Dispatch from the Archives is a regular column about work previously published in Southwest Review. The magazine is the third-longest-running literary quarterly in the United States, and its archives date back to 1915. This edition looks at two poems by Joyce Carol Oates and Henri Cole from volume 74, number 4.
Behind my home, a mile down the running trail, near the overgrowth separating the path from an abandoned railway track, on any hot early morning, you might find an armadillo. I plan my summer runs around their most active hours, desperate to observe their world. I’ve gone down countless internet rabbit holes researching these critters. One of my favorite discoveries? When nine-banded armadillos mate, the females experience delayed implantation (a lag between mating and fertilization). That single egg divides into four, which results in identical quadruplets, every single time. Who doesn’t love a bizarre animal sex fact.
The armadillos emerged from their burrows early this year—already 80 degrees in February. I myself was ready to burrow away from the heat in Southwest Review’s basement office. That same week, I’d been reading a back issue from 1989 because I was excited about an Ursula K. Le Guin story (which I’ll circle back to in another column). But what really struck me this particular week was the interplay between two poems in that issue.
Joyce Carol Oates and Henri Cole appear only a few pages apart in the Autumn 1989 issue of Southwest Review. Both poems center an animal as the main subject. Both poems consider desire. Both poems make a statement about love in the final line. The parallels feel too obvious to ignore.
The Oates poem, “Loves of the Parrots,” opens with exclamatory wonderment:
Giant parrots of Yucatán perching
splendid in the sun! Bright green,
bright yellow, bright
arterial red!
The speaker of the poem is so exclamatory, in fact, that only the final sentence ends with a period. There’s an unstable nature to the barrage of exclamations. And wonder quickly transforms into trepidation with the appearance of that jarring adjective arterial. The speaker then comments on the nature of the male birds’ desire for the females: their “mad eyes ringed in white!” and “bloody breast-feathers.” The language is direct in its violence, culminating in the poem’s thesis, stated clearly in the final line: “Love, not death, is the bitter thing.” And look, I love a poem that really hammers down on strange punctuation like this one does. But the final line, the bloodiness, the sardonic speaker—they all feel a bit contrived. What makes this poem wildly more interesting to me is its proximity to Henri Cole’s.
Cole’s poem, just a few pages away, opens with a similar state of animal observation. The speaker watches his dog, Caesar:
Nose pressed against the glass,
Caesar sighs as morning
appointments arrive wincing
with pitiful yelps and cries that
undermine fidelity.
In the poem, Caesar is a “clumsy prairie dog” pining after the city’s ritziest hounds, carried about “like hairy princes or barons” to their salon appointments. It’s a waggish (I couldn’t help myself) commentary on social-class dynamics, and the descriptions are pitch-perfect:
He tugs me along the avenue,
his tousled hair-do one giant
cowlick crowning
a foursome of hand-me-down
paws.
This blundering dog pulling the speaker down the street has only “love’s unharnessed zest” in mind. And even if he’s neutered, Caesar is driven by a desire that ignores pedigree.
Regardless of their similarities in subject matter, the tone of these two works could not be more different. Alone, the Oates poem is an earnest reminder of the brutality of love; the Cole takes a more playful approach. But when you place these poems in conversation, they recomplicate. They inform. They move, nonlinear. A third conclusion arises. It is not about the nature of animal desire; rather, it’s about human nature, projecting our desire onto other animals.
Curatorial decisions can create new meaning. The simple act of collecting two different writers into one literary body means that you have to think about their relationship to each other. By 1989, Joyce Carol Oates was already a household name and a National Book Award winner. Henri Cole was at the beginning of his writing career, a debut poet on the verge of releasing his second collection. These whistling poems have stayed with me, even after I placed the two writers back on the bookshelf. The cover of this issue, though faded with age, is red. Bright and arterial. Animalistic and beating with desire.
Read the poems by Oates and Cole.
Hannah Smith is a poet from Dallas. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
