The Continuous Life

 

I've spent a lot of the last several months going through my poetry files, both analog and digital, and trying to put them into some order. I began keeping those files nearly fifty years ago, when I was first teaching English in middle school. It was understood that as part of the curriculum the students would be asked to read and respond to writing in a variety of genres. The department came to grade-level agreements about which novels would be read in common each year, but when it came to short stories and poems, teachers were more or less on their own.

I was fortunate to have come to the middle school after several years of teaching in elementary school, where Barbara Helfgott-Hyett, working with the Poet-in-the-Schools program, had come in as a visiting poet and led writing workshops both with the students, and, after school, with the teachers. One way of working that Barbara shared with us involved the use of model poems. She would present students with a poem she had chosen—often a poem based on a memory or event that young people could understand and relate to—and then ask the students to make observations about craft (what did the writer do first? what next? what do you notice about the language? the shape of the sentences? the stanzas? etc). Then she would ask the students to draft a poem of their own in which they would employ one or more of the techniques they had observed that were of interest to them.

When I first began trying to "teach" poetry in my own classroom, I had a very small selection of "teachable" poems, most of which I had picked up from Barbara. As I ran across others in our middle school textbook or in poetry books I found in libraries and bookstores, I would either photocopy them or type them out and put them in a manila folder in my classroom for future reference. When that folder became too thick, I broke it into three folders alphabetized by author (A-H, G-Q, S-Z). Eventually I had a folder for every letter of the alphabet.

Then personal computers arrived and it became possible to search for particular poets and poems online, I began archiving poems I liked as Word files. I created a digital folder called "Alpha Singles." As I ran across a poem I liked or thought might be of interest to students, I'd either type it up myself, or copy it from the internet, paste it into a Word document, and add it to my digital archive. That archive now amounts to something like 2500 poems.

I wound up having two archives: the manila folders in my file cabinet, and the digital files on my laptop. At the start of this year I thought I might as well go through both sets of archives, print and digital, and concatenate all of the poems I have on file into a complete digital archive. Along the way, I typed up or downloaded a great number poems, some of which I had run across before, many of which I had not. Often I would simply pick a line with an unusual sequence of words from a poem I had in print but wanted to have in a digital version. I might, for example, take a line (Ashbery's "waiting to leave the tongue behind," for example) and type it into the search bar, where I would most often find the entire poem available online.

At times I would wind up being directed to familiar turf, as for example the Academy of American Poets or the Poetry Foundation, but often I would find myself visiting one of the hundreds of blogs curated by poetry lovers of every conceivable stripe; and when I had copied the poem I had sought out, I would start scrolling through whatever else was posted there, and in so doing would discover many other interesting poems and poets I would never have encountered in any other way. Indeed, one of things I enjoy most about conducting targeted searches of this kind is precisely the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that I'm going to find something even more interesting that I didn't even know existed.)

All of the above has been by way of introduction to a poem by Mark Strand that I found online while I was hunting for another poem entirely, but which pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks.  I'll get to that poem shortly, but first a word or three about Mark Strand, who long has been one of my favorite poets. His poem "What to Think Of," for example, has been for many years one of my go-to texts for use in the classroom:

What to Think Of

Think of the jungle
The green steam rising.

It is yours.
You are the prince of Paraguay.

Your minions kneel
Deep in the shade of giant leaves

While you drive by
Benevolent as gold.

They kiss the air
That moments before

Swept over your skin,
and rise only after you’ve passed.

Think of yourself, almost a god,
Your hair on fire,

The bellows of your heart pumping.
Think of the bats

Rushing out of their caves
Like a dark wind to greet you;

Of the vast nocturnal cities
Of lightning bugs

Floating down
From Minas Gerais;

Of the coral snakes;
Of the crimson birds

With emerald beaks;
Of the tons and tons of morpho butterflies

Filling the air
Like the cold confetti of paradise.

One of the things I most enjoy about this poem is its playfulness. It puts us in a surprising (and deftly rendered) landscape and asks us to imagine ourselves as existing in a magical dimension in which we are honored and worshiped. Not something most of us have experienced, or are likely to, but pleasant enough to contemplate, for sure.

In the classroom, we read the poem together, the students make some observations about what the poet has done and how he has done it, and then we shift to the question of what one would need to do to write a poem of this nature. The most obvious answer in this case would be to start with the working title "What to Think Of," and then write a poem that gives your reader some interesting things to imagine. (You could of course also borrow anything else that you observe or admire in Strand's poem: his use of short couplets, the way he plays with the sounds made by the words (green steam, Prince of Paraguay, kiss the air that swept over your skin)  the interweaving of real and surreal imagery, etc.) The idea, in other words, is to use the architecture of "What to Think of" as a kind of scaffolding for a poem of your own composition. Structurally, it's basically just a list poem (Think of a, think of b, think of c and d and e.)

When you're done with your first draft and considering which parts of the poem to keep, which to drop, which to expand), you might choose to keep the title (and acknowledge its inspiration with an epigraph like after Mark Strand) or give it a different title of your own composition that seems appropriate for whatever it is that you came up with.

This particular exercise always seems to provide students with a game to play that results which are interesting and enjoyable to read, and more importantly from my point of view as an educator, interesting and enjoyable to have written. My primary objective as an educator throughout my career has been to try to create environments in which the students' experience of writing as a source joy and satisfaction. I won't go into detail about about this in this essay, because I have written about it at length before, but the notion that writing can be a source of pleasure for the writer is generally foreign to my students. Enjoyment of writing is not something that they are ever likely to have experienced in school. Every year I would have one or two students who loved to write, but that's something that they either were born with or learned on their own, but not in the context of their English classes. As it happens, I was a kindergarten teacher for a few years as well at the start of my career, and I know that most kindergartners LOVE to draw and to write, after a fashion. But by the time many of them hit second grade they have become convinced that writing is not something they're good at, and certainly not something they enjoy. So one of my primary goals is to try to give my students the chance to re-discover the pleasure of writing as a pleasurable form of exploration.

And that is in fact one of the reasons I like Mark Strand's poems. He's clearly a writer who enjoys what he is doing. His subjects are sometimes whimsical, and sometimes quite serious, but it can be exhilarating to follow his mind as he works his thoughts out on paper. That's certainly the case with the poem I now, at last, put before you:

 The Continuous Life


What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

I've read this poem dozens of times and it blows me away every time: the ambition of it, the audacity of it, the beauty of it, the compassion of it. I'm reminded for the zillionth time of Christopher Clausen's assertion that all literature "implies some kind of answer, shallow or profound, to the fundamental human questions,  What kind of world is this, and how should we live in it?" The striking thing about this poem is that Strand isn't leaving those critically essential questions to be answered by implication, he's coming at them head-on. Right in the first sentence, he asks a question which might be paraphrased as "At what point do we as humans just give up?" Interestingly, Strand filters this question through the consciousness of the children, who are "watching the grownups for signs of surrender," and wondering, as the grownups themselves must wonder, how hard to work, how long to work, and how to know when the work is done. What does it mean to be alive? How should we live? What wisdom can we convey to our children about how to answer these questions?

These are huge philosophical questions, which have generated many lengthy (and for many of us more or less impenetrable) texts by the likes of Descartes and Kant and Wittgenstein and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But here is Mark Strand, trying to spell it all out for us in four sentences.

I love the second, long sentence, a capsule summary of the human experience:

                O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
    To prove you existed.

This is the reality of life: that it is at one and the same time completely ordinary, and deeply mysterious. We are given this time, and yet no matter what we do to use it wisely we will have to face the fear that what we have done is not enough. I love that line about the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops, those instruments of the quotidian which have their own miraculous beauty, if only we can bring ourselves to apprehend it. As a person who has been retired now for close to nine years, I can attest that the taste for mundane and the worship of household chores does in fact seem to grow, and that the question of what we might hope or wish to leave behind as we approach that second darkness grows in resonance as well.

And then the music and precision and eloquence of the very last sentence:

            Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

The available languor of the earth! And the tremors of love it engenders. I'm stunned by the originality and beauty of the phrasing, and of the idea.  I can perhaps imagine myself beginning a poem as Strand began this one, essentially starting with the question, "Well, what about _______?" and then attempting to offer some answers. But I cannot imagine myself getting from point A to point Z in the way Strand does here. It's a poem which unfolds a sequence of ideas and images in a way that is artful and musical and emotionally resonant, and, to my way of thinking, profound.

One of the reasons I am drawn to poetry is that it is a means of keeping myself focused, of learning and re-learning how to pay attention, a life skill that Strand both endorses and demonstrates in this poem. Why are we here? We are here to keep busy, to learn something, to lean down and hear the careless breathing of the earth, and to experience such love as we can encounter (and generate) in our selves, our days, and beyond.

Makes sense to me.