Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman

1952-

Nationality: American

Birth Date: June 5, 1952

Genre(s)

Poetry

Table of Contents

• • Biographical and Critical Essay

    • • Tonight Is the Night of the Prom

      • North Sea

      • The Rote Walker

      • Far and Away

      • The Black Riviera

      • "Story Hour"

      • Iris

  • Writings by the Author

  • Further Readings About the Author

  • About the Essay

Biographical and Critical Essay

One of the founders of the New Narrative movement in contemporary poetry, Mark Jarman recovers lost storytelling traditions in a poetry that is grounded in specific places (California, Scotland, and rural Kentucky) and specific times (particularly his childhood and adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s). With partner Robert McDowell, Jarman was the cofounder of the Reaper, the primary organ of the New Narrative movement. Jarman has often advanced highly polemical arguments for narrative poetry as an antidote to what he sees as exhausted lyric and meditative modes of contemporary verse. But his collections of poems are more convincing arguments for narrative, demonstrating a growing facility with all aspects of the art. However strident the Reaper pronouncements may have been at times, Jarman's poetry is not strictly narrative but combines narrative, lyric, meditative, and dramatic elements with increasing skill.

Born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, on 5 June 1952, to Donald and Bo Dee Jarman, Mark Jarman is the eldest of three children. His father was attending the College of the Bible (now the Lexington Theological Seminary) when Mark was born, and a year later the family moved to Santa Maria, California, where the Reverend Mr. Jarman served the First Christian Church. When Mark was six, the family moved to Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, where his father was pastor at the St. Clair Street Church of Christ as part of the U.S. Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Fraternal Aid to British Churches. In 1961 the family moved to Redondo Beach, California, where the elder Jarman was the minister for the South Bay Christian Church. Mark Jarman's childhood, divided between Scotland and California, became the primary subject of his first full-length collection, North Sea (1978); the struggles with religious faith that he experienced as the son of a minister and grandson of an evangelist are also important subjects, particularly in The Rote Walker (1981); likewise Jarman's adolescence in Redondo Beach provided inspiration for some of his mature poems, such as "The Supremes" and "Cavafy in Redondo," from Far and Away (1985), and the title poem of The Black Riviera (1990).

Though Jarman was only twenty-six when North Sea was published, he had already distinguished himself as a poet. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, he studied with Raymond Carver and the poet George Hitchcock, editor and publisher of the influential little magazine kayak. By 1974, when Jarman received his B.A. in English literature with highest honors, he had also received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for poetry from the San Francisco Foundation and had published an impressive chapbook, Tonight Is the Night of the Prom (1974). At Santa Cruz he also met McDowell, with whom he was to found the Reaper in 1981, and Amy Kane, whom he married on 28 December 1974.

From 1974 to 1976 Jarman attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop as a teaching/writing fellow, studying under Marvin Bell, Donald Justice, Sandra McPherson, Stanley Plumly, and Charles Wright and earning his M.F.A. in poetry. Jarman then taught at Indiana State University, Evansville (now the University of Southern Indiana) from 1976 to 1978, the University of California, Irvine, as a visiting lecturer (1979-1980), and Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky (1980-1983), before settling at Vanderbilt University, where he is a professor of English. In addition to his teaching and editing, Jarman has also received three National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry and a 1991 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. He lives in Nashville,Tennessee, with his wife and their two daughters, Claire Marie and Zoë Anne.

The chapbook Tonight Is the Night of the Prom explores the material of Jarman's California adolescence. Although Jarman was barely past adolescence when he wrote the poems, they are remarkably accomplished; indeed, many of them were published as early as 1972 in magazines such as kayak, Antaeus, and Poetry. At once elegiac and tough-minded, the poems explore an adolescence lived on a "strip of sand littered with strange,/ intolerable acts--trash cans aflame, / perversions coming on the tide like grunion" ("Elegy for Redondo Beach"). The speaker laments the loss of this seamy landscape now that the "city fathers" have "lined the Esplanade with lamps / to flood the beach with decency." If this apprentice work seems of a piece with the fashionable surrealism of the 1970s, the surrealism is suited to the material--the landscape of southern California mirrors the furtiveness of teenage sexuality, and many of the poems distinguish themselves from run-of-the-mill verse by their early indications of Jarman's gift for narrative.

Jarman returns to California and adolescence in the poems of his later collections. But first he turns to his childhood in North Sea, particularly to the years his family spent in the linoleum-factory town of Kirkcaldy in Scotland. The volume consists primarily of shorter lyrics, and some of them seem unnecessarily hermetic. Jarman seems to have deliberately abridged his narrative, perhaps because of his Iowa experience. But some of the poems show the benefit of his apprenticeship, succeeding beyond the poems in the 1974 chapbook. In "My Parents Have Come Home Laughing," the speaker's parents return from a feast for Robert Burns; their ribaldry about haggis and Burns's "Nine Inch Will Please a Lady," which might well have been the whole substance for the younger Jarman, gives way to his tender recollection of a somehow comforting primal scene:

the strength to keep laughing breaks In a sigh. I hear, as their tired ribs Press together ... And hear also a weeping from both of them That seems not to be pain, and it comforts me.

A longer meditation on the family history and the family name, titled "History," concerns the child's (and the adult's) need to make a name for himself. The poem culminates in a prose meditation about the "logic" of "a child who believed his name could be magical." The child's logic, Jarman says, "is also his selfishness": "I wanted my name to have a meaning of utmost secrecy. I did not want ever to mistake my identity for the one my family gave me."

There are other moving poems about family life in North Sea, such as "The Crossing," and the love poem "Lullaby for Amy." The latter poem's refrain, "The earth is a wave that will not set us down," later serves as the epigraph to Jarman's watershed collection, Far and Away. The increasing maturity and the unsentimental tenderness of the finest poems in North Sea more than make up for the occasional emaciated lyric that mars it.

The Rote Walker combines the best strategies of the previous collections and represents a further advance in Jarman's poetic growth. The subject matter is fraught with conflict, examining his rejection of rote faith in order to find poetic faith, more sacred because it is more hard won. The book is framed by poetic musings about the secular folk song "Greensleeves" and the Christmas carol with the same tune, "What Child Is This?" In the poem "Greensleeves" the speaker, fooling around on a piano, recalls only the melody of the song of the same name:

A scrap of melody, it is the one piece I ever played well; my heart is still in it, too. It is possibly this that I mean. So much meant to be lost is saved.

In "Does the Whale Diminish?" the speaker questions his father's rejection of the drunk, the wife beater, the bigot, and the one who "was merely suspicious." But rather than chide his father, the speaker recognizes that "all of us" are "suspect," that there is some essential truth in the father's view of him as an "ungrateful son / ... lost in impossible poems." The speaker empathizes with the father's difficulty in deciding. Similarly, the title poem inverts the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed the first to recite their assignments / for they shall be first to forget"; "The meek do not want it") but ends echoing T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1943): "The end of the task / is to forget the task." As critic Peter Makuck says, "Buried in his No he [Jarman] has found a Yes."

In addition to the primary theme of the poet's struggle with the faith of his forebears, The Rote Walker also contains accomplished poems that are harbingers of Jarman's recent work. In "Los Angeles" Jarman returns to his southern California adolescence but with the distance of maturity and a moral stance that was undeveloped in his apprentice work. The speaker, a "preacher's kid," recalls an adolescence devoted to fast cars and "girls with flammable skin," but he realizes he has rendered the city and his past "out of reach":

the city like a model of our past, under glass. At times, we kneel before it, worshiping our lives there. At times, we hover over, knowing, helpless, looking on.

Far and Away returns again to the lost landscapes of Jarman's adolescence and represents a breakthrough in his method and techniques. On the dust jacket, Jarman characterizes the poems as "experiments with narration and the reconstruction of experience. Today the part of L.A. where I was a teenager bears little resemblance to what it was then. And yet my backward look isn't altogether nostalgic. I have no desire to return to the past, only to recover some lost people and places." Indeed, the best poems in the volume eschew the nostalgia common to lyric remembrances of things past; Jarman both trusts the compelling subjects of his narratives and paradoxically maintains a moral distance from those subjects. Invoking the great poet of memory, in "Cavafy in Redondo" Jarman notes that "Our ruins run back to memory," and he recognizes "the magnet of nostalgia." The speaker of the poem refuses to give in to sentimentality, noting that, like the remembered teenager on the make, the past can often "flatter, listen / cajole, make little whining endearments, / plodding ritualistically among landmarks." Similarly, the widely praised poem "The Supremes" compares the speaker's nostalgia for his "innocent" teenage lust, as he watched the black singers on a "portable T.V." at the now defunct "Ball's Market," to his nostalgia for the vanished landscape of coastal Los Angeles. From the perspective of an adult on an airplane "leaving ... for points north and east," the landscape (and by implication the early Supremes) can "still look frail and frozen / full of simple sweetness and repetition." But this is only a trick of perspective: the truth of the story belies the falsifications of nostalgia. The speaker and his friends who had huddled around the television "in wet trunks, shivering" were really ignorant "tanned white boys, / wiping sugar and salt from [their] mouths / and leaning forward to feel their song." Furthermore, the poems imply, sentimental nostalgia is a tempting though untenable stance, but neither is it "acceptable / to cough with cold or shiver with irony / at your own home / or at the amusement of your family" ("Far and Away").

In Far and Away Jarman returns to some of his most powerful subject matter with a newfound poetic distance, and the extended narratives "A Daily Glory" and "Lost in a Dream" cover new ground in terms of poetic technique. In these poems Jarman works with longer lines, a change that is important for his later poetry. In The Black Riviera two poems, "The Mystic" and "The Death of God," employ lines reminiscent of those of Robinson Jeffers, about whom Jarman has written, and Jeffers becomes a central presence in Jarman's book-length narrative poem Iris (1992).

Whereas the poems in Far and Away are narrative experiments,The Black Riviera (cowinner of the 1991 Poets' Prize) shows Jarman in full command of his narrative powers. As Andrew Hudgins notes in his jacket blurb, the poems "tell fascinating stories and meditate passionately on the nature of storytelling." Even the poems that concern Jarman's southern California past operate in a larger historical context. In one of the finest, "The Shrine and the Burning Wheel," the speaker witnesses "a gang of boys" setting fire to a bicycle tire in the parking lot of a Quick Stop. This scene of meaningless violence occasions a meditation on art, transcendence, and history, in which Edna St. Vincent Millay, assorted Shriners, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Janis Joplin, and the Boy Scout Expo all figure in the speaker's recognition that "Transcendence is not / Going back / To feel the texture of the past." Rather it involves a "poetry of heaven and earth" that meshes personal with public history, despite the feelings of meaninglessness inherent in the postmodern condition. Although Jarman values family history, in the broader historic and geographic contexts of these poems, "the black box / Recorded with the last message of childhood" threatens to become "gibberish" ("Between Flights").

Like the muffled stories of adults that the child in "Story Hour" hears through the walls, personal histories alone are "full of lacunae / Fragments in a burning hand written / On less than water--air." The child's feeling that he is the sole audience--that he holds a magical power--gives way in maturity to the recognition that "I have no such power." The true power of stories, as the final poem in the book suggests, involves the active making of one's own narratives in the context of history and of the world. The speaker's nostalgic reminiscence about a long-ago story must finally give way to the present--a moment with his daughters in an imperfect world where a blue-white flower grows, incongruously, next to the "Sanitary Sewer." Though the story of "Miss Urquhart's Tiara" exerts a powerful influence on the speaker, his daughters' "pressing close" enables him "to close the book" and return to the problematic present. The Black Riviera demonstrates not only Jarman's masterful command of narrative technique but also his sophisticated understanding of the ways in which narrative masters and commands human beings and human histories.

The lengthening of the poetic line and the relative lengthening of the narrative pace in The Black Riviera (there are seventeen poems in a fifty-four-page volume) anticipate Jarman's Iris. In long, Jeffers-like lines, this novel in verse tells the story of its title character. Iris, a young mother in rural western Kentucky, has an obsession with "a paperback of poems, / The only book from college that she'd saved, Robinson Jeffers." The poem charts over twenty years in Iris's often unhappy, yet heroic life in terms of her lifelong argument with Jeffers's "inhumanism." The poem reaches its climax when Iris, along with her hitch-hiker companion Nora, finally makes her belated pilgrimage to Tor House. Late in the poem, Iris recapitulates her story to Nora:

You'd think with all the death in it, my life Would be a tragedy. But I've kept my real life a secret--reading Jeffers And trying to imagine him imagining someone like me. It's when he says He has been saved from human illusion and foolishness and passion and wants to be like rock That I miss something. I think I have been stead- fast, but what does rock feel?

Deciding that she likes Jeffers best when she feels his wife's human presence in the poetry, Iris ends up rejecting the tragic view that so tempted Jeffers. Discovering the "secret lodge[d] with her," that Tor House and even Jeffers's Hawk Tower were built for human reasons, Iris enters "The house where pain and pleasure had turned to poetry and stone, and a family had been happy." By mastering her own narrative (indeed by reinventing it), Iris manages to transcend the potential tragedy of her life by rejecting the "hardness" of her favorite poet. Iris is an ambitious narrative that should do much to enhance Jarman's already secure reputation.

Jarman's accomplishment is remarkable for a poet of forty. Especially in his recent work, he engages both the personal and the public in increasingly fruitful ways. Though David Wojahn, among others, has taken some New Narrative poets to task for failing to create stories of "deep delight," it is clear that he finds Jarman an exception. Whether, as Wojahn states in his jacket blurb for The Black Riviera, Jarman "can win back for poetry many of the readers it has lost in recent years" remains to be seen. But in terms of expanding the range of technique and subject matter in contemporary poetry, Mark Jarman is an innovator and one of the finest contemporary narrative poets.

Writings by the Author

Books

Tonight Is the Night of the Prom (Pittsburgh: Three Rivers, 1974).

North Sea (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1978).

The Rote Walker (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1981).

Far and Away (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1985).

The Black Riviera (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).

Iris (Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line, 1992).

The Past from the Air (West Chester, Pa.: Aralia, 1992).

The Reaper Essays, by Jarman and Robert McDowell (Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1996).

Other

"Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers and the New Narrative Poetry," in Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism, edited by Fredrick Feirstein (Santa Cruz, Cal.: Story Line, 1989).

"Poetry and Religion," in Poetry After Modernism, edited by Robert McDowell (Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line, 1991).

Further Readings About the Author

Peter Makuck, "Sensing the Supreme, Working the Self's Heavy Soil," Tar River Poetry, 22 (Fall 1982): 44-53.

David Wojahn, "Without a Deep Delight: Neo-Narrative Poetry and Its Problems," Denver Quarterly, 23 (Winter/Spring 1989): 181-202.

About the Essay

Written by: Richard Flynn, Georgia Southern University

Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets Since World War II, Third Series, 1992, pp. 156-161.

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