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.

Artifactual

 

 

 Artifactual

What's the point? What if
there is no point? What if
the pointlessness is the point?
At what point does whether
or not there is a point become
a pointless question to even ask?


Do you feel like you owe it
to yourself to be able to offer
some kind of explanation?
What is there you can say?
It is, as they say, what it is:
right there in black and white:


Why this and not that? Why not
something else entirely?
Fact is, I can't say. I'm not sure
myself. I am just trying to make
space for something to exist
where before there was nothing.

 

Process Reflection:

I have for some years enjoyed playing around with mark-making in various contexts. One of the simplest forms of mark-making is simply doodling, and at departmental and administrative meetings I found that doodling gave me something to occupy the part of my brain that was going quietly crazy while my left brain was trying to keep up with the flow of the conversation. It's a simple process: apply the point of the pen to the paper, and see what wants to show up. The stakes are low, and if what you have drawn doesn't pass muster, who cares? It still feels good while you are doing it. At least it does to me.

At some point I began, in the comfort and privacy of my study, trying more ambitious projects for which I felt the term "doodling" was reductive and dismissive. I preferred to think of them as black-and-white drawings. In some cases those drawings included some recognizable real-world elements. In many cases they did not. (Samples here and here.) I was primarily interested in exploring the ways in which these two simple elements, black and white, interact with one another, particularly in the negative spaces they create for one another. And the time I spent drawing began to feel a lot like a meditation exercise for me as well; I feel calmed and focused while drawing, and I'm often pleased with the results even when I can understand why someone else might not see them as being "art" in any sense of the word they might be familiar with.

The other night I happened to be in the mood to draw, but as it happened I had two sheets of blank paper in front of me rather than one, and while I drew I was also thinking about what to write for the weekly meeting of the poetry group that I host on zoom. So while I was drawing I began turning over in my mind the whole question of the value and worth of what I was doing, both as an artist as a writer, and as the words presented themselves I write them down, and as the movement of the lines proceeded I did that as well, more or less contrapuntally. The finished drawing is above. In writing the words, I was aware of trying to mimic, in a playful manner, in the sequences of the sounds the repetitive movements and patterns in the drawing. 

The next morning I took the lines I had written and did several revisions, of which the poem you see above is the product, but quite probably not the end product. I have yet to get feedback on the poem from my group. But it seems to me at this intermediate point that the poem is driving at something that I feel is at the core of both drawing and writing: they are disciplines based on a certain sort of magic, which is to make something out of nothing. And I do believe that what results from any particular exercise need not necessarily meet anyone else's criteria of excellence. It's quite enough for me that it makes me feel good when I'm done with it.
 

 

 

Julie Carr: Noun Poem

 

 

Often when I run across a poem that interests me, either in a book from the library or online, I will go one what amounts to an online scavenger hunt, looking for other poems by the same poet or for interviews where the poet talks about what goes on in their head when they sit down to write. Very often this kind of online investigation leads me to blogs curated by other readers who share my interests and enthusiasms with regard to writing, and often in those blogs there is a sidebar with links to other poems and poets.

It was in just such a manner that I ran across Julie Carr. I was reading an essay written by Renee Gladman in which she referenced Carr, so I followed the breadcrumbs and wound up reading a number of poems by Carr, which I found interesting precisely because they challenged my sense of what a poem might be, how it might be read, and what sort of "sense" it might be said to be making.

I'd like to share one such poem, published in the Denver Post, and try to unpack some of what has gone on in my mind as I have read and re-read it. I can't claim to have any special insight or expertise, either in regard to this poem or to Carr's work in general, most of which I have not yet read. And yet this poem does engage my interest. I know that there are some readers who find it hard to relate to art or poetry which is nonrepresentational. I'm not one of those readers. I am actually really interested in the question of what happens when you take a literal medium and remove the literality. What is a drawing if it is not a drawing of something I can point to? What is a poem if it is not a poem about something I can point to? I am actually most drawn to artwork and poetry which explores the in-between spaces: work which is neither entirely literal nor entirely abstract. This one, for example:

Noun Poem


A man in need of a bird of yarn

enters a town with two suns

The bird unwinds its tale of read

in which a woman paints a postcard for her son

This is a sentence with two nouns

One is the noun we all know

the other will be formed of the wealth of the first:

a widower in search of a bride

Yes? I am thirsty, he says with laden head,

can I have a glass of milk, Mom?

She fills him a glass and watches him drink

the brush poised in her hand

The bird and boy whistle one to the other

red spooling from incongruous mouths

This is a song with two swallows

The other gathers others in the skies

This, a sentence with two eyes

One sits within his like an egg in a nest

the last spills as it mates, as it cries

 

The first thing that catches my attention, unsurprisingly, is the title, which immediately suggests that what will be foregrounded in this poem will be the kinds of words it uses, as opposed to the kind of meaning it makes. The first two lines confirm that suspicion:

A man in need of a bird of yarn
enters a town with two suns...

Having been nudged by the title, I am sensitized to the sequencing of the five nouns in the first two lines. And what I am more or less forced to notice in those two lines is that there's a kind of syntactic instability in play. Even though the words are all simple, familiar, one-syllable words (other than "enter" which is two, but still) that I recognize and understand, there's something odd about the phrasing. What is "a bird of yarn," for example? Is it a bird made out of spun wool? Or a bird in a story (yarn)? Or a bird of legend? All of the above? None of the above? And why would a man be in need of one? Carr is putting words together in such a way as to work against the part of my brain that wants to just read the poem and "get it." The third line does the same kind of work:

The bird unwinds its tale of read

The word "unwinds" suggests that maybe we are talking about a ball of yarn after all. But to speak of unwinding a "tale of read" suggests, in an oblique way, not only the the unspooling of yarn, but of a yarn (a story), or even perhaps of the very poem we are reading, as it "unwinds its tale of read."

So my sense is that there is a certain amount of playful misdirection going on here. The poem is unfolding, but is doing so in a way resists easy paraphrase, and encourages us to consider multiple possible readings simultaneously.

I'm going to resist the temptation to indulge in a line-by-line analysis of the syntactical shifts in the poem and the various possibilities that they present to me as I read, which would likely be as laborious for you to read as it would be for me to write. But I do want to make note of a couple of features of the poem which might not be obvious on first reading but become more so the longer we stay with it.

There are three places in which an assertion is in the poem made about the poem: "This is a sentence with two nouns," is the first, and later, "This, a sentence with two eyes." And in the middle of those two assertions, "This is a song with two swallows." I note first of all that are three assertions include doublings: two nouns, two eyes, two swallows. Once I've noted that, I notice other doublings throughout the poem: a man and a woman, a woman and her son, a bird and a boy whistling to each other, and finally  the two eyes at the end of the poem: one in apparent contentment in its nest, the other shedding what I take to be tears:

One sits within his like an egg in a nest
the last spills as it mates, as it cries

The piece that I've skipped over in that sequence is perhaps the most important for me in terms of how I construct the poem in my mind as I read. It's the middle assertion: This is a song with two swallows. And it is precisely this phrasing that snaps the whole poem into focus for me. It's a song. It is asking to be read as a sequence of words that make a certain kind of music. And once that is brought to the forefront of my consciousness, I see it everywhere. Re-reading, for example, those first two lines: A man in need of a bird of yarn enters a town with two suns. Put aside for a moment the question of what it might mean. Listen to the echoes there, the consonants: man, yarn, town, sun; need, bird; enters, town, two. These combinations and permutations of sound continue throughout the poem: a woman paints a postcard; a bird and a boy whistle one to the other; This a sentence with two eyes; spills as it mates, as it cries. If this poem were read out loud to a listener who had no English, they'd still hear its music.

But although this poem presents itself in some ways as an exercise in sound and syntax, it is also a narrative poem of a sort. There's a cast of characters in action in a landscape or series of landscapes: a man and a bird in a town with two suns, a woman painting a postcard and watching her son drinking milk and whistling with the bird "red spooling from incongruous mouths." Which I have to say is belatedly becoming my favorite line in the poem. And finally, surprisingly, the two eyes at the end, each living its own story.

I've read the poem maybe twenty times now and it's starting to cohere in my mind. I don't feel the need to have all of the elements here line up and make logical sense. The narrative makes the sense that it makes. The words make the music that they make. I find the poem to be curious and rich and, well, astonishing.

Stories That Could Be True

One of my favorite poets is William Stafford. In 1977, he published a volume of new and collected poems entitle Stories That Could Be True, a title which I have become fond of over the years for reasons I'm sure he would not have anticipated. Because I've reached the point in my life where that title strikes me as being something of an oxymoron. I've come to understand that all stories are essentially fictions, even and perhaps especially when they are presented as—or intended by their narrators to be taken as—"true stories."

To tell a story is essentially to make a selection of events and present them in a sequence. It would not be desirable, even if it were possible, for any storyteller to include every detail in narrating an event. When I woke up this morning from my dream, what had I been dreaming about? Something about a basketball game? Or walking in the rain in the park? Both at the same time? No sooner had eyes opened than the dream was beginning to fade. I could attempt to recreate it now, but to do so I'd have to invent details that I've already lost, and those details of course not be "true."

The crow cawing outside that woke me up, did he caw once? twice? repeatedly? Was there in fact a crow there at all, or did I just put that in for verisimilitude? Was it perhaps a female crow? How would I know? (Or did I perhaps imagine or make up the whole thing about the crow?)

Did I raise my hand to my face before I took off the covers? Did I scratch my nose? On which side? With which finger? Did I use my right hand or my left to toss the covers aside? Which foot hit the floor first? Was I still lying down when the foot hit the floor, or had I already sat up. When I sat up—if I sat up—was there a cramp in my leg? Which leg? Which muscle? And how painful was it? How would I be able to quantify that pain in a way that would be "true."

You see the problem. Just to tell the story of getting up this morning, if I were to try to capture every detail, would take me all day, and I would not even get to the part about making breakfast. much less eating it. And inevitably I'd get some of it wrong, or leave some of it out. There's information I don't have access to. There's stuff I've forgotten. There's other material I might choose to leave out because it either seems extraneous to the story or it reflects on me personally in a way that I would prefer not to share. That dream, for example, might have been about something else, something potentially embarrassing or compromising that I might not want you to know about. It was only a dream, I know, but still.

Then there's my writerly desire to craft the story in a way that makes for good reading or good listening. I might want to select my details in order to reinforce a particular narrative arc. I might want the language to move in a certain way. And that leads us to yet another fundamental and inescapable reality in storytelling: stories are made up of words. Words are sequences of sounds that line up single file, one word after another. There's simply no way that words can accurately re-create the simultaneous multidimensionality of lived experience. As Stephen Dobyns, no slouch of a poet or storyteller himself, has observed

The main problem with turning the world into language is that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described.

I had a colleague at a school where I used to teach who considered himself to be an evangelist for what he called objectivity. He labored mightily to impress upon his students the need to stick to facts when they were writing. He strove to be "objective" himself when responding to student writing, and was often highly and publicly critical of other teachers in the department—myself being one of them—he considered to be overly encouraging of subjectivity in student work and overly subjective in their evaluation of it.

I didn't agree with him then. Twenty years later, I still don't agree with him, and I think I understand more clearly why. The fact of the matter is, we are awash in subjectivity all day, every day, all the time. As human beings, we make sense of the world by telling ourselves stories. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just the way it is.

The problems arise when we lose sight of the fact that those stories are, almost by definition, fabrications. Over time and many repetitions, we become so invested in the stories we tell that we come to believe them, and to act, and think, as if they were true. This is the case with almost every religion. It's the case with local and national politics, where people's attachment to their own particular versions of the stories they believe to be true leads to the kind of toxic vituperation that seems to be dominating the news cycle not just here in the United States, but in Britain, Italy, Hungary, China, India, the Phillipines... just about everywhere.

Even at family gatherings on holidays, with family and friends, it's easy to forget that the stories we tell one another are merely today's version of what we think happened, or what we remember, or what we think will make people laugh.

This last weekend I was at Santa Sabina for a writing retreat run by William Stafford's son Kim, who is poet-laureate of the state of Oregon himself. He's a terrific writer and master storyteller, and he gave those of us at the conference many short writing prompts by way of encouraging us to connect with our own stories. One of the prompts had to do with recalling a time when you did something you weren't supposed to do. (This is a very good writing prompt, one that I have used—in a slightly different way—with great success over the years with students at all levels from elementary school through adulthood.)

So, I took a shot at it, and this is the poem that I came up with:

Balance

Walking home from school I stopped at the five and dime
for a Milky Way. On the way to the register at the back
of the store my eye was caught by a glint of metallic red light
from the tray on the counter to my left, a display of gyroscopes
with a diagram showing how it worked: you would wind
the twine around the stem, place the foot of the device
on a flat surface, and, holding the top steady with your finger,
yank the string, and then the little red wheel in the middle
would spin and the gyroscope would stand by itself, freed
for the moment from the constraints of gravity. Seeing that
Mr. Harvey was busy ringing up an old lady in a red dress,
I snatched a gyroscope and slipped it into my bookbag.
At home, I sat in my room watching the gyroscope
spin and spin, a thing of wonder and beauty, until suddenly
my mother walked in. Where did you get that? she said.
When I told her, she marched me out to the car, drove me
to the store, and made me give it back and apologize.
I told Mr. Harvey I was sorry, even though it was a lie.

If you were to ask me if this were a true story, I'd say yes. But in the writing of it I found myself making a lot of strategic decisions that were in essence falsifications.  For example, the name of the store was (I think) The Variety Shop, and it wasn't exactly a five and dime store. But for the sake of compression in the story I didn't want to get into all of that, so I just used the generic term "five and dime." (A term which also serves to set the story in the not-very-recent past.)

I don't in fact remember if it was a Milky Way I was after; it probably was not, since I got my candy bars, when I got them, not at the Variety Shop, but at the Gristede's market down the street. I included the Milky Way by way of trying to establish the age (and cupidity) of my main character, which is to say, a younger, somewhat fictionalized version of myself, and also because I just like sound of the syllables. (It could have been a Hershey Bar or a Three Musketeers, right?) The part about stealing a gyroscope is certainly true, but all of the details about their placement in the store and the diagram are invented, as are Mr. Harvey (I have no idea what the name of the store owner was), the old lady, and her red dress. The cash register was by the front door, not in the back. The conversation with my mother is invented as well. She did see me with the gyroscope, and she did make me take it back, but that's about all I remember, and in the absence of memory we fall back upon imagination.

The last line is a particularly egregious case of calculated misrepresentation. I put it in there because I wanted to make a point about my conflicted relationship as a child with parental and ethical expectations (which I would certainly not have been aware of as a child but am certainly aware of now), and also because I wanted the poem to have a punch line at the end. I was hoping, when I read it out loud, that people would laugh.

And they did, although I had, and have, mixed feelings about that, for reasons that should be clear at this point, because the writing of that poem gave rise to the writing of this post. I was very aware in drafting the poem of the somewhat treacherous ground I was traversing as I tried to be true to the experience I had as a child but also true to my sense of what might make for a dramatically effective poem. I was also ruefully aware, both in the writing and in the aftermath of it, of the essentially glibness and shallowness of the poem, as compared to the power and depth of many of the poems that I most admire, and many of the poems that my colleagues read the same night I read this one.

I would say that "Balance" as a poem succeeds in terms of its own limited ambitions. It's smooth. It's deft. It's clear. It meets the requirements of the prompt. And it successfully conveys some elements of the truth. It presents itself, like all other stories, as a story that could be true. But, like all other stories, it less true that it purports to be.

Is it Necessary?

We all have a limited number of hours on this planet. If we are going to dedicate ourselves during those hours to some particular endeavor, whether it be writing or art or music or public service or the accumulation of wealth, it would behoove us to spend that time doing work that needs to be done, that creates value in our own lives and, ideally, in the lives of those around us.

One of the questions that keeps recurring in my life as a writer has to do with what might be called gravity, or weight, or perhaps necessity. While I certainly respect writers who have taken it upon themselves to do the daunting and at times discouraging work of trying to get the words right, to construct poems which are thoughtful and well-crafted, often of late I have found myself looking for something more elusive.

A large proportion of the poems and stories and essays I read—and, alas, perhaps an even greater proportion of the ones I write—might be described as being entertaining or amusing.  But as a reader and as a writer I am always hoping to find my way toward a poem which is not merely artful or clever or funny or apt, but in some sense essential.

Last week I went to a poetry reading sponsored by the Marin Poetry Center at the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael. The featured poets were Troy Jollimore, whom I had head of before, and Lynn Emanual, whom I had not. Jollimore read first, and I enjoyed his poems, although they seemed mostly to be the kind of poems that would come across better on paper. Lynn Emanual's poems, on the other hand, had a dramatic quality to them, and as she read them the words seemed to embody a deep authority and to convey an immediacy and sense of seriousness of purpose that I found to be very impressive. The poems felt, well, necessary. You could sense that they had been important for her to write, and it felt, at least in that moment, like it was important that I had gotten to hear them.

I wound up buying a copy of her New and Selected Poems, called The Nerve of It, and I spent the most of the next day reading and re-reading her poems. One of the ones I like the best—which she had read the previous night—was this one:

The Dig

Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the Rock
gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at the café
where they drink their thimblesful of hot tea, beyond the valley
with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of irrigation,
and someone incising a dark furrow in a field, some plowman's black
gutter opening through the green, she is waist deep in this open grave,
staring at the delicate puzzle of my feet. Beyond her, in the shadow
of Tel el-Hisi, daubing and dampening the earth, another woman finds
the faint brickwork of a floor spidering the dust, on the hearth's
wedge-shaped arc of shadow, a scattering of charred millet.
Nothing else for miles. Nothing but this bluff of ruin,
one decapitated tower, one "window" staved into the brick,
the bouganvillea crawling across a wall dragging its bloody rags.
She is standing here thinking she cannot bear the way this foot—
my foot—wants to step out of the earth.  I don't care. I am using her
to leave the grave. And so we go on. We go on until we cannot go on
deepening my grave, and the trowel hits stone and I lie staring
while she makes the earth recede, reaches in and pulls me out,
my jaw wired shut by roots, my skull so full of dirt that suddenly
the intricate sutures come loose and, in her hands, the whole head opens.
In the shallow setting where I lay is the small triangular sail
of a scapula, the ribs like the grill of a car. She bones me like a fish.
She lays the little pieces, the puzzling odds and ends, into the dishes
of shellac and formalin. One carpal still wears the faint blue
stain of a ring. Wearily, I lay my reassembled head,
sutures rich with glue, against the wall of a filled beaker.
A fine sweat of bubbles on my chin. All night, through the window
of my jar, I watch her mend with glue and wire, the shallow
saucer of my pelvis. We are nothing. Earth staring at earth.

I'll resist the temptation to do a detailed line-by-line analysis of this poem, because I know from my own readings that such analyses can be tedious to read even when they are thoughtful and well-written. But let me just say a couple of things.

First of all, there's the sheer audacity of the piece, the daring leap of the imagination that begins in line fourteen, when it becomes clear that the voice in the poem is that of the woman whose body is being excavated. Then there's the surprising twist that at least in her own mind she's the one in charge of this operation: she is using the archaeologist as the instrument of her resurrection, watching with approval as the broken pieces of her body are being reassembled and mended. Finally, there are the startling last two sentences, which shift the point of view in such a way as to open up the poem vertiginously.  Suddenly, it's not "I," it's "we." That "we" asserts the identification not only of the digger and the dug, but of the writer and the reader, and of all of us. We are nothing. Earth staring at earth.

And that, my friends, is of course the simple truth of the matter, even though it's a truth most of us manage to keep out of the range of our vision as we go about our daily routines, as if we had all the time in the world, as if we were in the world but not of it.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I know, children or adults, who regularly read poetry on their own. And most of those people are themselves writers. I would venture to guess that if you were to ask the average person why they don't read poetry, they'd say something like "I can't understand it," or "I don't have time," or "Poetry doesn't do anything for me."

William Carlos Williams famously observed—in a poem—that "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." If there's one necessary function that poetry can serve, for those who do choose to engage with it—it is to retrieve to our consciousness the simple truths that we so easily lose sight of. And that's what makes this poem so powerful to me.

I'll close with the last sentence of "Like God," the last poem in The Nerve of It, which suggests yet another simple truth about the unspoken contract between writer and reader:

                                           You
did not choose to be in the story of the
matron whose bosom is like the prow
of a ship and who is launched toward
lunch at the Hotel Pierre, or even the
story of the dog-on-a-leash, even though
this is now your story: the story of the
person-who-had-to-take-the-train-and-walk-
the-dark-road described hurriedly by
someone sitting at the tavern so you could
discover it, although you knew all along
the road would be there, you, who have
been hovering above this page, holding
the book in your hands, like God, reading.

Merwin

W. S. Merwin passed away this week, dying peacefully in his sleep at the age of 91.

I have on many occasions in the past had things to say on this blog about Merwin. (If you'd like to take a moment to review them, you can just type "Merwin" in the search bar at the top of the page.) Merwin was an outsized presence in my life. Even though I never met him personally, I saw him read on several occasions, and as a writer and as a human being he was an inspiration and a mentor to me. He was not only a highly original and deeply resonant writer, but he was as well the model of a human being who devoted all of the energies of his life to doing good in and for this world. He spent the last twenty years of his life on the island of Maui doing the work of restoration: taking land that had been stripped and used up for sugar plantations and painstakingly re-introducing native Hawaiian plants to heal the land. That work is documented on the web site of the nonprofit foundation he created to support this work, the Merwin Conservancy. He was a committed and eloquent spokesman for a view of the world which is under siege every day by politicians and businessmen and me-firsters of every stripe who seem to have lost all sense of shame or perspective. Here he speaks of what is at stake:

I believe that our real superiority as a species is not our intelligence itself but the quality of imagination and compassion (in itself perhaps, one of the blessings of language) that allows us to care about the welfare, suffering, survival of lives far from our own, and not immediately or obviously related to our comforts, our prospects, our acquisitions. Whatever we may call the sympathy that involves us with the fate of victims in war zones half a world away, the sonar torture of whales, the mutilation of women and the tortures of bears in Pakistan, or the last members of a species of rainforest honeycreeper, this regard for life apart from our own is something that, so far as I know, is unique to our species. We can glimpse ancestral forms of it in the family and group behavior of other animals, but its broader emergence is a mark of humanity. It is our talent and we have developed it in our own way. It is something that we cannot altogether account for. But if we do not live up to our gifts they do us no good. And what this gift demands of us constantly is a change of heart. What hope there may be depends upon whether or not we can believe in such possibility.
 
from the forward to Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants and Animals of Hawaii.

Several of Merwin's poems have worked their way into my life in ways that no other writer's poems have ever done. I'll post two of them today. The first is one that I committed to memory many years ago and which is still perhaps the most powerful tribute to intellectual humility (and the power of wonder) that I have ever encountered in print. (Note: the word maoli, used here as a personification, is a Polynesian word that means what is native or natural or true.):

Search Party 


By now I know most of the faces 
that will appear beside me as 
long as there are still images 
I know at last what I would choose 
the next time if there ever was 
a time again I know the days 
that open in the dark like this 
I do not know where Maoli is 

I know the summer surfaces 
of bodies and the tips of voices 
like stars out of their distances 
and where the music turns to noise 
I know the bargains in the news 
rules whole languages formulas 
wisdom that I will never use 
I do not know where Maoli is 

I know whatever one may lose 
somebody will be there who says 
what it will be all right to miss 
and what is verging on excess 
I know the shadows of the house 
routes that lead out to no traces 
many of his empty places 
I do not know where Maoli is 

You that see now with your own eyes 
all that there is as you suppose 
though I could stare through broken glass 
and show you where the morning goes 
though I could follow to their close 
the sparks of an exploding species 
and see where the world ends in ice 
I would not know where Maoli is

The second poem is a kind of answer to the question that faces us on those occasions when we find that the world has failed us: how should we respond? Merwin's answer to that question is indicative of the openhearted wisdom that suffuses all of his writing:

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
(from The Rain in the Trees, Knopf 1988)

Quarter to Twelve

Quarter to Twelve

A strident sun overseeing what might
be desert, what might be sea. Rocks
just here; on the horizon, perhaps, hills.
Something breaking up in the middle
(where it all began, where it always
begins): buckthorn bursting into bloom,
grackles harassing wrens, or maybe
some kind of business with an axe.
Over on the right, a building? A book-
case? A mirror? All of the above?
The whole surrounded by a wall:
contents under pressure. The light
doing its definitive work. The day
nearly over, or just about to begin. 

Process Reflection:

It's been a while since I did a pen-and-ink abstract. Wound up doing this one yesterday. It's small, maybe 4" x 6". As usual I had no idea what it was going to turn out to be as I was doing it. I started in the middle drawing more or less random shapes, and worked my way around, ending with the circular figure in the upper left. I was aware, as I worked, of wanting to break up whatever patterns were emerging as I worked, which is why I went to some horizontals in the lower right and then to some verticals and right angles in the upper right. By the time I got to the upper left all I had left to do was circles, so since it was looking landscapey by that time I decided to do a sun thing.

But I kind of liked the way it came out. And today when I was trying without success to get some traction on a poem, I put that work aside and thought I'd just try to work out from the drawing and see what words showed up. I was conscious of wanting to have the poem have some of the same shiftiness that was present in the picture, as well as some of the same continuity. The title just popped into my mind somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth draft.

Looking at the picture as it will appear here, I notice that it appears a little lumpier than it would if I had taken it with my regular camera than with my iPhone. But you can kind of get the idea of what it looks like.

Hillsdale

I've signed up for a course at a nearby community college. It's a poetry workshop. On the first day the instructor gave to those of us who were there for the first time (only a few of us, in a class of returnees) a writing exercise consisting of a series of eleven prompts, like "Name something you can hold in your hand," "What scares you?" and "Quote a line from a song.")

It was suggested that we might try jotting down quick answers to each of the questions, and then attempt to make a poem out of the raw material that appeared on the page. I've done exercises of this kind before—and asked my students to do them as well—but not one with these particular questions. So this afternoon I gave it a shot. My first draft wound up being something like 16 lines, which was close enough to sonnet length that I figured cutting it back would give me something to work against. Here, FWIW, is the very wet draft:

Hillsdale

Pen in hand, she sits at her desk by the window, watching the sun

descend toward the woods behind the house. She is waiting

for the words that might express her heartache, her fear that

the willful disregard for facts she sees in the lives of her friends

and neighbors will only increase in intensity in the coming months

and years, even as the west coast burns, the midwest dries up,

the east coast drowns, home-grown refugees by the millions

take arms against whoever has food or water left to steal.

She recalls her years in Honolulu: once the city of sunshine

and clean air, now choking on traffic, streets awash in homeless

people displaced by entrepreneurs looking for the quick kill.

Wishing she could be invincible, she sits, simmering in onyx anger,

pen poised over the paper, waiting for words. Outside, crows

caw out their warnings. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Process Reflection: The list of questions gave me a word bank to work from, and there were enough different kinds of questions to introduce the same kind of randomness that I sometimes find interesting to work through when I do collages. There's of course a tendency for these elements to pull in different directions. For example, Honolulu would not have shown up in this poem if it wasn't the answer to one of the questions. The challenge was to find a way to have it arrive in a form that fits the emerging narrative, so I had it be the narrator's recollection. The first question had to with owning a large estate, and that provided my frame: from the time I was twelve until I was fifteen I lived on a farm in Hillsdale, New York. So even though Hillsdale and Honolulu are poles apart in any normal geographical or cultural sense, they are both part of my experience. And, as my legions of long-time fans may recall, the existential angst that haunts the poem's narrator is not exactly foreign to me either. It did give me pleasure to tip my hat to Brother Bob, another long-time mentor of sorts, there at the end...

Also, to perhaps belabor the obvious, the poem wound up being a piece of writing about a writer, who inevitably, I suppose, is sort of a stand in for me, in that her concerns as she sits at her desk waiting for the words to come are pretty much the concerns that I have when I sit at my desk waiting for the words to come. The dilemma being that the words, whatever the turn out to be, must necessarily always fall short. I was reading Stephen Dobyns yesterday, his introduction to his second book on craft, Next Word, Better Word, and I think he about nailed it: "The main problem with turning the world into language is that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become,  it is always a diminishment of the reality described." Or, if you want to go back 160 years or so, Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, famously put it this way:

As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.

PS: Two late emendations: after writing and posting the first version of this poem, I went back and changed the word "invisible," which is the word that came up in the original list, to "invincible," which is close in sound but closer to what turned out to be the controlling idea in this poem. And then I was thinking about the word "olive," which came from the list of questions ("Name a color") but didn't feel right here. So I changed it to "onyx." And tinkered with the line about the crows as well. In short, it's still falling into place.




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