David Lanier (Poetry ’94) is a retired family physician and the author of the chapbook Lost & Found, winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Prize from the Texas Review Press. In 2015 he established the Rodney Jack Scholarship for LGBTQ students in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, and has recently augmented his contribution so that the fund can now support two qualified candidates each semester. The following is David’s remembrance of the late Warren Wilson MFA alum for whom the scholarship is named. David and his husband currently live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Remembering Rodney Jack
I never got to know Rodney Jack as well as I would have liked to. And for reasons I’ll explain later, I’ve thus far been able to read only about a dozen or so of the poems he wrote in his relatively short lifetime. But that, for me, has been enough to convince me that he was an extraordinary person and poet. His work first gained wide recognitionin 1999, around the time of his graduation from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, when five of his poems were published as a group in Poetry. The magazine further honored this set of poems by awarding Rodney the prestigious Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize later that year. Here is one of those poems, written soon after he found out that he was HIV positive:
After The Diagnosis
They erected a chainlink fence around
Peachtree Mortgage & Loan,
the building I once climbed
by way of a drainpipe and a tree-of-heaven
to the hot tar top, closer to a box maple’s
topmost bejeweled branches — laden with samaras.
Stomping through a plush rug
of creeper and fallen sourwood flowers, I know
that I’m alive — as Darwin described it:
greedily hungry, fit to survive —
not the least bit concerned with fences.
I scale the chainlink, then the building,
sit on the roof dreaming
of my future house: vaulted ceilings,
walls mostly windows looking out to a yard
lush with royal paulownia, black locust,
angel hair also known as mimosa —
those trees like weeds that grow where they can,
beside a dumpster, gutter, punched through
a sidewalk crack, whose numbers
are legion and whose flowers are proud,
like the sourwood lilies I tread on my way home.
I keep coming back to this poem because it captures so well the essence of the Rodney Jack I knew. Two things in particular haunt me about this poem. The first is the poet’s remarkable restraint. Since the title tells us that the poem’s narrator has recently received some unfortunate, if not devastating, news about his health, we might expect the reaction to be somewhere between despair, agitation and hysterical wailing. Instead, he chooses to describe for us, in a calm, contained way, a day of boy-like climbing over vines and chainlink fence, up a drainpipe, to a rooftop retreat for a moment’s reverie among the lushness of nature. The only indication we get that strong emotion may be pent up or smoldering beneath the poem’s smooth surface comes in the second stanza when the familiar feel of nature beneath his feet assures the narrator that he is not only alive but “fit to survive.” With that thought in mind, the following third and fourth stanzas — all one sentence — seem to come rushing out of him like a controlled sigh or a song: intake of breath before the colon, followed by an extended exhalation that’s syntactically complex and saturated with detail. It sounds to me almost like a wishful prayer or a sung ode to survival. The other haunting characteristic of the poem is its pervasive sense of, not loneliness, but aloneness, separateness. The narrator has literally been fenced out, and although he claims to be “not the least bit concerned with fences,” he’s nonetheless forced to see the world from the other side. At what must be a very difficult time in his life, the narrator has escaped to an out-of-way place where he chooses to look neither inward nor to others for solace. Instead, he looks outat the comforting beauty of the natural world that alone feels welcoming.
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