent American poet at a time when the notion of “pre-eminence” was still thought viable, so memorably held forth on the notion of contemporary poetry being either “cooked” or “raw.” Lowell’s contention was that “cooked” poetry, the sort that might then have been produced by the likes of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Louis Simpson or Donald Hall, was “marvelously expert,” though it often seemed “laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar.”

When it came to the “raw,” this was a poetry characterized by “huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience,” and was mostly “dished up for midnight listeners.” Lowell was clearly thinking of the Beats, par ticularly Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl and Other Poems had appeared in 1956. T here was, Lowell concluded, “a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal.”

T he occasion of Lowell’s remarks on the state of American poetry was telling, given that they were included in his acceptance speech for the Na tional Book Award. The book being honored was Life Studies, his game changing collection of 1959. Life Studies is a collection divided into four sections, each with its own method. The first section, “Beyond the Alps,” explores Lowell’s family his tory and his relationship with his parents.

The second, “91 Revere Street,” is written in prose and offers a series of autobiographical sketches that detail Lowell’s childhood and early adulthood. The third section consists of odes to four writers. The final section, “Life Studies,” includes such poems as “Skunk Hour” and “Waking in the Blue.” Almost seventy years later, Life Studies remains the single most influ ential book of poems of English language poetry of the second half of the 20th century and, now, the first quarter of the 21st. What’s striking about this fact is that so familiar are we with first person “lived experience” nar ratives, including those driven almost entirely by “identity poetics,” that we may easily overlook their main source.

I give this long preamble to the work of Julia Thacker because it is vital to its contextualization. Lowell’s eccentric family members may be Boston ix Foreword by Paul Muldoon Brahmins of Beacon Hill but they are cut from the same cloth as Thacker’s supermarket bag boys, sundry Good Ol’ Boys, Jell-O connoiseurs, Geor gian moonshiners, not to speak of regular attenders of tent revival meet ings. Thacker writes movingly of a brother: As kids, we sprawled on starburst linoleum, glued to Star Trek, my brother so small he fit in the V of my legs. Battling neon-colored brains in a jar, we, navigators on the deck of a starship, controlled everything and so calmed the tempers of our house, the wind of slammed doors. What did my brother think when I ran away? That I got beamed up? It may be instructive to set poems by Lowell and Thacker beside each other. Here’s Lowell “Waking in the Blue”: I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, once a Harvard all-American fullback, (if such were possible!) still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties, as he soaks, a ramrod with a muscle of a seal in his long tub, vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing. And here’s Thacker in “Archaeology”: Once I left a man while he was taking a bath.

The door slammed and he leapt out of the tub, a tidal wave on the shag rug, slick and shining. I don’t recall what the drama was about, only the tub, kidney-shaped, x Foreword by Paul Muldoon porcelain painted pink, its gold claws, its filthy rings of sweat, rose oil, hashish, sloughed off skin. One might be forgiven for thinking that the man “taking a bath” is Stanley himself, while the uncle in Thacker’s “God Awful” who “is forbidden to lift more than fifteen pounds” is a version of Lowell’s “Uncle Devereux,” with whom he spends a “last afternoon” and who was “dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease.” In the case of Thacker, this is an America that is, even now, too rarely represented: My kin are falling out of beds and bathtubs as from a great height. For the family reunion, they dine at Applebee’s, tethered to oxygen tanks. Study Technicolor menus like the Great Books. In addition to mirroring the four-part structure of Life Studies, Thacker includes something of its range. There are prose poems such as “Author’s Note” and “Grass Soup,” with its litany “of fits and fevers” and “seven chil dren abed,” that bring back the prose memoir “91, Revere Street.”

There are more conventionally formal poems like “Braid Him Into The Earth“ that, even in its title, conjures up Uncle Devereux and the speaker who blends the “piles of earth and lime,/ a black pile and a white pile.” One of the reasons why Lowell was so exercised by the notions of the “cooked” and the “raw” in his National Book Award acceptance speech was his own realization that Life Studies itself represents a shift from his own earlier formal style to his much more unbuttoned later style. To some readers, the collection may even represent a synthesis of those “two piles.” T his would explain Lowell’s final musing on “When I finished Life Studies, I was left hanging on a question mark. I am still hanging there. I don’t know whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.” For Lowell himself, and for writers like Julia Thacker, this combination of cooked and raw has indeed become no less a “life-line” than the oxygen tanks to which her extended family are so memorably tethered

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