Fred Marchant
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Fred Marchant is the author of Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize in poetry. His second book of poems, Full Moon Boat, came out from Graywolf Press in 2000, and House on Water, House in Air: New and Selected Poems came out from Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland, in 2002. He is also the co-translator (with Nguyen Ba Chung) of From a Corner of My Yard, poetry by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa. This book was published in 2006 by the Education Publishing House and the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Ha Noi, Viet Nam.
He is a Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program, and Co-director (with Robert Dugan) of The Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston. A graduate of Brown University, he earned a Ph.D. from The University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He is also a longtime teaching affiliate of The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He has taught creative writing workshops at sites around the country, ranging from the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, NH to the Veterans Writing Group, organized by Maxine Hong Kingston, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In 1970 Marchant became one of the first officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector from the United States Marine Corps. Recently he has edited Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947. This collection of poems, to be published by Graywolf Press in April 2008, focuses on Stafford's time as a conscientious objector in Civilian Public Service camps during World War II. Fred Marchant's new collection of his own poetry, The Looking House, was published in June 2009, also from Graywolf Press.
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The Return
When he poured acid for his etching,
Blake said the art he practiced was infernal,
meaning it brimmed with the energy of demons
who first of all had been angels. On the wall
of the bedroom I inherited from my grandfather
hung a gold-framed etching titled "The Return"‹
a doughboy kneeling before a larger than life
crucifix, the helmet and rifle on the floor,
his calves wrapped with puttees, his head
half-hidden by a bulging, cinched-up knapsack.
Harry, older uncle on my mother¹s side,
quit college to go to France in 1916.
He flew a Spad in the Lafayette Escadrille,
and never wanted to fly again afterwards.
In one photo, the polished sash of his Sam
Browne belt gleams in the ocean sunlight.
He is sailing home, and a swell has leaned
him into the bulkhead. Under the smile
you can see his fear that life thereafter
would turn out to be another flying coffin.
In 1970, Georgette, Harry¹s war-bride
wrote to me on Okinawa, pleading that
I not leave the service as a conscientious
objector. She said Jesus could not approve,
He had smiled on America, and I owed
back some portion of what I had been given.
The airplane I flew home on, my c.o.
discharge in hand, was an empty, airborne
auditorium, another sign of the nation¹s excesses.
When I woke, I looked out over the desert.
At first I thought I saw a land split
apart by our history of rage and sorrow,
but as we cruised through a vast clarity
of air thousands of feet up, the creases
of deep, dried-out arroyos reminded me
of the pack that belonged to the soldier
who hung over my childhood sleep
and taught me, before I ever understood
a word like puttee, how good it would feel
to take a helmet off,
set the weapon down.
Against Epiphany
Which god was it that opened my picture
book and saw the two of us on a road
where melting snowfields glittered
on every side and poplars bent like
the fingers of an old man clutching
at what he had loved about the sun?
Which one was it that saw behind
the thatched, white-washed farmhouse
our fur, flies, and shit-stained walls?
And the barbed wire I had nailed
to fence posts marking the boundary
of mind and selfhood?
Which of the many stood gleaming
in winter sunlight, rime fringing the shore,
the whitecaps like ice bobbing on the sea?
What was the nothing visible to whom
that god seemed to be waving?
What do we have that any god would want?
Quick, if you can find it, hide it.
Non Sum Dignus
Red orb of the sacred heart,
thorn-entwined
little fist bleeding on plaster robe.
Purple ribbon bookmarks,
Lenten, the gold
tabernacle open, bereft.
Smoking, peppery censer,
chasuble swirl,
the devout abject and grieving.
Steady sssh of approaching
nylons, flecks
of lipstick on the teeth,
and a tense, uplifted tongue.
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