Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063

TRES REVIEW

Playing in the Sandbox
by Jack Anders

To speak of a poetic “movement” is immediately to confront the degradation of history. For there have been millions of movements, an endless procession, and to seek to determine and prove the novelty, the immanence, the importance, of our own movement, in the face of all those others, is only to invoke the guilt of why it is we are trying to make our own names instead of saving theirs.

Yet in the end, the best way to fully read the work of prior poets, is to write our own new poems. If you want to preserve the heroism, the flavor, the furor, of any prior movement, the truest way to do it is by trying to make your own movement, in this time.

Who is in the movement? The living. To be in the movement, you have to be alive. There are no other prerequisites. Believe me – take it from the innumerable dead – and the waiting unborn – this prerequisite is selective enough. For the expanses of the dead past and the dead future are endless. Only this present moment, this living instant is alive, and it is momentary, it is like a line of dawn sweeping across the globe with darkness before and behind it.

A most peculiar weight is placed uniquely on us, on you and me, and him and her over there, and only because we are living. We, you and me, right here, we are the living -- we are among those who, like the crest of a wave, inhabit the flowing zone of the present moment until it rolls on out from under us, us left suspended, skeletons.

So while we are here, you and me, and him and her over there, all alive at the same one time, in this flowing moment, which at any interstice may have already left us – for all I know I’m talking to a corpse – for all you know I have already become a corpse behind these words which live without me – well, so long as we’re here, what shall we do? I want to say: that is the origin of poetry. That is the only movement of poets I can endorse.

In our age, uniquely, this movement seems to be one which us scribes, us readers/writers (for text is interactive) find bridging across from pre-internet to post-internet. We might be the last generation to remember living only in print, in books and magazines, hardcopy documents only, on the one side – and virtual, pixel, screen textuality, on the other. For future generations, for all we know, it might all be screen.

Would I want to live in this fleeting present moment, this instant of precious and vulnerable, dying life, this strange floating temporary life-raft of a zone, this stray detritus-receptacle, this pyramid-tip of mysteries and money troubles – alone, would I possibly want to be here alone? No, and for that reason, poetry. As a way of speaking, nothing more. “Words with the most life in them” – no other rule of form.

Looking back from this one particular moment which right now happens to be irradiated with life as I write it, back over the endlessly unrolling frozen waves of history, an endless field of broken bodies and burning dollar bills, I see, I detect, a lineage, a line of progenitors, of previous workers. Of other slaves, now dead – but I know from some of the signs they’ve left, that they too were seeking to somehow hold the mystery of signlessness, of what the Buddhists call “animitta.” Poetry is signs of signlessness. Look at them back there –  Holderlin’s poor broken body rotting away in the small bedroom the carpenter, Zimmer, maintained for him, so he could stay in it, after he went mad . . . and look over there, Friedrich Nietzsche, his mustache enormously, laughably overgrown, for that’s what his nazi mom and his nazi sister wanted to have him look like, a “prophet,” a “seer” – his works being used to support the Fuhrer, his ironic and naive aphorisms becoming inscribed over the gates of S.S. training camps, “What will not kill us makes us stronger” . . . and hey, over there, on a side road in England, that gentle man, John Clare, lost on his way, escaped from the madhouse, feasting on wet grass. Looking for his wife Mary, who by that time was long dead, but in the end historical facts such as “life” and “death” are nothing more than signs, like a dispensable snakeskin, sloughed off of the 7-mile-long body of writhing solitude, or something . . . something said pretentiously, by our other good friend Jim Morrison, who we find over on this side of the globe, hanging out at this particular notch of the latitude (not the latitude of the drowning horses), sipping his too many scotches . . . a lineage, a line of precursors. Who are mine? Who are yours? Are you, too, a poet? What is a poet? What does that mean? What form of regular slavery is that?

The first recorded poet in human history is said by some to be Enheduanna, born 2300 B.C. She was a Sumerian moon priestess, whatever that means . . . the daughter of King Sargon of Agade. Her poems are marked by sensuality, weird metaphors, and intimacy, like Sappho, who followed her approximately 2000 years later. Enheduanna’s poems, in part, survived the years, etched into rock plates. I admire these lines of hers:

My soft mouth of honey is suddenly confused.
My beautiful face is dust.

(A Book of Women Poets, ed. Aliki Barnstone, p. 5)

The philosopher Walter Benjamin once visualized the Angel of History as a statue, turned, its back to us, and facing history, which heaps chaos after collapse after catastrophe at it, pushing the Angel backward with a continuous spillage of falling buildings, clouds of bomb-dust, piles of people, mounds of pain and horror, always pushing, pushing the Angel back. This is the deadening, lost sense of history. History, in its purest linguistic form, is an endless list of names, as in a medieval Domesday Booke, or today’s phone book. History is an enormous list of events each of which only ends with a death. History is like the world’s largest stack of utility bills. Confronting history without the sense of a unifying metanarrative to connect the dots and stitch the progression together, one is left with this helpless run-on pile of fragments. Therefore Holderlin said that “poetically we dwell upon the earth,” because absent the poetic sense of things, life would be a mistake, which is the same thing Nietzsche said when he said that without music, life would be a mistake. Poetry opposes history. I have already leapfrogged you back over 4000 years to hear Enheduanna say things like:


From the doorsill of heaven came the word
“Welcome!”

. . . .

What I sang at midnight,
let the singer echo at noon!

(Women Poets, p. 8). 

That was written in 2300 B.C., over 4000 years ago. Just think of it. Just try to absorb, hold, conceive of, this passage of moments, just for a second. It can’t be done. It’s impossible. All the same, it’s amazing to me, how just as she said, it can be said again, the singer can echo her thoughts, her heart, at any time of day:

Like gift-ribbon
I wrap around and through
myself, sometimes
wonder, what it would be like,
to not have to look at
everything, not guess or judge
what is and what is not
reality, this bad cinematographic
end-sequence skipping
due credits and moving straight into empty
white frames, [] [] [] []
to lack a form of certainty like the warm rain
of a kiss from my mother saying
she loves me as I’m tucked into bed a young boy

again . . .

(Paul Mabelis, posted at The Sandbox). 

While the self, in Enheduanna’s poem, seems to speak plainly, from the rock, likewise, the self, in Paul’s poem, seems to me to speak plainly, from the pixel-space. The self is a very simple thing in sleep, in kissing, in silence. But in words it grows very complicated. It speaks figuratively, as Jesus did. By wearing a mask we be ourselves. Parse it out:

We dwell
poetically
on the earth.

(Holderlin)

Poetically, i.e., via imagination. It has the same force as history, but in an utterly different way. Ideas of miracles, of hands literally descending from the clouds, of a man awakening and walking out of his tomb, of a hand commanding the waters to part, seem to me to be examples of bad poetry. They are not figurative, they leave no space, afford no credence, to the imagination, to the child’s game. Literal truth is historical truth, and it doesn’t even exist. It dissolves when you touch it.

Heraclitus said fate is a child playing dice by the side of the sea. He also said the kingdom is a child’s. Jesus said we must become like little children. There was a Zen monk who said he would learn something from a 7 year old child, if the child had something to teach him, and he would not hesitate to teach something to a 70 year old professor, if the old professor had something to learn. Nietzsche said that to write with great style is to write naively, and with cynicism. Isn’t that the tone we can seem to detect here:

wonder, what it would be like,
to not have to look at
everything, not guess or judge
what is and what is not
reality

(Paul)

I am not saying “it’s a great poem” – I am sick of thinking that way, of judging things, comparing, over and over. It seems to me that the heart of the matter is that, for better or worse, and for whatever reason, we, you and me, happen to be here, alive at the same time, in this floating present moment. So what are we to do with it? How are we to be? For many people, most people, the overwhelming majority, poetry, per se, will never come into play. Their poem may be the fact that they successfully raised a son, or comforted a daughter, or paid off a home, or found food to eat. Most people do not need poetry, per se -- they need relief from the pain of living. Which is what poetry does, for those who have the oddity and good fortune to have received the education which allows them to read, and the leisure time which allows them to think about things, and the nerdiness which allows them not to entirely dissipate their limited leisure time between the thighs of lovers. Ginsberg said the purpose of poetry is to ease the pain of living, and all else is drunken dumbshow. 

Yet to write poetry, at least as I have experienced it, is not entirely an easeful or an easy thing. In our age, at least, I think that writing poetry involves a fair amount of taking apart existing concepts, existing default word-orders which become default mindsets, worldviews; much of the work of poetry consists of deconstruction. Which is dangerous and difficult, because, in Rilke’s words, it tends to leave you “exposed on the cliffs of the heart,” without the comforts and shelters of default word-orders. I have seen old Christian men and women, for example, who have derived a firm and profound sheltering of their psyche, via their religious fundamentalist beliefs. Which I think are frozen poems. To become a poet, these folks would have to be thawed out. But why would I want to do that to them? Why deprive someone of mental shelter? Poetry, for the working poet, is exposure of the mind, exposure in the sense of when they say that someone got lost in the winter woods and was “exposed,” or, more horribly, when, in the old Greek tradition, the parents had a baby, and it was a girl, and they didn’t want a girl, they needed a boy, an heir, a hand to help around the farm, and so they brought the infant baby girl to the side of a rocky hill, and left her there, “exposed” her, for the wolves and crows. Poets are exposed. they lose the sheltering effect of what it is like not to live in doubt, not to wonder. Not everything about wondering is wonderful. Beyond the limits of words there is an awful (awesome?) silence which it can seem like a sin to put into words. Words freeze the signless. So poets write figuratively. Poetry is not to sin in words. But is there sin? Poetry is a child playing with colored wood-block alphabet letters by the side of the sea.

how would you want me
to explain myself, what me with all these
smoked cigarettes, fine grass rolled in them
and my heart
with a valve
that does not close
something about the way
the doctor says that makes me want to
ask you to go away

i cannot help my madness, what
would you have me say

(Ankush)

I read in an interview where the poet Campbell McGrath said that he didn’t believe in the mystical aspect of poetry. Yeats thought poetry was so mystical that he went and sat at the fat feet of Madame Blavatsky and joined the Irish Theosophical Society and wrote his ridiculous prose book “A Vision” and the like. Poets must be fools! William Blake sat naked in his backyard with his wife. OK, his backyard was fenced. But still. Any real poet knows exactly what I am saying when I say that poetry is a constant form of spelunking, risk-taking, not-knowing, not knowing how the sentence will end as you begin to write it; how good poets leave gigantic junkheaps of bad poetry, and maybe (or maybe not) some good stuff . . . did you know that Emily Dickinson never even read Walt Whitman because she heard he was obscene? That’s how crazy it is. Absolute judgment is absolute reduction into the literal, the imaginative bird is frozen, cut up, fried, put on a plate, dead. Poems are spells against death.

Over the flooded plain I am born by the wind,
I descend in tears like dew, I lie glittering,
I fly aloft like the Griffon, to my nest on the cliff,
I bloom among the loveliest of flowers,
I am both the Oak, and the lightening that blasts it.
I embolden the spearman,
I teach the councilors their wisdom,
I inspire the poets,
I roam the hills like a ravenous boar,
I roar like the winter sea,
I return again like the receding wave,

Who but I can unfold the mysteries
of the unhewn dolman?

(Amergin’s Charm)

Paul and Ankush both post regularly at The Sandbox. Paul lives in upstate New York, Ankush lives somewhere in India. Another very intriguing poet from the box is Eden. She lives in New Zealand. When else in history could poets from opposite sides of the globe listen to each other and talk back and forth and share their poems in realtime? Compared to Paul and Ankush, Eden’s work is generally much more restrained and understated. Indeed, just as there is a poetry of exhibitionism, there is also poetry of diffidence. It may be that from the existential point of view of the poet, the situation always feels the same. For a shyer person, what feels to her interior like sufficient self-exhibit, would not be enough for a less shy person. Emily Dickinson was said to sometimes request that her visitor stay over on one side of a wall, or door, while she spoke to him or her from the other. Who doubts that she felt as naked there as someone else might feel up on a stage? Emily was a "debauchee of dew;" Dylan Thomas claimed on the night of his death to have drunk 18 straight whiskies. To each his or her own. Every poet, in a sense, is an exhibitionist in relation to his or her self-sense: the degree of outward showing varies in proportion to the alchemy of inward sensitivities. A barefoot tribesman has thick calluses on his feet, while a citydweller needs his shoes; but there are no calluses on the eyes. To speak the poem at all is an act of exposure: the truly squeamish stick to a pose of prose.

There is an inward and an outward world. We can see the leaf swaying, outside of us; or we can let it fall down through our eyes and into our thoughts. Either approach may be more or less auspicious, depending on the poet’s strategy and sensibility. The danger of too much subjectivity and inwardness is a sloshiness of content and fuzziness of sensory image – for example, this is a recurrent problem with Rilke, I would say, or Louise Gluck. On the other hand, too much external focus can lead to merely documentary detail, mere assemblage of facts – think of a John Betjeman or Elizabeth Bishop poem you didn’t like (you’re probably wrong about the Bishop poem, but that’s another essay). Jill Chan, aka Eden, in her book which she has published and which you can buy by dropping her a line at the box, begins with inwardness:

The way a leaf sways
Inside her, she imagines

(Imagination) 

There is a sense, with Chan, that the borderline between inwardness and exteriority is quite permeable: she is hypersensitive. This effort, however, to delineate inward and outward zones for poetry quickly becomes paradoxical, however. According to Nietzsche, all of our sensations of the supposedly "outside" world are already supremely metaphorical, figurative, inward, imaginative: it was only through a conductive process of photon to retina, nerve-impulse to cortical center, transfiguration via sensory filters into recognized images in the mind, that we see anything. Thus external sense-input has already undergone interior, essentially metaphorical (i.e., saying one thing in terms of another) transmutations in order to be felt, touched, tasted, seen, heard, smelt. "A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor," Nietzsche says. The orange does not smell like an orange outside of our noses. It is only the complex biological machinations of nose-holes, cilia, smell-receptors, nerves, brain-functions, that gives rise to a "smell of an orange" which we register as a sense-impression. One could readily hypothesize a differently organized creature for whom an orange smelled like steak and a steak like an orange. This is not to say that the orange fruit does not exist, hanging there in a tree outside of us. But it is to say that our own sense-impressions of what an orange is, are in a sense poetical, metaphorical. We might accurately say: an orange is like a tart, orange-colored, sweet-sour, relatively soft, spherical object, to a human. To an ant, perhaps it is like a gigantic, bulbous, acidic rock – unless skinned – in which case it may be more like a large hill roughly subdivided into large lobes in turn subdivided into hundreds of approximately ant-sized containers of semisweet liquid. To a species of fungus allergic to oranges, the fruit is like a zone of total poison. Etc. To each its own world. Even sense-data is an interpretation of phenomena, from this perspective. In Nietzsche’s terms, "there are no facts, only interpretations."

The hypothesis that any attempted straight factual description will inherently include metaphorical and interpretive subtexts leads me to have a preference for poetry with high imagistic, outward-directive substance. I am suspicious of excessive subjectivity in a poem because I figure that a supposedly "objective" poem will be inherently subjective in an implied manner. For example, such an ostensibly outwardly descriptive poem as "At the Fishhouses" by Elizabeth Bishop sets up unstated subjective, inward, metaphorical resonance:

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them. . .

(At the Fishhouses) 

Likewise, consider the wealth of "subjective" resonance contained in images as ostensibly outward and descriptive as these by Thomas Hardy:

Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

(During Wind And Rain).

during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

(Afterwards)

The latter snippet brings to mind this from Keats:

The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass

(Eve of St. Agnus ). 

Which recalls this from the prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

The limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive.

(Love in the Night)

Fitzgerald had this to say about the Keats line:

All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. … A line like "The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass," is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement — the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your eyes.

(F. Scott Fitzgerald On Writing, New York, Scribners, 1985, p. 53). 

Ezra Pound said that a poem should be at least as well-written as prose; the trouble with poetry that is too subjective and inward is that one runs out of nouns and verbs to specifically say the subjective, inward condition, which is inherently amorphous. Let me close with one more piece of objectivity from Hardy before moving on:

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow, silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half-asleep as they stalk.

Only thins smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties die.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by;
War's annals will fade into night
Ere their story die.

(At Time of 'The Breaking of Nations)

In light of these preferences of mine, when I read Eden, sometimes her language is too vague, amorphous for me. When she does assay an external clarity, a detail, an objective image, I like the effect:

When you were young
You were always
On the light end
Of the seesaw –
Up in the air,
Magnanimously
Helpless.

(Understanding)

This is a very clever stanza. The rhythmic thrust of the lines down to "seesaw" really does seem to lift you up and leave you suspended, sort of looking down at the peculiar five syllables of "magnanimously" laid out down below you. The verbal texture of a word like "magnanimously" is deployed to full advantage here, irrupting and balancing the unobtrusive generality and banality of verbal clusters such as "when you were young" at the top and "helpless" on the bottom.

Other times in Eden’s poems, we get small, depressive effects, little snakes biting their own tails and rolling away, an impacted, short-lined hesitation, with a feel of a pulling away into self like water down a drain. This, for example, feels a little like Paul Celan:

Tired,
The wound
Closes its eye.

(Afterimage)

This tone, sinking into silence at the end of each short line, can’t help but remind us of Celan as the arch-poet of depressive short form in recent times. Celan once said "there's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German."  While Celan never gave up writing, his poetry was tugged as if visibly toward silence in his later years, the very short lines spindling down the page. In this regard, one can think of a poem as negotiating two poles: the zone of silence which consists of no words, and the zone of silence which consists of too many words. We might place Dickinson closer to the first pole and Whitman closer to the latter. Chan is certainly not a poet of sprawl; her risk, or the adversary of her poems, is literal silence. Her lines are so short, for the most part, and her poems so brief, that one feels that with one small yank up and to the left, the text would disappear entirely. And even within the minimal graphical territory of her poems (like small islands protruding from an ocean) the words which have surfaced are constantly in danger of drowning in an inaudibility, a silencing of verbal surface secondary to a creeping generality and abstraction. Thus in word-clusters such as the following we are perilously close to a completely effacing haze:

A certain movement
Rushes underneath –

(Reckoning)

The hand sways
To the eye’s music

(Calligraphy)

the floating rain
when everything else
falls on you.

(Weight)

And yet, closely examining these passages, and others, in her book, one starts to breathe in their altered gravity, until the mistiness itself is a form of delicate clarity. From a certain perspective of reflective sensitivity, we can begin to identify ourselves with these figurations. It’s a question of registering minimal phenomena as something other than minimal, where a certain overload has occurred elsewhere in the psyche:

Here I am taking leave
Just because
It’s time to ease
This hand
Into a different pocket
And feel the crooked edge
Of the key like it’s all
That matters

(Here I Am Taking Leave)

Her book is called The Smell of Oranges (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2003). The minimal statement is in a sense gigantic, because the words in her poems are seen positioned so sharply against nothingness, against white space. We are not used to viewing words in this way. What we call minimal is also maximal in the sense that, against the poem-canvas of the very short line, short poem, and indirection and understatement of phrase, whatever little bit is delivered, across this silence, tends to stand out against it, the word upon the white space, in a very vividly presented, "placed there," way. From this position, it is easy to see that her exemplars, or guardian spirits, in this lineage of lyric, would include, perhaps, Dickinson:

The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – Beside –

(Selected Dickinson, p. 133, Doubleday 1997)

Compare that to:

The mind
creaks as winds
bend leaves

(Eden, Afterimage). 

In both poems, the inside and outside are almost simultaneously presented; it’s as if neither poet has more than a thin membrane between self and world; this accounts for hypersensitivity. Also consider certain of the quieter Zen poets, such as Saigyo:

The winds of spring
scattered the flowers
as I dreamt my dream.
Now I awaken,
my heart is disturbed.

(p. 126 Zen Poems, Borzoi 1999). 

Compare:

You cannot
Remember his face
After turning off
The lights.

(Eden, Visual Perceptions). 

In both poets, there is an absorption in how reality subtly weaves and unweaves what we know of it, even what we are; as she says elsewhere:

do threads feel
the unravelling tug
of a regretful hand?

(Tug) 

She prefers hints and preliminary gestures of presence, for the full-on onslaught senses too much, inflicts her feeling with what is still bearable, but not necessarily sayable. Think again of the anecdote of Emily standing on one side of a wall, preferring her interlocutor to speak from on the other side, around the corner. Isn’t that the same sensory sensitivity as the following?

In the next room
The creak of your slippers
Brings you closer

I am picturing you
Sharper than day

Running water
Brushing of teeth
Click of the door

(In The Next Room)

The figure is portrayed, as it were, before he appears. The expectation clouds the sensitivity of the speaker with sensory detail which is minimal, because it consists of subtle hints preceding the actual appearance of the other person. To me this poem is effective because we are clearly notified of what it is that the poem tracks the pre-appearance approaching of. In some of the other poems, I get a similar sense that the poem is presenting me with flickering, preliminary phenomena – however I am less sure of what the not-yet-appearing thing, object, item, is. This is a typical difficulty or risk taken by this kind of poetry; we see this occur in Dickinson sometimes. It is to the poetry of understatement what blundering bluntness is to the poetry of overstatement. Let me quote a few more short poems that remind me a little of hers, these from Czeslaw Milosz’ anthology A Book of Luminous Things:

In the rearview mirror suddenly
I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral:
Great things dwell in small ones
For a moment.

(Adam Zagajewski, Auto Mirror, p. 128) . 

Likewise, Chan seeks to reflect the firmament in a dewdrop. I would particularly want to introduce her to Anna Swir, if she has not yet made her acquaintance. Compared to Eden, Swir is slightly more secure in her moral or metaphysical assertions, also in her detailing of scene; but her basic existential modesty, indicated graphically by a brevity of form, is analogous:

You will not tame this sea
Either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
In its face.

Laughter
Was invented by those
Who live briefly
As a burst of laughter.

The eternal sea
Will never learn to laugh.

(The Sea and the Man, p. 47)

Swir lived from 1909 to 1984.

Walking to your place for a love feast
I saw at a street corner
An old beggar woman.

I took her hand,
Kissed her delicate cheek,
We talked, she was
The same inside as I am,
From the same kind,
I sensed this instantly
As a dog knows by scent
Another dog.

I gave her money,
I could not part from her.
After all, one needs
Someone who is close.

And then I no longer knew
Why I was walking to your place.

(Swir, The Same Inside)

Swir (full last name Swirszcyznska) experienced the Nazi occupation of Poland; this may account in part for the sharper tone of her voice compared to Eden’s. Swir’s troubles have been co-opted by outside blind historical forces; Eden, one senses, lives in a zone comparatively much more innocuous historically; but she seems to have encountered interior dislodgments or questionings with their own difficulties, or even dismalities, calling for poetic address.

She is sixty. She lives
The greatest love of her life.

She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,
Her hair streams in the wind.
Her dear one says:
"You have hair like pearls."

Her children say:
"Old fool."

(Swir, The Greatest Love)

Notice how the thing creating pathos here is an external force: aging. In Eden’s poems, pathos seems more to be created by internal crumbling:

I wish I could
Unweave mistakes,
Pull out the parts
That never belonged.

(Eden, Tug)

She is expressing interior misgivings. To me the statement is a little vague. I would want something a little sharper, in some ineffable poetic way, I suppose. Along the same vector of negative critique, to me, a poem such as the following is simply too amorphous, perhaps too far gone into the silence, the indeterminacy, which wells up within and between the lines and words. But this may be a defect of my own affective predilections. Here, you judge for yourself:

Poems
on the table

a glass

the rimming
of dreams

and the slow
grasp

of your right
hand

(Poems)

I feel like this poem is too close to invisible. It is like the gauziest thinnest translucence hung upon silence. It disturbs me: it feels immobilized. The gesture is so slowed down, here, that it becomes like a broken-off piece of an unknown statue – like a broken-off bit of grasping hand, whose owner and overall gestural meaning or intention cannot be known. Without such context, what of us can ever be known, or even, comfortably forgotten? I feel like the voice in such a poem is isolating itself away not only from me the reader, but from her the speaker, and therefore I start to feel like this poem has risked itself a little too close to immobility, freeze, unknown, depression, silence. This vector of negative critique has a positive flipside, which must be emphasized: if it wasn’t for Eden’s overall leaning away from speech, toward silence, away from activity toward immobility, away from signification toward undersignification, away from being-here toward being-lost, we would not have her poems, she would not want to write them. It is her distortion of voice away from regular normal sane well-adjusted medium-temperature prose, and toward what may be characterized as a pathology of silence – that makes her a poet. In a sense, all forms of poetic voicing may be characterized as pathological variants or pullings-away from the central normal prose of daily life. So, my negative critique must be balanced against the paradoxical fact that if you stripped away each of these supposed negativities, you would lose the poet. Any changes or transmutations she makes in her voice as her voice continues to develop will be far more subtle and mysterious (hopefully) than anything seemingly suggested as a way out of my negative critique.

Let me give another example of a poem of Eden’s which I feel to be too minimal, and then show you a poem of hers which to me seems ore fully "present" on the page:

And what about the moon
You haven’t seen for a while . . .

You want to look at it
When beauty would move you

While you stand there,
Head tilted,

Bathed in awe,
Making you forget

The angle of his words
Coming at you like arrows.

(Life As Poetry)

There seems to be an outline of a scene; perhaps two lovers below the moon; I am initially confused by the reference "you haven’t seen for a while;" I am wondering what that means, what that is all about; then the line "when beauty would move you" seems a little vague or banal’ I am not convinced, or motivated to know, inhabit from inside, the directive "you want to look at it;" "bathed in awe" just makes me impatient, as reader, to be shown that which bathes – I want, I hunger for, the poetic presentation of the visual image, the sensory image, the full white moon, its chalk-like spherical delectable wafery graciousness high in night – I want to * see * what the poet says is enough to be "making you forget;" then I am disrupted over to the romantic-twosome-angle of the last two lines, vaguely incising . . . to me, that is the problematic progression of the poem. Now compare that to this, which seems to me tactile, satisfyingly * here *:

My mother would ask
If I wanted them cut or peeled.
I’d answer that I wanted them peeled
If only to see her fingers hold them
Like clay to be molded.
After peeling their husk,
She would put her thumbs in the center
And break each into halves;
Later separate the slices, one by one.

I marvel at the flexible skins
Pulling away,
Not even breaking at the pressure.

(The Smell of Oranges) 

Now, notice that it may well be that I experience the tactile physicality of this poem more poignantly precisely because elsewhere in the book we encounter more amorphous poems like "Life As Poetry." However, I do believe that her willingness to stretch our her verbal perceptions so as to show us the full heft and pliancy of an object, a thing, is laudable and represents a significant extension of her inherently delicate and minimal apparatus, up and over a hurdle, like a hiker up a mountain. I think it is healthy for her voice to encounter an object in this way. Notice how it generates a moral resonance which is only implied. The inherent moral implications of "not even breaking at the pressure" suit Eden’s enjoyment of understatement as a mode of indicative rhetoric; it suits her posture as speaker. For her to circumnavigate an orange and place it in the poem is, really, just the same, just as much an achievement, or a risk rewarded, as it would be for a more vulgar and boisterous poet to haul us colorfully around the globe. I am reminded of Auguste Rodin’s advice to the very sensitive, delicate and subjectively minded young Rilke to go and paint things, in his poems; he then went to the Paris Zoo and got out of himself a little, stared at the flamingos and caged panthers, and wrote his "thing-poems." The orange gave Eden a dose of Vitamin See. (OK bad pun).

As I write this part of my essay, it is November 20, 2003. I am holding a book that my friend Jewel gave me which provides us with a selected Emerson quote for every day. The quote for November 20 is "What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that kind." With her accuracy and delicacy of perception, Eden is able to offer us glimpses into the oh-so-rare materialized "best" which, in a perfect world, which is to say, a fully inhabitable one, would be the "average," the prevalent. Look at the sensitive idealism found in these patches:

Light falls

Drunk, wintry
Through a blue window.

(Weight)

In streaked woods
Where candles mull.

(Dexterity)

The ducks are there
But you forget to bring

Bread to feed them
To feel less alone.

(Writing Bad Poems)

Hold an egg. Hand curve,
A second shell for protection.

(Temperance)

At her best, she conveys a tone of careful, ruminative attentiveness. I am reminded of Jane Hirshfield, whose poems are likewise short, quiet and thoughtful. Hirshfield had this to say about attentiveness in an interview:

Attentiveness is the only means by which we can know the nature and qualities of our moment-by-moment existence — the entrance gate through which a person can not just 'be' his or her life, but know it, taste it, consider it, work with it as a potter works with clay. Attentiveness is what opens us into a conscious human experience, different from that of a tree or stone. And yes, I do see the development of a continually deeper and more clarified and refining attentiveness as the path through which art and craft as well as life are more fully realized. The realm of the poem is a small cosmos in which the large cosmos of our existence is also held. For me, it's something like the Heraclitean formulation, 'As above, so below' — as in life, so in poems.

(San Diego Reader interview). 

When Eden moves away from solitary introspection into bits of dramatic interaction and dialogue, the inwardness and attentiveness continues:

He asks her
Where she lives.
"Behind my eyes"
she whispers . . .

(The Conversation)

Compare:

I saw no Way – the Heavens were stitched –

(Dickinson, p. 110)

With:

A stitch of hands explains all.

(Eden, Faith). 

The small, domestic trope ("stitched" / "stitch") is being deployed in a framework full of cosmological spaces ("Heavens" / "all"). Clearly, Eden works more from the Dickinson as opposed to the Whitman end of things. Thus, holding in mind Yeats’ prescription that poets consider their antinomies and opposites as potential generative fertilities or zones of growth, I wonder at whether Eden would be able to effect any further growth or extension along the more documentary, narrative lines glimpsed rarely in her book such as here (I quote the entire poem):

We were there curled
up in the lounge.

The first patient
I became acquainted
With was Hone.
"What’s that?" he asked
pointing at the bottle of
spring water I was clutching.
"Water," I said shakily.
His eyes glared
At me but his tone of
Voice was friendly.
"We’ve got heaps of water
over there," he said indicating
gallons of water propped
on a small round table.
Smiling, I tried to avoid
His gaze and settled in
My worn-out chair.
The smell of smoke lingered
In my hair. I wished
He would disappear.
I snapped my fingers
To see what would happen.
He vanished, just like that.

Just like that.

(The First Patient)

I do not like the way this poem ends. I think it’s a cop-out; or to be more clear, I feel like the careful fabric of documentary, detailed realism created over the main body of the poem is suddenly thrown into question in a way which seems too easy, too much an evasion of what was admittedly a painful reality. But look at the poetic beauty of the realistic details, as long as the poet continues to dare sustain it! The scene is well-portrayed. The other person (is this the only time in the entire book a person is actually given a name? It may be) is incisively seen, in the double perception of the glaring eyes yet friendly voice. The sensory scene-setting or scenic notations consisting of the smell of smoke, the worn-out chair, are adequate to their presentational function. I think that she loses trust in the poem right at the end, or begins to squirm at the * placement * of her voicing there, in reality, documentary, adrift with detail, linear, historical: yet I disagree with her, if it is indeed the case that she does not * like * being in such a context: I think the poem works: the poem comes as a mild shock to me, it seems very uncharacteristic of the flavor or the tone of the rest of the book. It would be interesting to me if Eden made further forays into this direction of voice.

All in all, her book is an excellent, varied book. It gives us the smell, the tincture, of a specific, existent voice: a real poet: subtle, delicate, but also as definitely present as if you took the cork out of the top of a tiny red-glass jar of fine rose-water, and sniffed. I would recommend this book to others.

Another box regular is Lynze. Lynze’s poems have a very real feel to them. Her poetry gets happier when she is in love in her personal life, and her tone gets more depressive when she is out of love -- in that respect like Sappho. One of her major themes has been the nature of this cyber-beast, the internet, as a space for writing. It is a mixed feeling, with scary qualities. There is the weight of the strange emptiness or voidness of the internet. Poems float into the internet and lead a strange potentially endless half-life fading off into blogs and net spaces where who knows who may ever read them or not. It’s like Borges’ Infinite Library: all writing is contained there, but because the format is infinite and the storage capacious, to have your text let loose in there means curiously little. In Borges’ fable of the Infinite Library, you can go up or down as many levels in the library as you could ever wish; the shelves are packed with books full of nonsense; you are aware that the most amazing stuff ever written also drifts somewhere within the endless shelves, but how could you ever find them? A similar vertigo affects the internet poet. This is a weight I imagine her as sensing.

Then, too, she bears the weight of pursuing the physical and mental activity of poetry when she also has a fulltime semi-blue-collar job and kids to raise as a single mom. Her situation is unlike your stereotypical university professor poet whose job is at least somewhat aligned with poetry. To live is political; to say anything is a human act therefore a political act; Lynze is acutely embedded within a particular American post-feminist post-nuclear-family post-industrial semi-working-class goods/service-economy context. The same boat everyone’s in basically. She feels and wears all the wounds that one might expect. The main wound, for her as a poet, is the necessity of cliche, of verbal/mental kitsch. Her self is imbricated with automatic unavoidable cliché. It is in the logo “coke” on the can she drinks. She must act certain ways, say certain things, make particular kitsch/cliché gestures, to survive, to be allowed. She is not comfortably withdrawn from the mass-culture society like some of the rest of us. She therefore must actively work with known and unknown kitsch in her imagery and cliché in her poetry in a way which is almost military, it is so potentially intense and self-immolating.

Finally, she sits like a slug on top of the razorblade of fame, of the fame-wish – one of the mega-cliches which contemporary America forces down the throats of starving artists. Think of how literary fame, success, could help her, could get her out of the crappy job! (Am I just projecting all my own paranoias and fantasies onto her?) In America, poetry like every other art has been capitalized, co-opted by capitalist motivations and directives; infiltrated from underneath, the artist’s vision and the poet’s voice is lifted, afforded existence, realized into American materiality, into American cultural exposure, with attendant validation for the poet – only to the extent the poet successfully commodifies her art. Megapoets like Billy Collins sign up with entities like the Steven Barclay Agency to arrange for readings and contracts. University English Department heavy hitters like Kevin Young rack up various awards and prizes and get featured at readings and workshops. The commercial industry of American poetry is impressive. A large part of it consists of MFA programs where thousands of young students take courses in which they pay more established poets to teach them how to write better. 

There is nothing either right or wrong with any of this aesthetically speaking: you may (or may not) have good poetry emerge from this context just as from any other. My point is that silhouetted against this socioeconomic capitalist context, a poet like Lynze gets highlighted as a marginalized figure. She can’t make money off her poetry. She doesn’t have the right university degree or connections. Writing alone will not burst her from the margins into the marketplace. With the job to hold down plus the kids to raise alone she doesn’t have the resources or the time to effect a negotiated entrance into the American professional poet economic system. So, she stays "on the outside." The phrase "on the outside" is a cliché label attached to this zone which is actually profoundly inside, profoundly interior when we compare it to just about anything real and authentic. It is a zone at least as strange in its free-floating lack of validation as Emily Dickinson’s twilight world of poems furtively stitched into little handmade books and stored in a bedroom bureau drawer. Unlike Walt Whitman, Lynze does not have the time, lack of family duties, presence of political connections, or self-mythologizing capacity to effect publicity and self-promotion as Walt incessantly did (bless his heart). Lynze’s poetry works toward demythologization, I think, in an attempt to deal with the constant crossfire of kitsch image and cliché phrasing which resounds in that zone known as contemporary American practical lower-middle-class full-time-job reality wherein she lives. Consider:


the alarm is bright a cop light
stabs my dreams. the phone
rings too. nancy, collect.
i stumble it back
on its hook, unacceptable.

she wants me to call
animal control for her
dog's corpse-- it keeps her
locked inside,
the decomposition.

water from the tap to the pot to mr
coffee. a scoop of espresso, open
the blinds to a day already

soaked in gray. this rain soft
as needles from a pine.

(my windows are down)

The poem sounds like one of the ancient Asian Zen/Tao "this is what happened to me today" literati poets or monks stumbled into a COPS set, maybe a house trailer outside of Spokane. Which is precisely the effect intended: so take very ancient old insight-methods of making poetry which she has so thoroughly interiorized in an almost cellular way such that half the time I doubt she even knows what her own method is – take old Basho nature-observation method and apply it to our nature, our real times: nature stained by plastic folder, trash can leaking slow line of grit in rainstorm, etc. It is not necessarily or even wholly negative, this series of observations (observances) of American postindustrial daily life-events (rites). She is not self-mythologizing, does not seal her inherently painful bleeding-heart self-exposure that way, but she is attentive to, does, to the extent possible in our time, actually believe in, performance, mysticism, rite, irrationality, unnamable spirit-essence, right (as in, the spunk to say, "even in the midst of all this, I have the right to be a poet").

the little boot won't stay in the slot
i've been workin it all morning

this isn't about sex
it's about commerce

selling, buying. what's for dinner?
outside in the morning sun, a gleam—

a metallic seed the ants pass by.
obsidian reflection, monolith's face.

somewhere timing is leaky
let's try to find it this way:

crack the crystal. measure
the frequency. package it up.

the little boot
the slot
a label to cover the flaws.

(transactionality)

The sense here is of tracking the daily empirical existential life-details, including the little brief weird mystical/irrational flights and hijinks of the conscious human mind. But there is a sense of a troubled, uncalm state of mind, when you compare this voice to Asian poets who used the route of tracking their daily lives in their poems. The reason is simple: poetry is a strange and unusually destabilized place right now in America, in between old (print media) and new (internet) presentation formats and in a weird detritus-zone of post-free verse forms. There are a lot of poets and a lot of schools, a lot of ways to write poems. The first generation or two of MFA and souped-up English Department products have seeped across the land and we have many, many poets writing many, many poems. This can lead to a sense of creeping desperation because at once the territory feels like it suffers from glut (the abundance of writers and poems) and vacuum (the troubles a poet has fitting into the American socioeconomic situation). Compare the established traditions and lineages and cultural zones for poets in ancient China and Japan.

Consider the wandering poet-monk Saigyo (1118-90), who lived in seclusion in a small hut. He was an itinerant monk who composed waka poems (poems written in 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic form). Near the hermitage where he lived is a clean spring which was used as a motif of his poems. Another poet in Japan, Matsuo Basho (1644-94) also visited this spot and composed a haiku poem (poem written in 5-7-5 syllabic form) on the theme of the spring. Consider: a difference of 500 years! Five hundred years after poet-monk Saigyo writes waka poems in his small hut, along comes Basho and writes a haiku poem on the same spot. We do not have traditions like this in america. There is no traditional role of "poet-monk" for an American poet to play: it is a capitalist system: you are expected to make money. So you can either go the university professor-poet route or you can hold down a day job unrelated to poetry. As to the "monk" aspect – are you kidding? In american the prevailing religious systems are in various degrees of spiritual bankruptcy and none of them ever had such a place for a poet. As for 500 years of continuity – well not unless you are trying to continue a lineage of Native American poems (which we probably should be).

She’s like Jenni -- both of them just light up if they feel like they are in love. Consider:


have you ever driven
through budding orange
groves on a spring
day when the blue jean sky
wears your eye, road leaking
like a rocking cattle path, you're doing
50 on that snake & suddenly scent
catches up to you in long-lost dizzy?

that's how i feel sometimes
when we kiss.

(petalous)

That’s when she’s in love. When the love goes away she sounds like this:

spent the weekend in bed
with a man i want to love
with a man i could step into
but i won't cuz cuz
i'm skeered momma

i recognise impossible
even when courting the possible.

the possible is friends. i have
many friends. could i have more? sure
it's easy to sublimate
NOT.

at some moment in time
which never existed
we were both here and not here
we were both falling and landing
crash course from which airplane to step outta.

i gotta go.
my daughter's going insane
it's about love too
or whatever passes for it
these days.

(disappear)

She’s a great poet, therefore she will never believe it if I say it. Another good poet who sometimes in a great while drops by the box is Scott, who works a day job in law enforcement in California plus has a family plus is not insane (and yet writes poems anyways, how bizarre):

We found him
at the base of the cliffs above the river bed.
He'd leapt out into the warm dark night-
landed on his back in the stones.

He lived a little while,
too broken to do more than blink
a few times, slowly,
taking in the change.

Now we stand around his mummified body.
He's all toothy grin and blackened skin, a sack
for a colony of maggots.
His thin finger points at his belly.
It doesn't mean anything.

I look up at the cliff face, try to figure out
the trajectory, the point of departure,
the arc he made in the sky as he fell,
and I can feel it in my bones-
the hard stars, the wind, the dark river.

The leap, the fall,
the coming to rest.

We'd been looking for him for a month.
He stabbed his brother to death in their garage.
The mother said they never fought.

We cut him open the next day,
poked around in that mess.
It's not hard to point out
what was broken.


As for what went wrong,
there's lots of shit
we just don't get to know.

(Gap-tooth)

Extraordinary! It is beautiful to watch these poets work. These are a few of the living people alive at the same time that you and me are, and writing poems. The production of art in the present moment is the only sane reaction to the present moment, for some folks. It is the continuation of an artistic lineage from out of the past and forward into the future, where it will be picked up again by whoever happens to be alive then, by a few of them. The poets who I see around me alive at this time that I am, seem to be mainly pained by that one great classical pain in the ass, Death, Death the Irredeemable, and they seem to be comforted and cheered up by Love, by Love the Inexplicable. I dig Sumerian princess Enheduanna’s face out of 4000 years of dust and give her a big kiss on the mouth, and introduce her to currently living poetess Djuana – “Duanna, meet Djuana” – and as I go and zap them some herbal tea in the microwave, Jenni, lets say, reads them a poem by Natalka:

Before the word is was light
then tone and in tone lay seed
lies the seed of what is and will be meant
as defined as is by God as what was and as will be
and it is as the moment rises to meet you
will be is and was up to you to find the right word
and the way to release its tone correctly
thereby expressing your secret name as it was
and your sorrow that is for all death...your own in particular


“…"Get thee back, O thou Eater of the Ass, thou abomination of the god Haas who dwelleth in the underworld. I know thee, I know thee, I know thee. Who art thou? I am................."…”
...

first time Sweet died
the moon was fixed to the roof of another house by a string of small crystals
leeching over a memory of mine that the sun had already made pale
a once flowery violet bleached by phases to mauven slips
more and more a creeping pastel
finally spilling a de-tinted trail of powdered milk
and glass chips leading away
from not a shred of evidence that there’d been any colour


who would ever know an iris had grown invisible by his side
unable to resist the draw of his claws as they contracted
ridged round once vigorous jade stems and blades
that grew brittle at grasp and flaked away
so he held less and less as he pulled closer to death


“I am the Lord of Thy Mouth…”


as he withdrew all breath with his last clench
i bled my final fluid moons over him
bathing his body with filaments of invisible vows
using my mouth for my hands were bound
by his constricting last wish
to be rootless
but we were
eternally tied
and my roots his . . . .

Reference Links
MiPo Summer 2003 featuring writers from the sandbox

Duncan Hannah
www.jamesgrahamandsons.com

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