Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Radioactive Starlings
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.myronnhardy.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2001050727
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2001050727
HEADING: Hardy, Myronn
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100 1_ |a Hardy, Myronn
670 __ |a Approaching the center, 2001: |b t.p. (Myronn Hardy) p. 101 (poet and writer; graduate of University of Michigan and Columbia University)
953 __ |b lh08
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Columbia University
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and novelist.
AWARDS:PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, 2002, for Approaching the Center; Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, 2008, for The Headless Saints; Griot-Stadler Prize for Poetry, 2012, for Catastrophic Bliss.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Myronn Hardy is an award-winning poet and novelist. Raised in Arkansas, he divides his time between New York City and Morocco. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Columbia University. For his first poetry collection, Approaching the Center, he received the 2002 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award.
The Headless Saints
Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, The Headless Saints ranges across continents and cities, and across themes of oppression, survival, and the redemptive potential of art. Many poems reflect on the determination of enslaved Africans in the Americas to triumph over the near-extermination of their history and culture. Others consider the subject of art, as in a poem about a meeting between Abel Meeropol, an American poet of Russian Jewish descent who wrote the words to the anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit,” and Billie Holiday, the African-American singer whose 1939 recording of the song made it iconic.
“Sometimes the poems stop short,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “at others, their terse vigor reinvents what they see.” The book’s best poems, said Phoebe contributor Joe Hall, “remind us of the alluvial nature of the present . . . [and] suggest the imprints of the larger, messy, tectonic historical forces which have informed them.”
Catastrophic Bliss
The themes of connections and disconnections inform the collection Catastrophic Bliss, for which Hardy won the Griot-Stadler Prize for Poetry in 2012. In these poems, Hardy alludes to figures as disparate as Persephone, Dante, Fernando Pessoa, Marianne Moore, Stevie Wonder, and Barack Obama. The book’s title poem evokes an overabundance of sweetness, as honey pours from the sky, Ants are “intoxicated” by the sweetness; cooking pots overflow. But the poet reminds the reader that sweetness must be earned, and that by summoning it “we/chanted/until our/throats tore/to ribbons.”
The poem “Making Stars with Jacob Lawrence” describes an imagined visit with painter and collagist Jacob Lawrence, most noted for his works on the theme of the Great Migration of African Americans from the Deep South to Northern cities such as Chicago. White linens drying on garden clothesline evoke memories of a Lorca play in “Linens Near a Ghost Town; “ In “Habits” the poet muses on memories from a Catholic school classroom.
Kingdom
In Kingdom, his fourth collection, Hardy “uses a mix of silence and incantatory language to evoke subjugation and revolt,” according to a writer for Publishers Weekly. The poems reflect on religion, violence, and redemption, exhorting the reader to look unflinchingly at what is frightening or shameful, rather than looking away. The poet alludes to the 9/11 attack on the twin towers in New York City, and refers to both government-kept secrets and to the private secrets of individuals, suggesting the toxic nature of unacknowledged sins.
Finding the book’s language sometimes distracting, the Publishers Weekly contributor described Kingdom as a serious collection in which the poet calls for respectful attention and offers “gorgeous lament without melodrama.” Though Hardy insists that people accept responsibility for what is wrong in the world, he also offers hope for positive change.
Radioactive Starlings
Hardy’s 2017 collection, Radioactive Starlings: Poems, addresses themes of journeys, memory, injustice, and identity. The poet’s time spent in North Africa and the Middle East are evident influences in the book. The poem “Walking Jerusalem,” for example, alludes to the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish; in several others, the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa appears as a starling. And in “The Silence in Sunlight,” Hardy refers to both the police shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2016 and to the image of activist Iesha Evans peacefully confronting riot police during a protest sparked by the killing.
“The transnational character of Hardy’s verse enables the poet to empathize with the downtrodden across a broad spectrum of cultures, ranging from the Muslim . . . to the Christian. The universality of his vision brings the past into sharp relief in terms of the present, and, above all, his humanity is seen to permeate his awareness of present sorrows against a backdrop of age-old conflict,” said Virily reviewer Lois Henderson. A contributor to Publishers Weekly described Radioactive Starlings as “an illuminating, if occasionally difficult, collection.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, March 3, 2008, review of The Headless Saints; September 1, 2015, review of Kingdom; October 16, 2017, review of Radioactive Starlings: Poems, p. 48.
ONLINE
Myronn Hardy Website, http://www.myronnhardy.com (March 23, 2018).
Phoebe, http://phoebejournal.com/ (March 23, 2018), Joe Hall, review of The Headless Saints.
Virily, https://virily.com/ (March 23, 2018), Lois Henderson, review of Radioactive Starlings.
Print Marked Items
Radioactive Starlings: Poems
Publishers Weekly.
264.42 (Oct. 16, 2017): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Radioactive Starlings: Poems
Myronn Hardy. Princeton Univ., $17.95 trade paper (112p) ISBN 978-0-691-17710-6
Hardy (Kingdom), who divides his time between New York and Morocco, invites readers along as he
journeys from the U.S. to Africa to the Middle East and back, ruminating on politically charged events of
the past and comparing them to injustices of the present, and exploring how identity is shaped by individual
memories as well as collective historical memories. He makes constant references, both popular and
obscure, to world history and politics, art and literature, and even sporting events. For example, in "Walking
Jerusalem," Hardy writes with a nod to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: "Among ashen stone I'm
reading 'In Jerusalem.'/ Reading a line a stanza then walking/ about the gray." Portuguese writer Fernando
Pessoa, notable for writing under numerous heteronyms, appears in various locations in the form of a
starling. Hardy achieves the greatest emotional impact when he utilizes simple, clean, direct imagery to
articulate complicated themes. In "The Silence in Sunlight," he reflects on the viral photograph of Iesha
Evans's arrest while protesting the shooting of Alton Sterling in New Orleans: "Silence as armor her armor
after numbness./ Black gun to black body in black cotton." This is an illuminating, if occasionally difficult,
collection. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Radioactive Starlings: Poems." Publishers Weekly, 16 Oct. 2017, p. 48. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A510652861/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e199b8e4.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A510652861
""The radio buried in sand is language,"" one poem early in Hardy's second book begins, and the pages that follow include broadcasts from all over the world. Bred in Arkansas, now based in New York City, the poet finds terse lines and pithy symbols in cityscapes, seascapes and inland scenes from Venice and Turin, ""Somalia or Ethiopia,"" ""Bahia, Brazil,"" in shantytowns, world capitals, and flood zones. ""Seaweed circles legs but will not pull/ another body under,"" he observes in ""The Living""; ""This time it drags// a living man to shore."" Hardy's scenes sometimes stand for the African diaspora, for the survivals and triumphs of the descendants of slaves; often they show the meanings and the links art creates among people who seem dissimilar, as in a poem about the meeting between Abel Meeropol, who wrote the words to ""Strange Fruit,"" and Billie Holiday, who made the song famous. Sometimes the poems stop short, or say no more than their subjects let readers predict; at others, their terse vigor reinvents what they see. Hardy looks not so much at what photographers or travel writers might include as at the shapes of the lives he can find, or imagine: even amid natural disasters, as in ""Tornado,"" ""coffins/ close,"" ""bodies break"" and ""rise invisible souls.""
The politically and socially aware poems contained in Radioactive Starlings: Poems (Princeton University Press; ISBN: 978-0-691-17710-6) by the award-winning Myronn Hardy cross the divide between his life in Morocco and the Middle East and that in the USA. In a variety of structures, including those of ghazal, sonnets and free lyrics, he draws attention to the problems faced both by a developed nation and by developing ones. Hardy is intensely aware of self within the ambit of an oppressed heritage that has been compelled to fight for its very right to exist.
The metaphor of radioactive starlings, especially in terms of Hardy’s viewing of the leading Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, as a starling in the contrasting cities of Lisbon, Johannesburg, New York City and Tunis, is central to the text. In contrast to Pessoa’s association with the ibis, which was the emblem of his own publishing house, the “Empreza Ibis,” Hardy’s rendition of him as a starling emphasizes the uniqueness of the author’s own approach to situations that call out the singular and the anarchic in response to the overwhelming brutality and emotional harshness of oppressive regimes. Rendering Pessoa as the common and much despised bird in comparison to the sacredness and sanctity with which the ibis is traditionally revered opens the way to understanding poetry as a medium of communication of the mass imperative for survival in the face of dehumanizing military might. The radioactivity of the starlings can be seen in both a negative and a positive light, firstly as referring to the pollution and the contamination of contemporary existence, especially within an urbanized setting, and latterly to the energy produced by a multitude of beings than can bring about much-needed transformation in its wake. The innate and instinctive power of the individual (enhanced by natural imagery throughout) is counterpoised to the autocratic and subjugational power of the state.
The transnational character of Hardy’s verse enables the poet to empathize with the downtrodden across a broad spectrum of cultures, ranging from the Muslim (including “Astronomy Night”) to the Christian (most powerfully reflected in “But I Must Forget”). The universality of his vision brings the past into sharp relief in terms of the present, and, above all, his humanity is seen to permeate his awareness of present sorrows against a backdrop of age-old conflict.
Hardy’s palette is dominated by black (as in the repetition of “the black” at the end of each of the 13 two-line stanzas in “Chazal of Wreckage”) and blue (as in the “blue throat bluer than seas”, the concluding words of “Bob Kaufman: 1967”), the hues of the bruised soul and psyche. As well as portraying the sensitivity of a visual artist in his diction, Hardy also reflects an understanding and appreciation of the fundamental importance of music to the commonly held psyche, not only in reference to the instrumentality of Kaufman, but also in the geometric symmetrical patterning of “Orpheus Escapes with Turtle.”
From the smallest, seemingly most trivial gesture, such as a father tying his son’s shoes, to the broadest of cultural references (as in “To Mecca with Gold”), Hardy reveals his mastery of a wide range of poetic form that transcends the immediate to recognize the deeper, more profound universal symbols of life. A poet whose work is well worth consideration, Myronn Hardy deserves appreciation from the highest quarters. by Lois Henderson
National Geographic Society excavations have unearthed flint fishhooks and mollusk shells amid sand dunes in the Sahara that rise half a mile high. Beneath these dunes satellite imaging reveals the faint courses of ghost riverbeds. From these remains scientists have traced the outlines of a giant, pre-historic inland sea and its tributaries on the same ground that is now some of the driest on earth.
Like fishhooks in the desert, Myronn Hardy’s best poems in The Headless Saints remind us of the alluvial nature of the present. As in “On a Bench: My Life,” the economic surfaces of the present moment of his poems suggest the imprints of the larger, messy, tectonic historical forces which have informed them.
Let’s talk about this poem.
Like many others here, the images are evocative, the diction simple, the texture of the language unpronounced but on examination revealing an ear concerned with subtleties.
Hardy also pivots quickly between thoughts and images, augmenting the often jarring effect of the book-wide device of substituting white space for commas.
We begin in an ancient Italian port:
It’s cold
in Venezia but I sleep on a bench
the sea will soon swallow.
Here in a small jacket I’m observed by a poet
wayward in his search for a canal through his mind.
Ethopia.
Yes.
Italy to Ethiopia: two countries tied together through imperialist aggression and colonial exchange. Here the speaker reverses the typical current of capital-center extracting from colony, and, instead, through the movement of the poem, subsumes the canalled city in a vision of Ethiopia.
Return.
Yes.
To the desert lush as cantos.
The green place where we share bread is
all I need: my sister spinning about the room dinner
of roasted fish yellow lentils…
…my uncle in church
Speaking Ge’ez.
The potentiality of the desert is on par with the power of the Italian canto. Ge’ez, the language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Ethiopian Jews, reminds us of a religious heritage in Ethiopia as enduring as Italian Christianity (itself adopted through the routes of exchange between the seat of Roman Empire and the margins of its influence). Yet—and here is what makes Hardy who he is as a poet—as soon as place is evoked, as soon as a set of coordinates suggests and begins to narrow the spectrum of possible historical narratives, the poem turns to the speaker’s estrangement from these very places and his own cautious sense of agency:
In this head is all I have. My warm-poor
country these feet will never touch. I hope the water I
cup let go will spill over desolate land.
This is a fine example of Hardy’s restraint as he underscores his inability to conjure this idealized home. Estranged, all he does have is the poetic act of recovery, a simultaneous cupping and letting go, naming but not inhabiting.
Is there a touch of indulgence in the last line? Perhaps. The phrasing might be too familiar. This sort of undeveloped line shuts down too many poems in his first book, Approaching the Center. Ending on such a note, less generous readers might be inclined to group “On a Bench” with Charles Bernstein’s “I see grandpa on the hill / next to the memories I can never recapture” or “I see my Yiddish mama on Hester Street / next to the pushcarts I can no longer peddle” poems, a voice conforming to an exhausted model[1]. This reading depends on the reader’s willingness to relate Italy and Ethiopia and pursue the implications of Ge’ez. Persistent readers will find in Hardy’s restraint an invitation to dig into the connotational substrate of these places to make these connections, and in this push into the uncertain seams of his poems, Hardy’s work becomes not simply about recovering a sentimentalized version of the past, but about problematizing our relationship with it in the poem’s invocations of larger historical systems.
Other poems give us much less to work with. “The Living” is stratified rock:
White gold crowns on water green
swirls into cobalt light pieces.
Coral broken a heart with exposed
valves arteries veins severed by currents
Seaweed circles legs but will not pull
another body under. This time it drags
a living man to shore.
Prosodicaly, Hardy accomplishes something nifty. The generally trochaic habit of previous lines suddenly reverses at “another body under.” The man escapes drowning as the poem kicks free of its dominant sonic habit. What else is here? Introducing a living man seems like an effort at putting something at stake and allowing for closure before the poem can break out of its own hermetic symbolism.
Elsewhere we find poems like “1937” which more explicitly think their way through colonialism. This one ends pointedly: “My dear friends, is fascism perennial?” A conversation about colonialism between a diverse body of members in “Tea in Perugia” concludes, “I sit beside him afraid of future’s rumble.” Whatever pleasure might be taken from the texture of the poem is subsumed by the poem’s efforts to alert us to manifestations of hegemony. These poems don’t play to Hardy’s strengths—images that are lush, terrible and sometimes bizarre within the tense syntax the white space of his pulled commas allow. Yet, in light of Hardy’s first book—2001’s terribly earnest Approaching the Center—these shifts in his second book both toward hermetic imagery and historicism represent maturation, resistance to the over-lyric “I” whose moods efface the ostensibly vital places of the poem. E.g. from Approaching the Center:
…God
If I could see the moon
just one more time
maybe this life would change.
What the divergent modes of The Headless Saints make room for, unlikely as it might seem, is the cutting, surreal imagery that emerges in some of Hardy’s best poems. In “Lobsters: Arkansas, July 1983” sun burnt white people looking at an anaconda baking in the sun are two-hundred “lobsters in overalls straw hats.” “Damsel Returns from Ithaca” features Polyphemus playing a cop who tosses addicts and kicks in doors. The point of these poems in not to conclude that cops can be monsters or white people forfeit their humanity in consuming cruelty as entertainment, rather, these are efficient, magical givens, from which the poems proceed. The cruelty of the spectators in “Lobsters” grows legs, infects the future:
…A woman (lobster)
yelled I need some pretty boots. Did she
watch Turner’s death? Ask for brown lampshades?
Were they all there tongues long wet as worms?
When it really dies will each try for a tooth? Place
in a box pass it through a family.
This is who we are.
And it is this regular recurrence of outstanding poems which keeps us following Hardy across a spectrum of tones (surreal, hermetic-imagism, historio-political) and places as various as Italy, Brazil and Arkansas. What emerges from all this movement is a sort of twin map—the lushness of a multitude present places set against the enduring, diffuse havoc caused by Imperialist forces throughout the history of these places—each map always in the middle of over lapping the other. It’s an ambitious project, one that seems to strain the limits of an 85 page book. But Hardy’s poems are self-contained; they do not have to be considered in aggregate, and it is this finely accomplished balance between larger thematics and the concerns of individual poems that so successfully invite the reader to dig deeply into his work.
[1] “State of the Art” in A Poetics (6).
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Joe Hall’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Versal, Cimarron Review, Handsome, Face Time: A Cygist Press Anthology and others. Founder of the DC reading series Cheryl’s Gone, Joe currently maintains a guest room for itinerant artists in his West Lafayette, Indiana home.
Hardy (Catastrophic Bliss) uses a mix of silence and incantatory language to evoke subjugation and revolt in his fourth collection. These are poems steeped in language both modern and ancient, evincing the cyclical nature of religion, violence, and redemption. The use of white space recalls both erasure and redaction, while the virtual elimination of articles and a chant-like repetition offer readers the chance to cover their eyes at the scary parts, only to realize the scariest is still to come. In the long, sectioned poem "Collapse," he writes, "We are supposed to look away but we don't." This is both an accusation and a call to arms. He trusts that readers will not look away from the towers he invokes many times, nor from the reappearing sycamores, and certainly not from "The secrets a country keeps.// The secrets we keep from ourselves." What happens in private, Hardy intimates, is what we allow in public. There is not joy at work here but rather attention, mindfulness, and a "Respect sought quietly." Occasionally the linguistic acrobatics distract, with some of the images—such as "sequins on the saffron wall"—feeling crowded, but Hardy primarily offers gorgeous lament without melodrama. We are responsible for the state of things, Hardy seems to say, but we are also the solution. (Oct.)