Audrey Hackett | November 2021

Audrey Hacket

1.

Poet Ralph Angel died on March 6, 2020.

That sentence seems bizarre, grotesque. Yet it trails, as Angel himself trailed, a long white tail of light.

Angel was a poet and teacher of extraordinary sensitivity and skill. He had a way of shaking things up, in poems as in life. His poems are memorable to me for their quick, even quixotic moves; their slide of perception and feeling; their lightly held center. No Angel poem I know of grinds to a halt. None grunts with effort. Get to the end of an Angel poem, and you achieve velocity. Lift off. Life off, I nearly wrote. That too. Wheee, I can hear Angel saying. Here we go.

I met Ralph Angel in the summer of 2017 at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he had been a member of the MFA in Writing faculty for many years. (In the other half of his teaching life, he was the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands in California.) It was my first residency prior to my first semester. On that June morning, first and second semester students were engaged in the frantic, rather giddy project of testing the waters with potential advisors. Angel sat quietly in a corner. He had a special radiance that drew people to him, but also made them a little shy. I was definitely in the shy category. To get the conversation started, he asked me where I was from. Living in small-town Ohio currently, I replied. His eyes lit up with horror, mock and real. I live in the small town of Los Angeles, he countered. Of course he did.

We got to talking about our respective “small towns.” He said he liked to know he could order a martini at 3 a.m. and get one delivered to his door. Not that he drank martinis, not anymore. He said he liked the sirens, the grit, the glamour, the gore. He liked the omnipresent humanity. He said he craved solitude—the kind you make for yourself out of the world of everybody else.

“I’m a helplessly urban person,” he confessed. And laughed at himself, tickled tanned California pink.

2.

I can turn, almost at random, to any poem in Exceptions and Melancholies, spanning 1986–2006, and hear again his voice. It is a worldly voice, yet never—or so rarely—world-weary. Listen, won’t you? Listen.

I’m standing still at 10th Street. I’m not the only one.
Buildings rise like foliage and human touch
. And so shall dig this cigarette as my last, and rattle trains, and
rot the fences of the gardens of my body—
—from “Sampling”

The voice. That voice. It drifts and riffs, takes a breath and jazzes onward. It carries on its tide phrases and fragments, the way wind flurries litter down the street. The title is apt. The poem samples, in the musical sense. But it also offers a sampling, a bit of this and that, fugitive bites. Can we have the whole? No. But we can sample, as the poem does.

…I’m standing still on 10th Street. I’m not the only
one. The dark tastes of salt and oranges. Its eyes
wander round and round. I am its thousand windows. I think
about the future and the sea. And stay.

Angel, as I knew him, was as little jaded as any adult person could be. His poems are this way, too. He is sometimes disgusted with himself, especially in his earlier, more jittery poems, but self-disgust never sullies his core delight. He digs life, as he digs “this cigarette.” Every smoke his last. Not because he was going to quit, mind you, but because, let’s face it, the fences are rotting and who knows when the whole glorious mess will pull itself down.

What to do? Nothing to do. “I think / about the future and the sea. And stay.”

Angel’s stasis was relative, of course. He traveled a lot, in Europe, South America, North Africa. As a young man, he worked on trains to put himself through college. In poems and in person, he presents a life in motion that’s animated by perfect stillness. The stillness of presence, a deep inner collectedness. “I’m standing still on 10th Street.” The phrase repeats, and perhaps migrates. I’m standing still. I’m standing, still.

And from that delicate point—a moment, a lifetime?—Angel travels everywhere and back.

3.

Angel became my advisor that first semester, after he returned to his small town and I to mine. He had a distinctive way of working. He didn’t write letters, he spoke them. He sent you MP3 files on a CD. You tore open the Priority Mail package, unwrapped the disc, put it into your laptop or kitchen stereo, turned up the silence, and listened.

“Testing, testing, testing 1, 2, 3. This is Garage Band. Testing.”

He greeted you. He remarked on the rain, the lack of rain, the flowers, the birds. He loved birds. “A hummingbird is building a nest outside my studio window. Her nest is perhaps two inches across.” These weren’t pleasantries, but something warmer, more intimate. Something closer to pleasure. Something closer to poems.

A mere
shrug of atmosphere—
and then the fog
coughing up some buildings, and then
the smell of rain just inside
the door—
puts a naked eye
to things, and makes them
beautiful.
—from “Three Minutes and Sixty Years”

Angel’s 2014 collection, Your Moon, is his sparest. He never wrote densely, but in this book his poems have the wispy efficiency of feathers. They’re barely there—but they take you places.

What did these later poems shed that the earlier poems carried? If pressed, I would be forced to say: the Angel autobiography. But then I would be forced to note that what is so achingly lovely, in these later poems, is their open window to that autobiography.

His voice was always seeing things. That’s the plainest way I can put it. His poems brim with seen things—cypress trees, beach towels, cups of coffee, rain. And the organ that does the seeing is, somehow, the spell-casting voice, but also the naked eye—the sensory, not to mention sensual, organ of Angel’s poetry.

What is it the naked eye sees? Intimacies, interiors, the inside-out and outside-in of things. Nothing fancy. Angel’s poems are filled with nothing fancy. A shadow, a murmur, a toe, a phone, a playful voice, a cab, a palm (tree and hand), the night.

4.

Angel put his naked eye to lots of things. Including poems. He sent them back to you, casually folded. They bore no words of his. An Angel rule was: you don’t write words on other people’s poems. But he did draw boxes. He drew dashes and dots. There was a kind of signaling going on. Sometimes you knew what it meant, sometimes you didn’t.

“Governing a large country / is like frying a small fish. / You spoil it with too much poking,” chapter 60 of the Tao Te Ching observes, in poet Stephen Mitchell’s translation. Sometimes, teachers from a position of bounty and diligence do a lot of poking. Often, they seem to believe that poking is their main job.

Angel saw it differently. One of his favorite phrases as a teacher was, “Take what I say with a grain of salt.” I know he meant: Take it lightly. But I also think he meant, “Take it with the savor of my saying it.” For isn’t this what we most deeply want as poets? To “taste” our words in another person’s mouth?

Another Angel phrase, offered at the close of every MP3 recording, was: “I hope that keeps the wheels a-spinning.” He wanted his feedback to propel you forward, not send you scurrying back. Each month, receiving his feedback, it was almost like he’d hopped aboard with me for a bit, then hopped off. I felt I was still riding, still flashing forward, maybe sending out sparks.

5.

Of his own poems and process, Angel said little. I do know there were long dry periods. I do know he threw lots of poems away. “Nothing happening today. No poems. Poems in the trash.” Maybe it agitated him. But he reported it simply. Poems in the trash. Well, why not. To make a poem—“make” was the term Angel preferred—is to make a breath, a thought, a gesture with the hand, a laugh that throws back the head. These things come and go. They’re here, they’re not. They’re good, they’re not. In the moment, they’re good. In the moment, they’re the moment.

The naked eye again. The naked eye is one that simply sees. And sees simply. The magic of Angel’s poems, to me, is their lack of magic. I mean this sincerely. The special things that go on, the feel of freshness, the mischief of life caught on the lam, are a kind of simplicity. The kind that takes clarity, and alertness, and a shrugged-off self-consciousness to achieve. Like this:

Flowers fall. And I noticed
before I stood again and folded up the paper and rinsed my cup
their artifice. I myself
was fifty when I was murdered, I don’t know.
I’m here to break again my knuckles
or break them back. I’m here
—from “Nude with Pebbles”

What could be simpler? “Flowers fall. And I noticed”—the break there allows us to notice the noticing, before we get thrust forward into that long line of rote life, the standing and the folding and the rinsing.

The poem’s gestures are surprising, tossed off and just right. I picture Angel throwing three-point shots (did he play, or even like, basketball? I have no idea) over and over. Forever. I picture poems that are air balls, poems that bounce off the rim, poems that—yes—sink the net.

Here are some more lines from “Nude with Pebbles.”

The subject is a non-thing. I breathed
the sweetness of the air. Jasmine I could smell
and eucalyptus, olive trees
and cypress, an iron gate.
We are in our robes again, you won’t remember.
You have found
a chicken sandwich. You are plotting out
your day. …

Found what? The stanza breaks. The next stanza supplies the deferred discovery: “a chicken sandwich.” Have I mentioned that Ralph Angel was funny? Is funny, eternally in the poems?

6.

Ralph Angel said in interviews, and in person more than once, that he was not interested in the story of his life, but in the fact of his life. Sometimes he referred to this as “the fact of my reality,” sharpening the thought.

This seems to me the wisest, clearest statement one could make about Angel’s poetry.

Angel respected the intellect but didn’t consider it primary in poetry. In fact, I believe he considered it a poetic impediment, a kind of denseness—an opacity that blocked the light. Artists and children, he said in one lecture, are those who “see with their minds.”

Seeing with your mind is quite different from thinking.

… I don’t have much
talent for poetry. When I see a wrecking ball
dangling from a crane I mean it
literally. I mean
I don’t mean the world’s fallen apart
or that a wrecking ball
symbolizes the eye my world-weary sister
couldn’t know to turn away
from. …
—from “Exceptions and Melancholies”

Angel is always turning away from what things mean and toward what they look like. What they look like includes what kind of images they form in the heart, in the soul. This is one way to understand the “I” that most of Angel’s poems inscribe. His lyric subject is a kind of photographic plate for experience. And Angel loved photographs. His last lecture at Vermont College of Fine Arts concerned photographs, and one of his last publications is an art book of camera-less images—beautiful, abstract, arresting, and unsettling—from Polaroid film he’d manipulated over the years.

Angel was a fan of randomness. Seeing is always random. What the eye falls upon, what is there for the eye to fall upon, is up to some power outside the self. What is seen—what image forms in the mind and on the page—is also random in the sense of being the product of a moment, and the product of the whole life.

“The fact of my reality” is a great underused resource in contemporary poetry, I believe: things themselves just standing for things themselves. What’s the point of this? Mainly that things themselves have expressive power. Or rather: they have expressive power when seen.

Angel was fiercely serious about art, and one of his core, serious beliefs was that art generates experience. What art does is what art is. We experience a work of art (“an art object,” Angel would say) in the way we experience, if we’re lucky, life: with an intensity skin-to-skin with ecstasy. Even, or especially, if the content of the experience is dark.

Which brings me to duende.

7.

Angel had an affinity for darkness.

He loved and admired Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, poet of duende, the “dark sounds.” He also loved and admired American duende, jazz, and the blues—forms based on the musical cry. The cry of anguish, the cry of protest, the cry of submitting to fate.

In 2006, Angel published Poem of the Deep Song, a translation of Lorca’s earliest collection of cante jondo, literally “deep song,” poems written in response to gypsy music and flamenco. Angel’s translations open the poems to English-speaking readers with clear, surgical diction. The dark excess of the original is there—Lorca was flamboyant, and went “all the way,” Angel once remarked—as a dark wine or a cup of hemlock is there in its crystalline goblet.

Angel loved Lorca, and he loved the music Lorca loved, the old songs of Andalucía. Angel’s own cultural roots intertwine with the region and the music. In his afterword to Poem of the Deep Song, Angel writes that the Andalucían music reminds him “of the incantatory medieval singing in the Sephardic synagogue that I grew up in.”

Haunting, disquieting, yet deeply familiar.

I have said the cultural roots intertwine, but the deeper root is duende itself, Lorca’s term for the somewhat terrifying living substance of art, the mysterious life-force that is also and necessarily a death-force. In the death-saturated culture of Lorca’s Andalucía, duende is the darkness that feeds life and, by the same cry of the guitar, destroys it.

Here is one description of duende from Lorca’s 1933 lecture on the topic:

Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but … with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand …

Angel spent time in Granada, and the flamenco performances he witnessed there stripped him naked, he said.

Angel was in some ways an unlikely translator of Lorca. The difference in temperament, in emotional temperature—the L.A. coolness of the one to the Spanish flame of the other—was great. And for this reason, perhaps, he was the perfect translator of Lorca.

I knew Angel only for two years, and only at a certain distance. Yet, I feel relatively confident in saying that the darkness I sensed in him was due—perhaps this is strange—to the purity of his heart. Which means, I think, a purity of feeling, not a messy abandon to emotion, but a respect for it, and a willingness to walk in its company as deep, or as high, as it goes.

What Lorca’s “deep songs” offer above all is a fiery defense of feeling in the face of fate. In “Flourish,” Lorca writes, in Angel’s translation, of the death of a man of legend. The poem tells us that the man’s reputation keeps the devout away and draws the scoundrels:

Your burial was attended
by sinister people.
People whose hearts
exist only in their minds,
and who followed you, weeping,
through the narrow streets.

Angel was not a person whose heart existed only in his mind. (Could there be a more damning phrase?) To the pure heart—to the heart that beats and spurts—darkness has an unbearable attraction. As death validates the reality of physical life, so darkness validates the reality of emotional life.

Again and again in Angel’s poems, and in Angel as he himself was, we encounter a darkness worn lightly, worn like its opposite: the light. How can you read his dazzling poems, and not think of shadows? Of the shadow, unshakeable? As in the end of Angel’s poem “First Impressions”:

Isn’t it language that keeps leaving
I ink in the tulips
Here’s the white wall of heaven
and the heart that
walks beside me like feeling

The heart outside the body either suggests a worrying alienation or a presence so large, so significant, it surges into its own form of life. A shadow as it exists under intense sun, perhaps—palpable, almost embodied. And isn’t alienation, the cool displacement, the mark (the literal stigmata, even) of the heart that doesn’t know what to do with all it feels?

8.

Toward the end of my first semester, I asked Angel, “Am I ready for Lorca?”

“No one’s ready for Lorca,” he replied.

9.

At what turned out to be his last reading at Vermont College of Fine Arts, in July of 2019, Angel read several poems with the title “Untitled.” It was remarked upon by students, as all things connected to Angel seemed to be, with awe or bafflement.

I felt torn. His titles were wonderful. Over time, they drifted further and further from his poems. Became a private language. A language it thrilled you to overhear. Blue hydrangea, I sometimes wonder of one Angel poem that mysteriously bears that name, where in the poet’s mind did you grow?

But I liked the way he let go of titling poems. I liked the respect it implied.

10.

Angel was my advisor again my final semester, my creative thesis semester, in the spring of 2019. You’re making a book, he said. I could hear his eyes sparkle on the other end of the phone.

But the encounter doesn’t end there. It actually ends where it began, two years earlier, on a creaky porch to the drum brush of light rain.

Angel made me tea, and served it to me in a glass cup. We talked about Lorca, flamenco, and Amish simplicity, about art and the self, about the many greens of Vermont in the rain. He came around slowly to talking about the poems I had submitted to him, a sample of what I considered my best work.

He said some nice things, and then he said a true thing. “They don’t let us in.”

“A poem is an experience. The reader has to have an experience.”

He said the true thing, the hardest and most necessary thing an artist can hear. The flaws in the work are the flaws in the self. To work on a poem is to work on the life. This would go on forever. There would be no escape. Nor would I want one. The “fact of my reality” would be the license, the limitation, and the limitless field.

There is no greater lesson to impart. His teaching ended that day, and began.

I am certain Angel himself had been on the artist’s journey, the rugged yet light-filled journey, for a long time. I wish he had been on it longer. Yet, he was on it long enough, after all. He made poems; he heard the soul-cry of flamenco; he drank tea in the rain. The poems won’t be going away anytime soon. They’ll carry on the work of his making; they’ll be forever made and unmade.

Here are the final lines of “Nature,” the Angel poem I love maybe best of all:

The long exhalation. Of baskets and flutes.
Of bracken. Of reed. Of cypress and olive, pelvis and spine.
Three shoes on a doorstep. Of human unfinished.
The spirit in time.

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Audrey Hackett is a poet and news reporter. She graduated with an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2019. She works in Yellow Springs, Ohio.