Some Say the Lark

by Jennifer Chang

An alternate cover for this isbn can be found here.

Chang’s poems narrate grief and loss, and intertwines them with hope for a fresh start in the midst of new beginnings. With topics such as frustration with our social and natural world, these poems openly question the self and place and how private experiences like motherhood and sorrow necessitate a deeper engagement with public life and history.

From "The Winter's Wife":

I want wild roots to prosper
an invention of blooms, each unknown
to every wise gardener. If I could be
a color. If I could be a question
of tender regard. I know crabgrass
and thistle. I know one algorithm:
it has nothing to do with repetition
or rhythm. It is the route from number
to number (less to more, more
to less), a map drawn by proof
not faith. Unlike twilight, I do not
conclude with darkness. I conclude.

Genres: Poetry, Womens

100 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2017

About the author

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

Critical Mass Interview:
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/S...

Boston Review:
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/chang_...

First Book Interviews:
http://firstbookinterviews.blogspot.c...

Cortland Review Book Review:
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/3...

Poetry Daily:
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=13702
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14001

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jennifer Chang has written one of my favorite opening lines of poetry ever in her poem, Dorothy Wordsworth and I think about it all the time:

The daffodils can go fuck themselves.
I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings
about the s---- sun that shines and shines
and shines. How are they any different
from me? I, too, have a big messy head
on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.
I flower and don’t apologize. There’s nothing
funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,
the critics nod. They know the old joy,
that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot
of future growing things, each one
labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.
If I died falling from a helicopter, then
this would be an important poem. Then
the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore
declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous
youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren’t you
meat? But I won’t be another bashful shank.
The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,
the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop
interrupting me with your boring beauty.
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.

This is just one gem of many to be found in her collection Some Say the Lark, and what a gem it is. Lark moves through existential quandaries of living in both the world and internally, often positioning on a balance between love and longing. This is a collection that looks deeply at language, thought and knowledge, such as in Small Philosophies, a poem in three parts, and also asks ‘what does it mean even to write a poem?’ There are tiny meditations to be found, such as Chang’s discourse on personal growth where she writes ‘My silent habit / is to listen: / for I knew these trees once / as a different self,’ or her advice that ‘ the best walking is without / reason, formless, scattering the self / into thinking.’ The collection becomes a beautiful reminder that time spent in quiet introspection is time spent well.

‘I have stood in this clearing and cannot decide
if I miss the trees or if I love newborn clarity.
How can I love a damaged place? But I love
rooms and cities I'll never return to, and once
I loved a man for how he damaged me. Here
is the footbridge unbridged by that storm. Here
is the fire pond the walker could not find: he did not
know my route. Here is the water. Where is the fire?’

This is a book I’ve revisited several times over the years, always one I spot in the 811s at the library and think “yes, I do want to read a few of these again.” It has become like visiting a friend, and each read I noticed something different or a line strikes me in a new way. I think that is what I love best about poetry, it’s like the old saying about never stepping in the same river twice because while the words remain unchanged upon the page, ourselves and our feelings and being flows across them in new ways each time. We are the babbling brook of the self with poetry to direct our course downstream.

Returning to her query about what is a poem, Chang once delivered a lovely example in an interview with Tupelo Quarterly. Asked about the temporality of poetry, Chang replied:

‘Poems are like time machines. They travel through time as a medium for individual memory and, as a genre, they engage historical time, collective cultural memory. But I think poems also activate a simultaneity of past, present, and future. A poem’s rhythm moves us forward in time; the imagination a poem (hopefully) sparks posits futurities, a constellation of potentialities. Considering the nexus of verb tenses versus the present tense of the reading experience, a poem has already happened, is always happening right now, and will soon happen again.’

I find this to be all very lovely. Poetry points towards possible horizons, of society, of discourse, and of the self. It is alive as it becomes an emotional rudder in the stream of existence, helping us navigate traumas, sail through heartbreak and look into the vast skies and find our place within it.

This is a collection about emotional vulnerability, feeling like ‘a door/ falls out of the frame and you're more/ open than you'd like.’ It is one that spends a deal of time in the idea of longing, but also the idea of loving, and finding the two to not be mutually exclusive. Some Say the Lark by Jennifer Chang is a collection worth diving into again and again.

⅘

The Lonely Humans

About solitude, I don’t need proof
it’s lost. Outside, the rain practices
loss, is losing to infinitude. Now there’s
a river the city can’t contain, rushing
against the wishes of infrastructure.
I know these streets, and then I don’t.
I carry my child with the current,
and we are the rain, the falling song
and the song of rain. Have I ever felt
happier. Felt the human wrongness
of crossing human streets, cars
stalling on waterlogged curbs.
I had thought words could make
new oceans, my thoughts tilting
above all like a lighthouse. Such
sovereignty, bearing a light
neither wave nor sail could regard,
my goddamn power ablaze
in the peerless dark. Bicycles going
nowhere. The noise of strangers
soundless in so much rain. To survive
what must perish: if we want,
want not as water wants, to flood
and to fathom us, our perishing.

[Matthew Siegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had been teaching the poem "Dorothy Wordsworth" for a few years so I had been waiting for this collection. It did not disappoint. The poems exhibit serious control over complex emotional material. The images are vivid and striking, almost unsettling in their precision. I don't want to call it quiet, in spite of the volume being turned down very low. There is serious power in these poems. I really loved reading this book.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE WINTER’S WIFE

It will be years before I understand
failure. The sun’s last rage
in the winter trees. My yard
is a failure of field. It is small
and poorly tended. Years before
this hard kernel of worry
rises to a truer height, I can learn
to make shade with my palms,
but I cannot learn to unmoor my want.
I want wild roots to prosper
an invention of blooms, each unknown
to every wise gardener. If I could be
a color. If I could be a question
of tender regard. I know crabgrass
and thistle. I know one algorithm:
it has nothing to do with repetition
or rhythm. It is the route from number
to number (less to more, more
to less), a map drawn by proof,
not faith. Unlike twilight, I do not
conclude with darkness. I conclude.

ON EMOTION

It was inside, gathering heat in her blood, slowly killing her.
No one said a word.
And this grew her fury further, grieved her immeasurably.
What did it look like.
A knot, or a slag of granite.
I imagined another brother, unborn for he was only a knot.
How my granite brother would never leave her.
I grew up in her abject sadness, which soon became our speaking.
And then I left.
Smaller, smaller, he was her favorite.
Jays nag the first light.
And now I am awake before dawn hoping today is a day when I won’t
have to say anything.
And then I.
To me, it was unintelligible.
I could see through her skin, see my brother not growing inside her.
Would he ever come outside.
The raging jays, the squawking catastrophe.
I wanted to know.
What is the difference between a son and a daughter, I wanted to know.
That is private.
That was her answer.

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reluctant to finish this book - I loved being inside the world of the poems. It took me a little while to really engage with them - perhaps because they're unique, and I wasn't sure how to approach them - but after I did, I was immersed and admiring and often thrilled by how smart (in all ways) they are.

[Cindy Newton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really hit-or-miss for me. Some of the poetry is beautiful, with lovely phrasing and powerful images, but others left me baffled. I'm sure I just didn't take enough time to delve into the meaning behind some of the more ambiguous lines, but I was lost at times. Still worth reading!

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate Lindsey Alexander’s recommendation of this book. I especially loved her poem about Dorothy Wordsworth.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

For day #2 of The Sealey Challenge, I read SOME SAY THE LARK by Jennifer Chang. What a fabulous book; I can’t believe it sat unread on my bookshelf for two years. Deeply intertextual, and displaying great range, the poems shift in register from workaday to archaic, from the intimate to the conceptual.

There’s a preoccupation with knowledge and its limits that is woven throughout the book, both in the explicitly titled “Episteme” poems, and the final “Epistemology” poem in her wonderful “Small Philosophies” suite. Here's an excerpt from the latter:

"I have stood in this clearing and cannot decide
if I miss the trees or if I love newborn clarity.
How can I love a damaged place? But I love
rooms and cities I'll never return to, and once
I loved a man for how he damaged me. Here
is the footbridge unbridged by that storm. Here
is the fire pond the walker could not find: he did not
know my route. Here is the water. Where is the fire?"

The very title of the book is a gesture toward this problem — of knowing the self and others; of willfully not knowing. It is taken from the scene in Romeo and Juliet where Juliet deliberately misunderstands the cry of the lark as that of the nightingale, denying the arrival of morning to delay the couple’s parting.

A brilliant book; highly recommended.

You can read two of her “Episteme” poems here: https://www.poetrynw.org/jennifer-cha... (Note that “Episteme 17” is titled “Ceremony” in the book).

And the wonderful opening poem “A Horse Called Never” here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that I find myself picking up or thinking about every day since I've read it. There is a blunt music within this book--blunt in the sense of "here is the stark image, musically conceived and entirely true." I think about her poem, "Dorothy Wordsworth," at least once a week. The entire book is full of turns and genius. It's the book I've been recommending to friends and will be gifting to many more throughout the year.

[Meg Ready · Rating 5 out of 5]

The use of form and building of the familiar with the unfamiliar casts a long, strange shadow that will have you gasping for breath. Jennifer Chang's poems are a vision of a world beyond ours— one we can almost reach if we acquiesce to our hunger for it.

[Erica Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moving, clear-eyed collection that considers the interior and exterior worlds simultaneously.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though the notes at the back of the book indicate varying influences behind the poems, or it might be more appropriate to think of the notes at the back as varying scaffoldings that could be used to see the poem as poetic influence, a lens that would lead the reader through the poet to the poem. Without those notes, I find the poems often reveal a speaker who seems unsettled by nature. Who looks specifically at the natural world and can feel something agitated or disturbed. Friends she might share the natural world with (as childhood friends, or as romantic interests). As though the natural world were a canopy she had passed through alone, or with others. But a canopy that describes how relationships exist and evolve.

But whether the poems make reference to another person or not, the natural world is assuredly informant. Operator. The poet lives amid nature’s language, beholden to it, and through it, she understands what nature might be telling her specifically. The explicit references to Dorothy Wordsworth are helpful in understanding nature’s influence on the poems. In particular, Dorothy Wordsworth feels like the figure who is among nature, attendant to it, but not always making deterministic efforts to uncover a poem from nature. Like it feels like Dorothy Wordsworth’s brother was. Dorothy Wordsworth feels like someone who would reveal to her reader what nature had revealed to her. Whereas William Wordsworth habitually seeks from nature something he can use in a poem.

Nature as powerful subtlety, perhaps. And that power affects her life, which then affects her relationships with others. Settling especially on questions the poet feels compelled to ask about any of the relationships appearing in the book.

[Dana Jerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

New fan of J. Chang here. Some really powerful work included in this collection and great experimentation. Naturally this is amid some "academic" approaches (she is one, after all) which is really just another way of saying some people don't recognize poetry as art unless it reflects or references other work by long dead artists.
I don't think she's clouded herself over with these, however. Instead she curates a celebration of each as it reflects her real and truest life. Some lines in "About Trees" stopped my breath.
"Dorothy Wordsworth" is a real burner and probably my fave poem in the bunch. I'd take a whole book of rippers like that one. Other faves include "Lost Child", "We Found The Body Of A Young Deer Once", "Terra Incognita", "Whoso List To Hunt", "The World" and "The Middle Ages".

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Chang has a real skill, especially, with opening and closing a poem. Take the opening lines from "The Winter's Wife:" "It will be years before I understand/ failure. The sun's last rage/ in the winter trees. My yard/ is a failure of field." Or the ending of "River Pilgrims:" "we know/ we will fail/ and the current will/ unlearn us, my water-skin, the ocean's clock:/ we love loss as we love ourselves,/ secretly. And too much." Failure, loss, insecurity, worthiness -- these are all themes that pop up throughout the book. Her use of language is so creative and exciting, and there is some philosophy, explicitly discussed in one poem, running through the poems as well -- how do we know what we know? And what do we make of that knowledge?

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorites: “A Horse Named Never,” “The Winter’s Wife,” “Whoso List to Hunt,” “Myself—Be Noon to Him,” “On Emotion,” “Mount Pleasant,” and “About Trees”

Parenting, Thomas Wyatt, longgone friends, Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth, neighbors, the stoop, the metro, the cop drowned in a car accident, the missing twin, the mother who watches TV and keeps her distance, death, loss—“we love loss as we love ourselves, / secretly. And too much.”

An intellectual domestic poetry, searching both the irony and earnestness in the questions, and “[i]t’s work to gather the seasons, / to ask a question that finds the feeling / at the troubled core of thought.”

[Eli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't say which
cloud cut open
the hill. Or why,
walking, I can't
reach the sky. Virginia
is not east.
               The hill
gives no slack, no
shade, so I rise
to light. I am quiet
and won't
squander words
to make what's
false true.
               I had
a love. A blue
kite untwisting
the sky.

—"Ceremony," Jennifer Chang

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read initially in college. Didn’t care for it then. Decided to pick it up years later to see if my sentiments about it had changed. I’m here to report that they still hold: this poetry book is for some of a certain taste but that certain taste is certainly not mine. There is a groundlessness to the verse that gives me nothing to grasp a hold of, no place to feel rooted to the work. I don’t remember a single poem I read other than “Dorothy Wordsworth.” On to the next.

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading these poems, I had a feeling like there was something simmering underneath. There is grief and frustration, but also an anger that seems barely contained, like a pot about to boil over. The focus is on the natural world, loss of love and friendship, and the loneliness of just being human. We can all, however, find something that connects us in these poems.

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

«but you are free
to measure the sky as you will and decide
accordingly.
I never thought there’d be a you:
fact or poem, you’re child to a thought
we once had.»


i did not connect to the first part that much hence the lost of one ⭐️

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, erudite collection of poems that inhabit a space of doubt--as gateway to and shadow of curiosity. Love and regret, hope and despair, all here, in their full, surprising apparel. A book to read, then read again.

[Kate Gaskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are astounding in their precision and breadth. Gorgeous, lyrical storytelling. Such a smart, smart book. Plus, "The daffodils can go fuck themselves" is perhaps the best opening line of almost any poem ever.

[Sam Thammahong · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poems was a fun little treasure chest. Jennifer Chang paints pretty pictures, while maintaining her feisty nature.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really strong collection of poems. Chang's lyric is incredible, enchanting, and surprising. I loved her closing poem, "About Trees." Her first lines, for the large part, really captivated me.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 C4564s 2017

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, insightful, meditative, and moving.

[DaniHappy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. I'll definitely have to read all the poems again to appreciate them more and to think about them. Also very inspiring.

[anhai · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️

[Mia Sitterson]

“What does it even mean to write a poem?
It means today
I'm correcting my mistakes.

It means I don't want to be lonely.”

[Lex · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I could be a color. If I could be a question of tender regard.

I found you sleeping past the twentieth century

I have stood in this clearing and cannot decide if I miss the trees or love this new found clarity. How can I love a damaged place? But I love rooms and cities I’ll never return to, and once I loved a man for how he damaged me.

When I was a child, we lay in the grass and the clouds made sense to me.

Mostly, I hope to fill the blank pages of your hands with snow and doubt.

What I would say about certain trees is that to master love one must be devastated by it. Certain trees know.

I’m struck dumb by knowing that until just recently you did not exist, the way I know I won’t exist, and that’s a kind of prayer I don’t have words for. Your father and I are atheists, but you are free to measure the sky and decide accordingly.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patsy Cline, Freedom In Ohio, It Was Your Birthday Again, Terra Incognito. Thank You

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When I was a child
we lay in the grass and the clouds
made sense to me. That's who I'll be,

I said to my friend."


This is a terrific book of poems.