Replete

 

 

 

On the Other Hand

 

 

Pen to Paper

 

 

 

 

 

Craft Talk

 

 

I did not know then (nor, for that matter,

do I know now) how to do what it is

I’m doing, other than to try to use my pen

to lure whatever creatures may reside

just out of sight onto the blank page and

into the light. Not unlike a guitarist

fingering notes at random until a song

begins to take shape as if by accident,

or a poet jotting lists of random words,

only afterwards making note of the echoes,

overtones, emergent patterns, misdirections,

dead ends. After which what remains may,

on a good day, take on a life of its own,

and turn out at last to be a pleasant surprise.

 

World Wisdom

 

 

 World Wisdom: What you see is what you get.

Theo of Golden

 

  

 

        A few weeks ago, a friend of mine recommended to me a book he was reading: Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi. A few days later, I was visiting Town Books, the second-hand bookstore sponsored by our local library, and saw a copy of Theo of Golden on the rack which features currently in-demand titles. When I brought it to the register, the woman checking me out told me that it was a book that people either seemed to really like or really dislike. She asked me to let her know, after I had read it, what I thought about it. 
      I went back about three days later and gave her the verdict. I didn’t just like it, I loved it. I can understand why certain kinds of readers driven by excitement—car chases, complicated love affairs, alien invasions, and the like—would not find this book to their taste. Nor would readers who seek out edgy or intellectually sophisticated experimental prose find much in this book to relate to. Some might find it corny, or too slow. Some may be put off by some of the religious overtones, which are present but not done heavy-handedly.
      But if you’re open to reading a character-based book which takes seriously the question of what it means to be a compassionate and responsible person in a world that too often seems to reward those with the loudest voices, I don’t think you’ll find anything quite like Theo of Golden. It’s a very quiet book whose main character embodies a set of subtle and decidedly un-hip notions about what it might mean to live well. 
      
      Theo—we don’t learn his full name until late in the book—is a man in his mid-80s who grew up in Portugal and spent a lot of his adult life in New York City. He turns up one day in the (fictional) small town of Golden, Georgia, and spends his first few days there walking around and getting to know the town a little bit. He becomes a regular at a coffee shop called The Chalice. He likes the vibe there, and starts returning regularly. The main line of the story develops when he notices and begins to study the artwork on the walls of the shop:
      

      On the left, right, and rear walls were portraits, ninety-two of them in total, done in pencil on white paper and in black frames of three sizes. All had obviously been done by the same artist. And, as if to reflect the customers in the shop at that moment, the collection included a full range of humanity —age, race, and expression. Portraits and portraits and more portraits.
      Even from the distance between himself and those framed faces, Theo perceived the richness of detail and delicacy with which they had been rendered. There was a quality to them, an aliveness, that would almost make one believe the people portrayed were spectators of the Chalice rather than mere adornments on the walls. (7)

      
      Theo asks the owner, Shep Carlisle, about the portraits, and is told that they are the work of a local artist, and that the people depicted are all shop customers who live in Golden. But for some reason, Shep tells him, the portraits have not been selling. Theo decides that he will buy some of them and present them as gifts to the people portrayed. That decision is the engine that drives the events of the story. After purchasing a picture, he hand-writes a letter to the person depicted and invites them to meet him at a bench in the local park, so that he can gift them the portrait.  In this manner, we are introduced to each character, one at a time, and we are able witness to the interaction between each of them and Theo. Of particular interest are the moments when Theo speaks with them about the impressions he has of them from having carefully studied the portraits, and the ways in which they are able to affirm or correct his initial impressions.
      
      One of the great pleasures of reading this book is in its rendering of the backstories of each of these individuals.  As Theo describes them, the portraits themselves are perceptive and masterfully rendered by the artist. But Allen Levi’s clear and precise descriptions of these individuals and the circumstances of their lives are no less perceptive and no less masterful. 
      
      There are of course conflicts that arise, and there are characters in the book who are every bit as contentious and complicated as the people you might run into on a busy day in your local supermarket. But the effect of Levi’s narration is to bring us into a pleasant and fully realized fictional world.
      
      In the beginning, many of the locals have their guard up. Many are mistrustful of this stranger’s motives and wary that it must be some kind of scam. But Theo’s gentle and attentive manner, not to mention his generosity in the bestowal of these gifts, wins them over. They come to accept him and befriend him. Of course, they have questions, and they are the questions that generate interest for us as readers as well. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? Why did he come here? Why is he doing this? By the end of the book, all of those questions have been answered, for the townspeople and for us as readers.
      
      Levi’s prose style, as I suggested above, is unadorned but effectively pictorial. The passage below comes in the middle of the book when Theo is thinking back to an encounter he had as a young boy walking along the shores of a river in his home town in Portugal, an encounter which sparks what turns out for him to be a lifelong engagement with an interest the world of art:
    

      Near the boat on the riverbank stood a fisherman whom Theo had never seen before. The man wore high rubber boots, a short-brimmed cap, and the working clothes of a commoner. His heavy shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, was stained with the evidence of a day's catch. He was stocky and muscular, a fact that became clearer as Theo walked toward the man. Heavy stubble highlighted his strong, square jawline. Thick eyebrows guarded dark, serious eyes. 
      At first, Theo could not tell what the fisherman was doing. As he stepped closer, however, he realized the man was painting a picture, standing at an artist's easel, facing west. The man held a palette with small bowls of color in his left hand and a paintbrush in his right. His eyes were fixed intently on the sunset and the distant shore…
      Theo stood behind the stranger, with only a few feet between them, and watched as the western horizon took shape in miniature on the canvas. With each brushstroke, the fisher-painter's sinewy arms rippled, as they did, no doubt, when he pulled at his net or fishing lines. In both cases, the man was in quest of a catch. At the moment, he was intent on catching the sky in front of him. (175-6)

      
      The passage continues and gains significance as it does so. But what impresses me the most about the passage is the precision with which the man and the moment are captured. The closing metaphor of “catching the sky in front of him” also gives us a window into the way that Theo’s mind works. He’s an attentive, curious, thoughtful kid who grows up into an attentive, curious, thoughtful adult. With a lot of bumps along the way.
      
      I’m a little late to the party with this one; it was published in 2023. But as Ann Patchett likes to say in her Instagram posts, “If you haven’t read this book, it’s new to you.” I recommend that if you have not read it, you might at least want give it a try. You’ll know after ten pages or so whether it is going to speak to you as it speaks to me.
 

Explorations

 

My default process when writing is closely akin to my process when beginning a drawing or collage. I put a blank piece of paper on the desktop and begin with a mark of some kind: a word or phrase, if I’m writing; a shape, if I’m drawing; a scrap of paper if I’m starting a collage. Donald Barthelme puts it in a way that makes sense to me:

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

                                             
After that I proceed by making another, and another, and another, pushing into the space and watching what emerges as I work. As Billy Collins puts it:

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.

The core concept, the fundamental practice, is thus purely explorational. I don’t know what I’m doing when I begin. And often, when I have finished, I would be hard-pressed to describe what I have done. The artwork, if it is successful, will speak for itself, and will invite the viewer to participate in the creation of whatever “meaning” the work might be understood to have. The “meaning” derived by one viewer will in all likelihood vary considerably from the meaning derived by another.

If this seems to be a somewhat arbitrary and potentially confusing way of proceeding, so be it. I find that submitting myself to this process to be both entertaining and, in the long run, very satisfying. (This all should sound vaguely familiar to anyone who has read my previous post about “the open text” in general and the poetry of Cole Swensen in particular.)

Anyway, all that I have written so far is by way of introduction to a few pieces I have recently completed which combine collage-making of a sort and drawing of a sort. In each case the artwork began as pure collage (pasting paper on paper), and upon completion of the collage work the pen-and-ink elements were added. I had not until recently thought to combine the two, but what resulted when I did so interests me:

 

 

 

On Reading On: Cole Swensen and the Open Text.

 

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time over the last few months reading poetry and essays by Cole Swensen. She’s the author of more than a dozen books of poetry that range from more or less traditional descriptions and meditations to more experimental “open texts.” In an essay entitled “The Rejection of Closure,” Lyn Hejinian has described this kind of writing as follows:

The “open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification.

This kind of writing, in other words, is concerned less in presenting the reader with a narrative or argument that can be paraphrased or “understood,” and more in providing the reader with an opportunity to enter into a kind of dialogue with the writer about how the juxtaposition of certain kinds of words or images might offer food for thought. In an interview in the Georgia Review, Swensen puts it this way:

I have a strong conviction that poetry’s role is to expand language. And there are so many ways that can be done—through innovative syntax, sound relationships that create new connections, images that do the same. Expanding language is so often a matter of creating new connections, which sometimes extend the network and at other times make existing linguistic networks more intricate. In other words, expanding language doesn’t only mean enabling it to cover new expressive territory, but also making existing expressive territory denser, quicker, more intense. Much great poetry seems to create an arc that spans from the concrete and graspable to the slipping-out-of-your-hands, and the leaps we make to catch that which is slipping land us in new regions, while allowing us to remain anchored in the “understandable.” I put “understandable” in scare-quotes because I’m not sure that poetry is ever about understanding—when we understand something, we’re necessarily standing outside of it, whereas poetry uses language in such a way that we don’t understand it, but experience it, participate in it.

 

As an example of what a poem of this kind might look like, I’d like to offer a short poem from Swensen’s 2004 collection Goest:

The First Lightbulb

precise erase 

 

a gate again 

 

where the sky died 

 

in a coin

This is a poem which I imagine that most readers, even dedicated readers of poetry, might initially find bewildering. I myself cannot claim to “understand,” but I’ve spent literally dozens of hours over a period of weeks inside this poem. I’ve read it, re-read it, memorized it, graphed some of its observable structural and sonic devices, recited it to myself while walking or washing the dishes. And even after all this time it still fascinates me. It is in some ways like a koan, in that it is short and invites thoughtful consideration without necessarily promising revelation as its end goal. It’s clear to me that no amount of further study will bring me to “closure” with this poem, but it’s precisely its open-endedness that keeps looping me back into it.

In the title essay from her remarkable book of essays Noise That Stays Noise, Swensen makes a distinction between the message of a poem and what she calls the “noise” within it, and offers a surprising (to me) redefinition of poetry:

Each source of noise corresponds to a different subsystem of the poem, such as the denotative system, the metaphoric system, the image system, the syntactical system, the rhythmic system, the system of sound relationships, and so on. What is information to any one of these subsystems may be noise to the others; for instance, the syntactical system may create difficulties for an appreciation of the denotative system in isolation (odd syntax can make it more difficult for a reader to know literally what is being said). Both systems are in themselves instances of organization, and these organizations can interfere with each other. However, at a "higher" level of organization, such as that of the entire poem, they can work together to create a more complex body of information. The more we look at possible sources and manifestations of noise, the more it seems that in terms of all literature, but most acutely with poetry, information itself must be redefined… Perhaps poetry itself can be defined as those literary instances of language in which the nonquantifiable aspects of its information overshadow the quantifiable.

“The First Lightbulb” is to my mind a pretty good example of a poem which a) foregrounds the “nonquantifiable” aspects of poetry, b) makes interesting use of juxtaposition and disjunction, and c) invites the participation of the reader in the creation of the meaning of the poem. Before you continue reading this post, I invite you to spend, say, ten minutes reading this poem and noticing whatever it is you notice about its vocabulary, its architecture, its sound relationships, its use of white space, and so on. I’ll pause here so you can try.

- - - - -

(Soothing music playing in the background.)

- - - - -

Okay, we’re back. I hope you enjoyed that. (Feel free to let me know what you came up with.) 

My own “reading” leads me to the following observations (among many others):

• It’s clear that there is no “message” that a reader can reasonably be expected to infer or intuit. 

• It consists of a series of words placed in what feels like a very deliberate set of parallelisms. “Precise erase,” for example, juxtaposes two words of two syllables each. The first syllable in each poem features a long e sound; the second syllable in each features another long vowel sound followed in both cases by -se. “a gate again” demonstrates a similar kind of mirroring, but with slightly different dynamics. There’s a repeated a-g-a sequence that is re-emphasized by the fact that the second word is “again,” which seems to gesture both backward toward the first line and forward toward the next, which (again) features two words with matching long vowel sounds: the sky died.

• The last line is a logical jump shift in several ways simultaneously. It doesn’t seem to connect syntactically in any obvious way with the lightbulb, with the gate, or with the sky. (Although it does, interestingly, begin and end with the same two letters: another mirroring.) It’s a line that raises questions just at the point where we might have been expecting closure. I’m quite sure that that is not accidental. In everyday parlance, the logical leap is not a bug, it’s a feature. It is one of the things that encourages me to go back to the top and start reading again, and as I have continued to do so I have managed to spend many pleasurable hours inside this poem.

• Despite whatever interpretive challenges the poem may present, it's clear that it has been very carefully constructed. The bulk of the poem, if we consider it as a structure, seems to consist of white space interrupted by verbal artifacts. In that sense, it reminds me a lot of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, in which various objects and shapes hang balanced in space, as if in distant conversation with one another. This poem also seems to stand in relation to traditional representational poetry as abstract art does in relation to traditional representational art: asking the viewer to set aside whatever previous expectations they might have had about what is supposed to be the case and engage with the work as a unique field of energies. It's not simply not an act of verbal communication, but also—and in some cases primarily—a created object: a sculpture made not of wood or wire or stone, but of words. (Tangentially related note: Three years ago I wrote a series of posts about Renee Gladman, who is also very interested exploring the way that sentences might be read as structures, and vice versa. And it turns out that Cole Swensen has written about Gladman as well, in her recent book Art in Time.)

• Even given the premise that the poem is not primarily concerned with meaning, it is of course inevitable that any reader, myself included, will be tempted to try to tease one out. Humans are pattern-making creatures, wired to seek meaning even where there clearly is none. That’s how we wind up with descriptions of the constellations and origin myths and suchlike. I might, for example, be tempted to take the title “The First Lightbulb” as a metaphor for coming up with a new idea, and then follow that thought into the elements of idea-generation such as precision and revision (precise, erase), to passing through a gate (again) to a new state of consciousness where even the things we are most familiar with are withdrawn (where the sky died, even if they were previously thought to be set in stone, or, more precisely, in metal (in a coin). 

Having done so, I have no real reason to think that such a reading of the poem is plausible, much less definitive. There are alternative readings of the poem that might be attempted. But to what end? The problem with this kind of “reading” is that it reduces the multifaceted, open-ended experience of reality to something easier to "understand" but existentially inaccurate and impoverished. (Stephen Dobyns, in his book Next Word, Better Word, extends the logic of this argument to the deployment of any language in any circumstances: “No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described.”)
 
Those of you who have been following this blog for any length of time know that in addition to my interests in teaching and in writing, I have for many years now been a maker of collages, and other sorts of artwork. I see concerns in this poem with many of the same elements that I am very much aware of when I am working with my own materials: lines, shapes, juxtapositions, contrasts, negative space, and so on.

Needless to say, the time that I have spent reading Swensen’s poetry, as well as that of other poets she discusses in her essays like Peter Gizzi and Susan Howe and Charles Olson, has led me to reconsider my own default notions of what poetry is and how I have gone about writing it in the past. I host a poetry group that meets weekly on zoom, at which each of us presents a poem we have written in order to get feedback from the others about what works for them and what does not. As I have begun trying to put into practice some of Cole Swensen’s notions about poetry as a zone for “expanding language” into new expressive territories, I have on more than one occasion been asked by a member of the group, “What makes this poetry?” That's a terrific question. It’s the kind of question that starts to open doors in the mind. And an open door is an invitation ("a gate, again"?) to step through and behold what surprising realities might be waiting for you on the other side.

What I've Learned

 

What I've Learned

 

 

Alas, not much. But not nothing, either. A place to start,

to begin with. Point A, as when the pen meets the paper

 

for the first time, and keeps moving until it stops and lifts,

or doubles back on itself to make a shape of some kind.

 

Or continues on into the white space, meandering,

trying to discover what it's meant to become this time.

 

Boundaries are helpful. You can go in one direction

only so long without getting lost. Better to return

 

home on occasion and consider whether to expand,

consolidate, change course entirely, or begin again.

 

The choices you make at any particular time are

mostly a matter of intuition. Often one move

 

will dictate the next, and the one after that, in a way

that will, with luck, deliver what you never saw coming:

 

A flower. A comet. A house. A star. A beating heart.

Process Reflection:

This is a poem written after I completed the pen-and-ink drawing in my previous post. The poem is a reflection on the process of drawing in general and of drawing that picture in particular; it is also, inevitably, a parallel reflection on the writing process as I understand it and practice it. Formally, I was attempting several things at once. I originally had it in mind that it would be a sonnet, or at least sonnet-ish, and that each line would contain 14 syllables. When I got to the end of fourteen lines, I found that the logic of the poem as it had unfolded in the writing suggested that I needed one more line, which was a) a surprise to me (I hadn't planned to do that) but also b) a surprise in the poem that mirrored or echoed the surprise that I felt once I had completed the drawing and began to see things in it that I had not completely intended. Although I think looking at the picture may help snap the intention of the poem into focus, I hope that the poem works as a standalone written document as well.

Back to the Drawing Board

 

 

 

 

This is the most recent in a long line of pen-and-ink drawings I have done over the last fifteen or twenty years. I have a particular way of working that has evolved over time. Most of the drawings are done on Bristol paper, which has a very smooth surface that accepts a clean line, and doesn't tear up the tips of the Pigma Micron pens (usually .05 or .08) that I like because the ink dries quickly and is waterproof.

I find the process of drawing to be enjoyable, a way of centering myself. I most often listen to music, humming or singing along to myself while I am drawing. I begin by penciling in the rectangle that I'm going to work within. I used to do the drawing first and add the surrounding rectangle, afterwards, but discovered that it is prohibitively expensive to pay for mats and frames in custom sizes, so in recent years I pick a standard-sized mat, measure out the opening in the mat, and then draw very lightly in pencil the lines that will form the outer edges of the finished drawings.

I never have a plan laid out in advance when I draw, I just put the tip of the pen down on the paper and draw some kind of shape and fill it in, then do another next to that, and another next to that. I leave white space between each shape, and as I work the white space, the negative space, starts to assert itself as a compositional focus that often outweighs the shapes I have actually drawn. At some point I will draw straight lines, like the diagonals in the picture above, to subdivide the paper into sections. In terms of composition, my goal is to wind up with a some stylistic consistency within each section and stylistic variety from section to section. (In an earlier post I wrote a poem about how this process works.)

Obviously this drawing is not a literal representation of anything to be found it the world. It's more or less a pure abstraction, although inevitably some abstracted elements will wind up suggesting something to whoever looks at the drawing. While it's not unusual for people to tell me when they "see" something in the drawing, it is very unusual for that something to be anything I had consciously included. An example in this case is the small rectangular shape in the middle right of the picture which reads as perhaps a house or a face sitting atop something that might be read as a star. I find it interesting when those elements make their presence known as I draw, but I can't say that I have planned them. I accept them as pleasant surprises, or as evidence of my subconscious tossing up something I was not expecting and will not immediately—or perhaps ever—understand. Even the large flowery shape at the upper left emerged mostly because I was working to fill in the negative spaces left by the sixteen smaller shapes surrounding it. I was also consciously trying to introduce some semitones in the form of dots and thin lines to contrast with the more heavily contrasted black and white sections in the rest of the drawing. It became a plant form only by default.

I've had a lifelong interest in art, and have a large collection of books related to drawing and painting and collage. One of the things that satisfies me about the work that I have been doing is that there is nothing like it out there anywhere. There's some Zentangle stuff that I took an interest in for a while, but most of what I saw out there seemed to me to be over-structured and stylistically repetitive. This art is my art. Each time I sit down to draw it's an adventure of sorts, a process of exploration and observation. I enjoy making the drawing, and I enjoy studying the resulting artwork once it is made.

These kinds of drawings do not lend themselves to explanation. There's not much that I or anyone else could offer by way of paraphrase or summary. I could describe in words what goes on in my head when looking at any one section, or at the drawing as a whole, but that would be a pretty pointless exercise. They exist in a non-verbal plane.

Which is not to say that there are no parallels between what I am doing when I draw and what I am doing when I write poetry, or prose, for that matter. My writing practice is not unlike my drawing practice. Probably the most simple and elegant articulation of that process, whether working as an artist or as a writer, has been attributed to Jasper Johns: Do something. Then do something to that. Then do something to that.

I'm sure that there are some people, and you, Gentle Reader, may very well be one of them, who would question why any sane person, given the ongoing political and environmental chaos going on in the world and getting worse every day, would choose to spend his time producing hermetical drawings or often well-nigh incomprehensible poems. My response is pretty simple. There is little or nothing I can do at the personal level to deal with any of that stuff. I'm an old man. I do not see any reason to choose to spend the limited amount of time I have left on this planet tilting at windmills. My art, and my poetry, is something that gives me pleasure while I do it, and some small measure of satisfaction when it is done. Granted, the value that accrues from it does not have a positive impact on the world as it is. But it helps me to navigate and endure that world, for as long as I remain a part of it.

I'll bookend this post with the followup drawing I completed yesterday:

 

Intermezzo

            Sally Rooney has a large number of readers who enjoy and admire her work and an equally large (or perhaps larger) number of readers who dismiss her out of hand as a niche writer catering to GenXrs ("the Salinger of the Snapchat generation") by mirroring their romantic preoccupations. In his NY Times review of her latest novel, Intermezzo, Dwight Garner leads with an acknowledgment of the "Rooney backlash" before mounting a strong defense of the book. And so I find myself in the unusual position of siding with Dwight Garner, no stranger to snarky dismissiveness himself, in his assessment. Because Intermezzo, in my opinion, isn't just a good book, it's a terrific book, in pretty much every respect. It centers largely on five characters. Ivan is a 22-year-old chess prodigy. His brother Peter, ten years older, is a successful lawyer. They are both in mourning for the recent death of their father, and, from early on in the novel, they are both involved in complicated but utterly convincing relationships. Ivan falls deeply for Margaret, a woman in her mid-thirties. Peter has a close relationship with Sylvia, an ex-lover his own age with whom he still keeps in touch, but he is also involved with Naomi,  a younger woman who seems to be using him for her own purposes at the same that he uses her for his. In the process they manage, without necessarily intending to do so, to create something that feels very much—first to the reader, and then to the characters themselves—like love. Peter and Ivan have a different kind of complicated (and convincing) relationship, elements of fondness and love warring against elements of resentment and dismissiveness as they try to find their way toward one another.

 

            A summary of this kind perhaps makes it all sound like some kind of hipster soap opera. What saves it from being so is Rooney's uncanny ability to render the events of the story from inside the heads of each of her characters. I don't recall having read a book which so strongly conveys what it's like to be torn in three directions at once as one attempts to decide what to do in a particular situation. Here's an example in which Margaret, who has just met Ivan at a chess match at a venue where she was the hostess, offers to give him a ride back to his room. They are both aware that there is something in the air between them, but neither of them is possessed of the sophisticated social skills that more experienced (and perhaps more jaded) proto-lovers would use to gloss over the awkwardness. The paragraph serves the very straightforward narrative purpose of getting Ivan from point A to point B. But Rooney follows Margaret's thoughts very carefully as Margaret considers not only her own feelings in the moment, but Ivan's as well:

 

Outside, the car park is glowing with the skeletal orange light of the streetlamps, the paved surfaces dappled and glistening. She turns on her wipers and they click and scrape rhythmically over the windscreen. It happens all the time that she drives someone home like this, or drops them to the station, and they sit in the car together this way, chatting about something. It’s just work. And if Ivan doesn’t want to chat, if he wants to sit there looking at his hands and then looking at her and back at his hands again, that’s okay — he’s only twenty-two, and very gifted at one particular kind of board game, and after all there’s no formal etiquette for the situation. Finding yourself in the car of an older woman after a presumably strenuous public event, being driven to your accommodation with your little black suitcase, no one ever teaches you how to behave under such circumstances. If he wants to sit in silence, looking at his bitten fingernails, that’s alright, no problem. She, too, of course, is sitting in silence, and has nothing to say. They come off the main road and down onto the small lane to the holiday cottages, the gravel crunching noisily under the tyres of Margaret’s car. She has done nothing wrong, has done nothing at all, in fact, beyond what is required for the purpose of driving Ivan from the bar to the holiday village. If she made a little error in the conversation earlier, if she used one little dubious word or phrase, asking him what he was passionate about, that was excusable, even in a sense deniable, because subjective. She pulls up outside one of the houses, a white bungalow with peeling paint and darkened windows.

 

Later, as another example, we are inside Peter's head as he is driving to court and adjusting to the pharmaceuticals he has ingested. I love the way the scattershot syntax and time dislocations convey what he has done, what he is doing, what he is seeing, what he is thinking, and how it all plays out:

 

In the morning, hiss of the iron, buttered bread roll, milligram of alprazolam, blue tie or green. Stands at the dining table rearranging his papers while the coffee cools, thoughts running rapid with broken phrases, details of argument, streams diverging and recrossing, hands clammy touching the pages. The point of law. To raise the question of. His briefcase then, bitter aftertaste, overcoat, and outside the chill wind of October moves through the leaves of trees. Wide grey streets around the Green, buses slowing to a stop, wheel and cry of gulls overhead. Leaves rustle over the park gates. Barred windows of Ship Street then and the vans reversing. Blue clearing in the white clouds, rain-washed cobbles. River dissected by the glitter of sunlight, Grattan Bridge. Copper stepped saucer dome over Portland stone balustraded parapet, dirty green cap in daylight, the Four Courts. Feels the effects by the time he’s inside, dressing: slow serene feeling beginning in the hands and feet. Breathing settles. Thoughts grow orderly and sequential, facts arranged in place, stately procession of claims and counter-claims. That’s not actually recreational, Naomi told him once. Like, you can get a prescription if that’s what you’re using it for. Along the corridor, scent of cleaning fluid, overheard voices. Even medicated he feels it: the white light of his own righteousness. Clear luminous certainty. In the courtroom, flow of speech unhurried, precise, inexorable. Admitting no contradiction. Familiar command almost perfect, yes, and pleasurable even, and then over.

 

Yes, this is writing that places demands on you as a reader. But it offers extraordinary rewards as well. I felt, and feel, like I got to know these characters as well as I have ever gotten to know most any of the flesh-and-blood humans beings I have met in my life. And that's because when you are with an actual person, you can never know for sure what they are really thinking. But with Rooney, due to her extraordinary psychological insight and writerly control, you can. 

The complexities in a story like this inevitably make you wonder whether the plot will be plausibly satisfyingly resolved, and whether or not the trip will have been worth it. The answer to both questions is a resounding "Yes!" Rooney is no longer occupying the wing in my personal house of literature  associated with interesting contemporary writers. She's in the larger room at the back having tea with Jane Austen and George Eliot.

 

 

 

B/W

 

 

This is a series of experimental pen and ink drawings with accompanying poems (also experimental) that I've worked on over the last six months. While I was doing the drawings, I was often listening to music from Blonde on Blonde, and particularly "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," so I decided to use phrases from that song as titles for the poems, which each bear some oblique relation to the drawing or the thought processes that the drawings generated in my mind as I wrote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warehouse Eyes

One over here, one over there, not where
you might expect them to be, but then again
what reason do we have to expect the future
to unfold in congruence with the past? More
likely, as in the present case,  it's just one thing
after another, the logic becoming clear only
in retrospect, if at all, and in any case subject
to revision. Leaves, legs, letters, jellyfish,
shovels, fins, wings: what you see is what you get:
individual parts blended into a whole that keeps
shifting around for as long as we keep looking.
The point being, there may not be any point.
But then then again there might. There's only
one way to find out: keep looking. So keep looking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arabian Drums

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I'm thinking
that's unlikely. One, because even I'm not entirely sure
what I'm thinking, or whether in fact I'm thinking at all.
And two, because thought, to the extent that it can be shared
at all, most often manifests itself as a series words
articulating quite possible arbitrary discriminations
—this and not that, this as opposed to that, this following
that—none of which seem likely to be able to capture
the experience of being present to the presentation
of an experience which is of its nature necessarily wholistic.
Yes, we have parts, no two the same, each making a claim
on our attention. But then, again no one stands alone.
Nor should they. There is no music in a single syllable.
Only in sequence are drumbeats able to conjure a dance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matchbook Songs

Beyond everything else, there's this to consider:
even though the world does not often conform
to our expectations of it, it does have a logic
of its own, which is not necessarily less satisfying
for being hard to predict or interpret. What we
might read as horizontality might just be verticality
of a less obvious nature. What we experience
as noise may likewise just be silence in disguise.
Illogic and incoherence may very well resolve
themselves, if we are willing to entertain even
a minor shift of point of view, into the epiphanic
apprehension of thusness and suchness. If there
is a lesson here somewhere,  it will likely turn out
to be in the form of a question rather than an answer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midnight Rug

We sit in silence, watching the water for what
seems  like hours, the ripples turning back
upon themselves again and again like snippets
of a song blown through the branches of the alders
and spruces until all semblance of coherence
has vanished, even as the notes continue to arrive
intermittently, carrying intimations, however indistinct,
of insight, of justification, of resolution. In this manner,
our time together passes by pleasantly enough.
After all, there is no where else we need to be.
The silence we share is clarifying, a relief from the rivers
of words we are in the habit of exchanging to make
sense of each other, and of the world in this moment.
The water speaks a wordless language that makes us whole?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sheet Metal Memory

Every new beginning comes from some other
beginning's end. Once we start, there can be
no stopping, right? Whether we move forward,
or back, or stay right where we are, eventually
we wind up, well, right here where we are now.
We will not have changed, other than by having
become indistinguishably older by an hour
or a day  or a week or a year. But our sense
of who we are now or who we might eventually
become will have been altered by the arrival
of today's new memories, as well as by the fading,
if not the disappearance, of older ones. All we have
left is the map of the path we have traveled,
or as much of it as we can still hold in our minds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ghostlike Soul

 Who among you can say where the spirit resides?
In darkness or in light? In song or in silence?
In birds or boulders, in fish or flowers? In the body
or in the breath? Here, echoes suggest this is what
salvation must be like after a while. Elsewhere,
mouths open as if to speak, but do not close again.
Is it not more desirable to wander with no clear
destination in mind? To dance alone on the beach
at night, to bate your breath as waves break over
your body which is dissolved into... what exactly?
The appearance of intention? An aspiration toward
timeless resonance? Questions asked but unlikely
to be answered. Apparitions, as it were. So what?
Not to worry. Sit with me a while. I'll keep you safe.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curfew Plugs

Room full of revelers, party going strong. In the all night
museum, the masked avenger addresses the renegades
in hopes of deliverance, absolution or at least sympathetic
understanding. Meanwhile, on the back porch, black cats
yowl under the light of a thousand stars to the accompaniment
of slide trombones and flamenco guitars. There's hardly room
to think, much less to breathe, but that's not necessarily
a bad thing. Isn't that why we came, to be present at the creation,
to celebrate the lunar conjugation, lending our individual
voices to the folding and unfolding of the origami chorus?
Whatever happens, don't lose heart. We're all in this
together. So just keep dancing for as long as the lights
continue to blink on and off and on again. You'll know when
it's time to go. In the meantime, keep sporting those smiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Childhood Flames

Can you recall what it was like in the garden?
The warmth of the sun on your face, the soft breezes
in your hair as you wander across the green grass
and stand in the shade of the blue spruce watching
as the cars glide by, each one carrying the mystery
of lives and stories other than your own but still
somehow the same? Or fishing with your father
at Croton Lake, standing by the water, casting  
your line in hopes of feeling the tug of a sunfish
or perch? Each moment an expanse continuous
with all the others, until the skies begin slowly
to darken and it's time to go home, take a bath,
climb into bed, drift off to sleep, and wake up
all these years later in another world entirely.

Inventories

 

Inventories
           
An Abecedary

 

_______________________________________________

Earlier this year I ran across a reference to a book by Aaron Angello called The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications. In his introduction to this entertaining and offbeat book, he had this to day about its origins and evolution:

... I had a sketchbook, and at the top of each page, I wrote, in order, a single word from Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet. I sat in the chair, looked at the word for that day, then for several minutes I just thought about it, completely out of its context. Once I felt I was filled with that word—as if the word filled my body, not just my mind—I began to write. Usually, I had no idea what I was writing. For the most part I started from a place of what I like to call “the beyond consciousness,” from a place where I didn’t “know” what I was composing, so to speak. I wanted to access a mental space that allowed for spontaneity, without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats so famously said. Occasionally, partway through a piece, I would do a bit of research (i.e., look something up on my phone), but generally, I just wrote. I paid no attention to whether I was writing a prose poem, an essay, a story, or something else. I didn’t even care if it “made sense.” My only rules were that I had to write in prose, I had to fill the page, and the piece couldn’t overflow onto the next one.
    I’m not certain why I chose Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet instead of, say, a poem by Emily Dickinson or John Ashbery, or any other bit of text for that matter. The experiment would probably work just as well no matter the source....Once I’d finished a draft of the manuscript—once I’d written a page for each of the 114 words in the sonnet—I put it aside for a while. Then, over the next few years, I periodically revisited it. I edited the pieces mercilessly. I rewrote some. I cut with abandon. I thought about how the pieces resonated with each other and what themes and memories I came back to again and again in those 114 days of writing every morning. I tried to take daily individual ruminations and make them work together as a kind of long lyric essay.

Something about the built-in randomness of Angello's way of working in this book appealed to me, and I decided to give it a whirl. Instead of beginning with a sonnet or other pre-published work, I opted to build upon a project that had occurred to me in one the generative sessions of semi-consciousness that often come to me in the morning hours when I'm lying in bed not fully asleep and not yet fully awake. I had begun running through the letters of the alphabet and selecting the first five-letter word that occurred to me. Later that morning I went to my laptop, created a little table with four columns and 26 rows and printed it out. Then I began penciling into each cell in sequence the first five letter word that occurred to me, proceeding in alphabetical  order. When I had completed the four lists, I typed the list in the first column into a new document, and, following Angello's example, began doing freewrites under each. It took me several weeks to complete the first draft of the entire document. Then I undertook the revisions. I have often found that having one or more formal constraints to work against gives me a way of making purposeful decisions about what to cut, what to add, and what to re-arrange when I am revising. My first-draft paragraphs had ranged from 75 words or so to more than 130, so I made an arbitrary decision to work toward having 26 paragraphs of exactly 100 words each in my final draft, which is what you will see below.

_______________________________________________

Amber

There's honey, of course. All those busy bees at work, all those waxy combs filled with golden sweetness. Apple juice. Maple syrup. Yellow ochre in the watercolor pan. Insects from a hundred million years ago, preserved in pine resin. The waves of grain beneath the spacious skies of the country whose praises we are exhorted to sing, and whose history we are encouraged to whitewash, the same country in which a child named Amber was abducted and killed, giving rise to the cell-phone alerts that bear her name. So much beauty, so much terror; so much sickness, so much hope.


Brush

Near miss, narrow escape from danger. Soft touch. Gesture. Caress. Instrument of re-presentation, the means by which a world can rendered in black and white, as in Japanese and Chinese ink painting, or ideograms can be deployed on paper, as in calligraphy. Also the means by which the world can be rendered with colored water on paper, or paint on canvas. Used in cleaning: Soak, scrub, rinse, repeat. Used in personal care: the cleaning of teeth, the parting and styling of hair.  Going further into the country, a term used for small bushes and trees that are difficult to penetrate.


Color

Conveys feeling, George likes to say. Upon hitting your eyes, color generates emotion subliminally. Which spills over into language. As when I am blue, or seeing red, or accused of being yellow, green with envy, or black-hearted. Children love to color. Give them crayons, fingerpaints, watercolors, and watch them go to town. More problematically, there's the whole sociology of skin color—black, white, yellow, brown, red—and how those colors have been coded and interpreted and responded to historically and in the present moment. Do you have a preference? My grandson wants to know: What's your second least favorite color?


Dense

Parsing the sense of dense. Case study in denotation and connotation. Heavy, thick, compacted: examples being lead, iron, rocks of any kind, cement. Castle keeps. Hardwood. Used to describe certain texts that are hard to decipher or hold in the mind: Faulkner's writing is too dense for my tastes. As opposed to, say, Hemingway or Rupi Kaur. Also used as a descriptor for someone whose head seems to resist incoming data: He can be a little dense sometimes. The opposite of dense in that sense would be bright, or intelligent, or quick on the uptake. Water is denser than ice.

Early

Too soon. Or perhaps optimally prepared, with anticipated obstacles avoided, thereby freeing you up to read or dance, nap or take a walk. Just before sunrise, lying in bed halfway between sleeping and waking, skirting the edges of a dream, perhaps pondering whether to throw off the covers and rise to greet another day,  or just turn over and cocoon under the warm covers for another few minutes. Or, conversely, the time just after midnight, those wee small hours that Sinatra sang about way back when. Or a premature arrival: a surprise that may (or may not) be pleasant, depending.


Fault

As in at. As in foot. As in my, or your, or his, or her, or their, or nobody's. As in gap or chasm, as in mountains sliding into the sea. As in the distance between what was hoped for and what transpired. Who or what is to blame for the way I am feeling right now? Who is going to pay for this? After an accident, determination of responsibility, insurers relying on investigators to decide who made the first, or most telling, mistake. Followed by lawsuits that will determine whether money must change hands, and if so, how much.


Giant

A creature of legend or myth. Goliath, for example, slain by a boy with a slingshot. King Kong. Paul Bunyan. Anyone acknowledged as a leader in his (or, presumably, her) field. Mascot for many baseball and football teams, and for at least one food company specializing in vegetables. Used of certain buildings And then all the adjectival connotations of absolute or relative largeness or importance: a giant step, a giant boat, a giant appetite, a giant boondoggle, giant redwood, giant panda. The largest of giants being the universe itself, or any of a certain class of dwarf stars within it.


Heart

This one is almost too rich. That which pumps blood. The quality of bravery or courage. Determination. The ability to feel deep empathy and compassion. Sticktoitiveness. One of the four card suits. The central point, the middle, the very the essence of something. Anagram of "earth." The locus of feelings (as distinguished from, or opposed to, or complementary with) the brain, the locus of thoughts. Lead-in to any number of phrasings: Heart attack. Heart to heart. Heart monitor. Heartwood. Heartache. Heartfelt apologies. Shot through the heart. The heart sutra. The heart of the matter. Deep in the heart of Texas.


Ideal


What's the best thing you can imagine? The moon sparkling on the water? Buying a new car? Riding horseback on the beach? Straight A's? Peace and quiet? A day without rain? Poker night with your best friends? Transformational sex? Season tickets for the Warriors? A novel that draws you into an invented world and keeps you there, enthralled? A home-made breakfast after a good night's sleep? Being able to walk without pain? Chris Stapleton on electric guitar? Sitting with someone who gives you their complete and total attention? That which can only be wished for but never attained? Unless, unless...


Jaunty

He strides in smiling, wearing a felt hat with a leather band, in which he has inserted a pheasant feather. He glances around the room and spies an empty armchair near the fireplace. On his way over, he plucks a glass of champagne from the bar, makes a show of taking a sip and closing his eyes and raising his head as if in the throes of an ecstatic revelation. Settling in the chair he doffs his hat, raises his glass in a toast to the assembled partygoers, takes a another sip, and smiles broadly at no one in particular.


Koala

What are you doing here? Were you invited, or did you just show up to see who would make a fuss over you? I get it; some people think you're cute. They point at you,  make soft cooing noises. Some of your more aggressively obnoxious fanboys and girls will likely pull leaves and stems out of the flower vases by the window and come over and try to entice you to nibble at them. If you were smart, which you're probably not, you wouldn't play along. Then they'd get bored and find some other way to call attention to themselves.


Lanai

In Hawaii, since the weather is almost always sunny and warn, most houses (and many condos) have at the side or in the back, which serves something of the function that a "porch" would serve in a house on the US mainland. Except that a lanai typically has no roof and extends longer and wider than a porch. It's a place to sit with friends and have a drink, or play a game of catch with your son or daughter, or just lie in the sun with a mai tai on the table at your side, soaking up the rays.


Mercy

As an exclamation, a word suggesting a) surprise at how poorly something is turning out, or b) pleasure at something so wonderful as to threaten becoming overwhelming. In the ethical sense, the act of forgiveness, often placed in contrast, as in Shakespeare's Othello, with "justice," often in the sense of earned punishment. The ethical ideal being justice tempered by mercy. An attitude more often aspirational than operational. There are Mercy Hospitals all over the country, which makes sense. I was taught in elementary school by nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy, and by and large they were anything but.


North

As in star. As in Pole. As in to Alaska. Straight up. An orientation during travel, as with a compass. Suggestive of winter. Snow and ice. Glaciers. Vikings with fair skin and blond hair carrying axes, pillaging the coastal villages of England. Historically and geographically embroiled, in the United States, with controversies associated with the civil war. From the point of view of the South, the metonym of all that is wrong about an American Federalism administered by Ivy League intellectuals, including multiculturalism, affirmative action, trade unions, and government handouts. Traditional rival of "South" in college and pro All-Star games.


Obese

Big. Round. Overlarge. But a loaded word these days. Those of a sensitive disposition emphasize the unfairness of fat shaming and to endorse "body positivity," which would preclude the need for a term like "obese." OTOH companies spend millions of dollars on television ads promoting diets and food plans and medications which are basically guaranteeing no-hassle weight loss, and those products are flying off the shelves. So there's a disconnect between the messaging from the politically correct and the messaging reaching the politically incorrect, as when Hillary Clinton lost the election after calling a significant percentage of the population "deplorables."


Pupil

The very center of the eye, the portal between the world and the brain. Circular window. Also, an attendee at school, not necessarily synonymous with "student, "which would connote at least some small degree of active engagement. You can be a pupil without being a student. Trust me, I know. But you can also be a student without being a pupil, if you are moved to study on your own. Wherever you are, you can be paying attention, letting the light fall upon the inner lens of your eye and make its mysterious way into your brain and reflective consciousness.


Query

Hints of academia. The sense of someone on a search for a hidden truth. Can I ask you something? What is your problem? (How come I get to be the one with the problem if you are the one asking all the intrusive questions? Did you ever stop to think that maybe it's your problem? It's always stupid this and fucking that and "I don't want to do this anymore.") You're right. I'll try to do better. (You have been saying that for years. But it never seems to stick, does it?) (Okay. Tomorrow then. One day at a time.)


River

Water on the move from the mountains to the ocean. Conveyance, highway for boats, attraction for nature lovers and skinnydippers. Home to fish and fishermen and fish fries.  Often a property marker. Natural symbol of anything in flux, not to mention various elements of oxymoronical folk wisdom, e.g. You can't step in the same river twice (which is simultaneously true and untrue). Thus mystery. Thus legend: the Danube, the Mississippi, the Rhine, the Amazon, the Orinoco. Last card dealt in Hold 'Em. Favorite subject of songwriters and artists. Picture it youself: the sun glinting off the water, sailboats skimming along.


Stand

As in taking one. As in tall. As in together. As in alone. As in easel. As in of trees. As in being upright, as in refusing to go along with what you know is not right. As in abide or put up with. What I cannot stand is this. And how about understand? Under from the German Unter meaning among. Standing among, suggesting community, and perhaps agreement or consensus. Yes, I understand. I stand among you, I stand with you, I will stand by your side. I will be a standup guy. We will stand together, you and I.


Train

A vehicle on rails. Cars carrying people, carrying goods, carrying gold. Freight train. Passenger train. Locomotive. Coal car. Tanker. Sleeper car. Caboose. Catnip for robbers, for hobos, for people eager to get out of town, for storytellers, mystery writers, movie directors. One also trains to become an athlete, a writer, a soldier, a doctor. What is left in one's wake, as the train of a wedding gown. Think of the ways in which train relates to river and stand. Movement and stasis. Being where you are, or being on the way somewhere, anywhere, else. Reaching the end of the line.


Under

The bus. The influence. The wire. The circumstances. The weather. Wear. Water. Write. Appreciated. Fire. Current. Pressure. Consideration. Perform. Pinning. Going. Standing. Investigation. Value. Going. Up from. Down. The emotional connotation of under-ness. Below. Beneath. Less than. The implication of failure, the disappointment of not rising to the standard. OTOH, what is under something is also the thing that supports it, the base, the basis, the rock upon which something rests, as in the famous and likely spurious saying about St. Peter. Who would merit a whole disquisition all on his own, historically and mythologically, were we to undertake it.


Value

Worth. Quality. Usefulness. Esteem. Appreciate. The question of metrics: how is value to be evaluated? Who is to say what is good and what is not good, whether and to what degree? What do you mean to me? What do I mean to you? Alternatively, what about the choices people make in the social sphere? Imposing houses? Good looks? Hot cars? Hot sex? The exercise of power? Competition as the driver of the economy? The accumulation and deployment of capital. Capitalism vs Socialism vs whatever the alternatives might be. Nirvana? Non-action? Total acceptance? What are you doing with your life?


Water

Original element, without which nothing, life having arisen out of the mineral-rich oceans of prehistory. Clouds. Rain. Snow. Lakes and rivers. Glaciers frozen tundra. Water in the stems of plants and in the veins of every living thing. For the grass, for the flowers, for the fish, for the whales. For cleaning out the digestive system, for washing the car, for showering and shaving and the baking of bread. Water on which to float, to sail, to cruise. To survive in the desert, look for an oasis. Water as a symbol of life, of clarity, of the richness of life.


X

The ex-ception. Marks the spot. Not commonly seen at the beginnings of words. Represents, among other things, the unknown. Something to solve for. Symbol for multiplication. Used to indicate the choice of a candidate on a ballot or a choice on a test. The means by which something written down may be crossed out. The generation following the baby boomers. Aurally, spoken—sometimes with regret, sometimes with relief, sometimes with real animus—of someone no longer a lover. Combined with the "Command" key on the keyboard, serves to delete whatever has been selected. Now you see it, now you don't.



Youth

Often said to be wasted on the young. Then again, youth is a relative concept, and even adults and oldsters have trouble inhabiting the present moment with attention and appreciation. I do like the sound of the word "youth," and I enjoy the pictures that come into my mind when I consider the concept of youth, or the actual young people who populate my memory and occasionally appear in front of my eyes. But I am in fact an old man, even though in my mind's eye I still think I'm the same person I used to be. As if.


Zen

Basic concepts: One, that your buddha nature, which is to say your enlightenment, lies within you, and that you are responsible for doing what you need to do to bring it forward, whether that be by work or meditation or art. It's not going to be provided to you by your family or friends or the deity of your choice. Two: that the world and all that we value in it and attend to in it is illusory. We want the world to make sense: we have to let go of that. It's not real, and it doesn't matter.

Mahmoud Darwish

 

Recently a friend sent me a link to a poem by Mahmound Darwish. I had not previously heard of Darwish, despite the fact that he is considered by many to be the "Palestinian Poet Laureate." I was intrigued by the poem, although I was not sure how much of it I really understood. I did some research into his background, but even with that information, I found "I Didn't Apologize to the Well" a hard poem to pin down. 

Part of that had to do with the translation that was sent to me, which was by Fady Joudah, himself a Palestinian poet. I was able eventually to locate another translation online in a book translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London, which falls much more smoothly on my ear. I felt their phrasings snapped some of the imagery into focus for me as well. I have no idea what images and connotations and connections would be clearer to someone reading the original Arabic.

Part of it is also, I think, actually thematic: the introduction by Amin and London makes note of his strategic deployment of "lyrical instability" as he tries to create a "map of absence." It is, in their reading, a poem of dislocation, and the way Darwish frames it is probably intended to give the reader a parallel experience of dislocation within the poem itself. Here's the translation I like:

I Didn’t Apologize To The Well


I didn’t apologize to the well as I passed by it.
I borrowed a cloud from an ancient pine and squeezed it
like an orange. I waited for a mythical white deer.
I instructed my heart in patience: Be neutral, as though
you were not a part of me. Here, good shepherds
stood on air and invented the flute and enticed
mountain partridges into their traps. Here, I saddled
a horse for flight to my personal planets, and flew.
And here, a fortuneteller told me: Beware of asphalt roads
and automobiles, ride on your sigh. Here, I loosened
my shadow and waited. I selected the smallest stone
and stood wakefully by it. I broke apart a myth
and got broken myself. I circled the well until
I flew out of myself to what I’m not. And a voice
from deep in the well spoke to me: This grave
is not yours. And so I apologized. I read verses
from the wise Qur’an and said to the anonymous presence
in the well: Peace be with you and the day
you were killed in the land of peace and with the day
you’ll rise from the well’s darkness
and live…

                        – Mahmoud Darwish
                        Tr. Omnia Amin and Rick London

It's a poem that had political ramifications when it was written twenty years ago which are now even more relevant and more intense than they were at that time, which means that any attempt to interpret it puts the interpreter under some pressure whether to address that political context or instead to ignore it. There are of course competing interpretive orthodoxies about this dilemma. Biographical Critics argue that you should not and indeed cannot interpret a poem without taking into consideration the circumstances under which it was written, including the lived experience of the author. The New Critics, at least during the era in which they could be said to be "new" argued that all of that supplementary data ought to be irrelevant: the poem must stand on its own; one can only "interpret" based on what you the words that you see in front of you. "Reader response" critics argue that the poem is just a stimulus, a locus of attention, and that the "real" poem, such as it is,  is constructed in the mind of the individual reader. Marxist critics, psychological critics, feminist critics, deconstructionists, each have their own orthodoxies. Suffice it to say that there are lots of lenses to use, individually or sequentially or simultaneously.

That much said, here are a couple of my observations, inferences, and hunches:

"The well" is an inanimate object, so right off the bat Darwish seems to be nudging me to wonder how the speaker could apologize TO the well even if he wanted to. But I can infer that it is an inanimate object with certain defining qualities: it's an oasis, a gathering place, the focus of the community of people who go it for nourishment and, presumably, the company of others.

The speaker, electing to pass all of that by, turns inward: he enters into imagination and myth, music and magic. I love listing of the activities he claims to have engaged in: borrowing the cloud, waiting for the white deer, saddling the flying horse, consulting the fortuneteller. The images, one after another, are surprising and delightful. And of course somewhat cryptic. "I selected the smallest stone and stood wakefully by it. I broke apart a myth and got broken myself... I flew out of myself to what I'm not." I see these, I FEEL these, as compelling emblems of, well, instability and dislocation, among perhaps many other possibilities. Attention and beauty and pleasure among them.

At that point an astonishing thing happens: the well speaks to HIM, saying "This grave is not yours." The implication being that it's "not yours" because it is mine, which is to say it is the grave of the person whose spirit resides within the well. And so THEN the speaker decides to apologize after all, and turning to the Qu'ran, wishes the spirit in the well peace, and suggests the promise—or at least the hope—of resurrection, of a new day arriving when the spirit will "rise from the well's darkness and live."

It would not be a huge interpretive leap to read all of this as a gloss on the tribal conflicts in the middle east. But I'm not really inclined to go there. For one thing, that whole situation is colossally messed up in a million different directions and has been for centuries. It seems to be even worse today than it ever has been. But I have so little lived or learned experience with it that I don't feel entitled or qualified or inclined to speculate on the poem's political and social themes. But I love the poem for other reasons. It seems to  me to be a very eloquent testimony to the power of poetry itself to help us process and cope with the distress and dissonance in the world. We are at the present moment a bewildering array of existential threats, including among others religious and ethnic rivalries, ongoing wars, climate change and its impacts, disinformation via social media, huge economic disparities among and within countries, the failure of our educational and health care systems.

But at this late date in my sojourn on this planet I feel like I am often hearing the voice that says "This grave is not yours." I'm getting closer to mine every day, that I know. And I do share the wish that those many millions and millions of others, and their descendants and mine, will eventually  rise from the darkness of whatever well they do inhabit, and live. Wishful thinking, yes. But as the old saying goes, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." So why not go ahead and ride? As Darwish does in this poem, and as I do when I read it.