Saplings in the Inkwell

By Austin Spendlowe

In a famous letter to the classicist E.R. Dodds, dated 16 January 1940, W.H. Auden explained his aim to live ‘deliberately without roots’ after upping sticks to the States. Seventy-five years on, Ange Mlinko gathers up those roots that Auden hoped to do without — roots in language, plants, and place — and sets them to work in her new book Foxglovewise (2025). Mlinko’s work as a poet, teacher, and critic has captivated American poetry audiences for several decades, but this collection is her first to publish in the UK. It is a staggering testament to a poet at the peak of her powers and I was very grateful to talk to Ange about it in late November.

Foxglovewise proves itself a canny little coinage. Its suffix implies a way of moving (c.f., slantwise, clockwise), a hunch confirmed by the question in Louise Glück’s ‘Matins’ that becomes the book’s epigraph: ‘are you like the hawthorn tree’, Glück asks, ‘always in the same place’, ‘or are you more the foxglove’, that is to say ‘inconsistent’, ‘first springing up […] behind the daisies,’ then ‘in the rose garden’? Foxglovewise’s thirty-two ensuing poems inhabit Glück’s extended metaphor in style and substance. Glück’s style lends Foxglovewise the botanist’s phrasebook, from which Mlinko cultivates a far-ranging mythology of language. In essence, Glück’s metaphor paraphrases Isaiah Berlin’s old toss-up between the singularly-minded Hedgehog and the ready-witted Fox. Mlinko responds with a book-length endorsement of the Fox’s fleet-footed pragmatism. To Mlinko, the epigraph spells out Foxglovewise’s central question: ‘are you a plant of the air, or of the ground?’

The foxglove’s knack for growing where it can makes it pragmatic, as Mlinko insists the best poets must be. ‘I grew up with this notion of pragmatism very strongly’, she explains, ‘it is a refugee state of mind.’ Mlinko’s parents entered the US separately in 1961 and 1962 and met in the ‘immigrant circles and social clubs around Philadelphia’, where Mlinko was born. Their routes to Pennsylvania from Hungary and Belarus took them first to Brazil. Mlinko’s parents spoke Portuguese at home and wanted for Ange — their eldest daughter — ‘education and money’. ‘You can imagine their chagrin,’ Mlinko recalls with some relish, ‘when I told them I was going to be a writer’: her father’s reluctant approval came only on the proviso that Mlinko became an airport bestseller, ‘the next Danielle Steele’. Thankfully, things did not pan out that way, but the ethos her parents instilled in her early lives on in Mlinko’s writerly practice: ‘The idea of having roots, of having no roots,’ she tells me, ‘goes deep.’

Mlinko’s poetic cogs are always whirring. ‘There is something of Auden’s industry in me,’ she says, ‘at a time when the world expects its poets to write to an occasion.’ She believes that poetry runs not on occasions, but on ‘the petroleum of the soul’, a reserve of continual practice and experience. Age is a boon to Mlinko because ‘there are literally more resources to call on.’ But however abundant those resources might be, it takes a resourceful poet to put them to good use. ‘Language,’ Mlinko holds, ‘is very much like vegetation,’ compressed over time into the ‘fossil fuels’ that power the best poetry. ‘My metaphor,’ as Mlinko calls it, governs all that she writes. Characteristically, it is an old idea, known equally well to philologists as to the Poet in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, who likens ‘Our poesy’ to ‘a gum’ — or sap — ‘which oozes from whence ‘tis nourished’. For Mlinko, this nourishment is a constant practice: ‘I expect to think about a poem every day and see, is there anything in the inkwell?’

Her inkwell often seems to fill with the ghosts of poets-past, as in ‘All Souls’ Night’, whose title recalls W.B. Yeats’ great poem. Yeats’ dictum that ‘a poem comes right with the click of a closing box’ cannot have been far from Mlinko’s mind when she chose to set her Yeatsian séance inside a chess box. Its cast of ‘blond and ebony’ figures transports her back to childhood, her grandfather’s copy of Pushkin and chess lessons with her father. Her family and literary forbears constitute ‘the dead who raised me,’ lovingly inscribed in Mlinko’s final line. It is Yeats, however, who hovers over the poem’s richest formulation, its ‘aspirational stanzas.’ For, as Mlinko parenthetically puts it, ‘(it knows the ways I betray my original)’. ‘[A]spirational’ hints not only at Mlinko’s wish to aspire to their example but also, as Mlinko explains, to ‘the fumes that aspire from Yeats’s wine glass’ at the start of his ‘All Souls’ Night’.

Mlinko stacks these allusions in coolly cross-rhymed stanzas, stratified like a geologist’s cross-section of the earth, something which ‘Elegy and Bourbon’ makes explicit. Its abcabc rhyme pattern undergirds the thoughts of a grieving speaker, sat watching the Kentucky Derby in a bar. The horses hurtle by; their hooves threaten to shatter the earth’s ‘thin crust’ and expose what lies below. Deep in the poem’s belly, Mlinko defers again to Auden in the inherited noun ‘Mutterland’, his pet name for the Pennine Chain’s limestone landscape: here she shoots a glance to Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’, a poem similarly fascinated with what lurks beneath the earth’s jagged exterior.

Admitting that the joy of formal poetry lies in how it looks, Mlinko’s are tidy pages, whose stanzas look like a well-kept garden. That said, she is no topiarist: her margins are not cut straight in the word processor but testify to the wonderfully wonky mess of the natural world. Quoting Derek Mahon, she claims that the best poems ‘offer themselves up as objects of order and grace.’ If that is the rule, then ‘The Missing Nymph at Dry Tortugas’ is truly exceptional. It is a stunted sonnet redoublé that opens in Key West, at Fort Jefferson’s sixteen million bricks, and continues with the help of a Nancy Drew mystery and Gildersleeve and Lodge’s obscure Latin Grammar (1895). ‘They just rhymed in my mind,’ she remarks of these works of romp and reference, which she found together ‘at a library sale in Key West’. These sonnets on decay culminate in a rubbly, echoic poem. It harks back, as Mlinko explains, ‘to the echo scene in The Duchess of Malfi’, where echoes spill onto the stage from the Duchess’s grave. What spills onto Mlinko’s page is a raft of explanatory notes, and the quip that her Latin Grammar ‘is, no doubt, a Key to the West’.

An important key to Mlinko’s intricate craft is the anagram. Sometimes an anagram will complete the line, but, more often than not, an anagram will open the door on a whole philosophy. In ‘Radishes’, Mlinko is expository about the nature of anagrams. ‘Best is raw’, she claims, which we are reminded is ‘‘war backwards’’; that these words are the mirror image of each other is ‘like a spell [/] grown in the cold ground’. When I ask Mlinko if her simile here should gloss anagrams everywhere in the book, she returns, ‘I do have a sense that the alphabet is a bit of occult machinery’. Where the anagram that concludes ‘Radishes’ is perfect in print, Mlinko insists that the anagram’s especial value lies in its ‘sounds’, too. She observes that ‘there is a bias against the poem on the page’ and is determined to disprove the notion that ‘we have declined into page-based poetry from a golden age of sound poetry’. Mlinko calls Ovid’s Latin verse to the stand: ‘there are anagrams galore, sight rhymes, mirrorings and chiasmi.’

The best defence of Mlinko’s case is Foxglovewise itself, whose poems celebrate sight and sound in poetry. In ‘Flamboyance’, a flamingo is dislodged from its pack (n.b. the collective noun for flamingos is flamboyance) and the force that tore it from its course is styled as ‘a hurricane (or an archangel)’. The bracketed revision invites us to inspect these loosely anagrammatical nouns side by side, to savour their sounds, which loop like ‘rumour’s [/] rippling circles’. ‘Flamboyance’ demonstrates Mlinko’s talents at the microscopic level: when we look through the ‘binoculars’ that she hands us in the poem’s closing lines, we do indeed ‘catch fire and water coexisting’. Close inspection of this kind, however, has its limits. As Mlinko avers in the penultimate sonnet of the ‘Chekhov in the Gulf of Mexico’ cycle, it is ‘[b]etter to languish on those balconies’ than to reach for ‘the telescope which brings a star [/] too close’. Throughout Foxglovewise, Mlinko diligently stewards mystery, does not permit ‘too close’ a view of what is going on. Her cunningly intermittent anagrams are indispensable in this mission.

Foxglovewise’s first poem picks up where Auden leaves off in ‘Notes on Music and Opera’. ‘Every high C accurately struck,’ he avers in the essay’s last sentence, ‘demolishes the theory that we are irresponsible puppets of fate and chance.’ It found its way into Mlinko’s commonplace book some time ago and struck her as ‘the most optimistic, most hopeful possible quote.’ The singer’s high C stands for artistic aspiration and achievement: ‘Auden believed it and he was more intelligent than most, so I believe it.’ Mlinko regrets how our world is too often given over to disenchantment and despair at the thought that we are just creatures of a random universe. ‘I really see those puppets,’ she confides, ‘scrambling for some evidence that we have a purpose.’ With Foxglovewise, we need not scramble any longer: Mlinko’s relentless optimism sets the salvific force of poetry beyond the bounds of doubt.

AUSTIN SPENDLOWE is a pocket history of the world.

Art by Federica Pescini