Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063

TRES REVIEW

Amy Gerstler – Light Depths
by Jack Anders

Amy Gerstler tells the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, “When I tell people I’m a writer, they look kind of interested. Then I tell them that I write poetry and they think I’m weird.” This kind of honest, unpretentious, funny and real approach to poetry informs all of her work. As one sifts through her work, one realizes that she has managed to preserve a basically unpretentious approach even as she has attained publication and recognition. For background, her books of poetry include Medicine (Penguin, 2000); Crown of Weeds (1997); Nerve Storm (1995); Bitter Angel (1990), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The True Bride (1986). She also teaches, writes art reviews, books reviews, fiction, and journal articles, and has collaborated with visual artists.

Amy Gerstler writes in a style combing compacted imagery with colloquial voice. I relate this style back to Robert Lowell, who in Life Studies was able to convey the impression (carefully crafted) of a free spontaneous speaking voice, like someone talking to you over coffee, except that when you look closer, you can see how the imagery and the music of the words and phrasings is too compacted and idiosyncratic to really be a transcript of speech.

To be able to compose in a style that mimics a plain speaking voice, and yet is not, is a way to make the text have a sense of authenticity. It is also a craft tool that can be used without retreating from free verse back into formalism. It is part of Ezra’s Pound’s triumvirate of free verse virtues or compositional devices consisting of “phanopoiea,” or image; “logopoiea,” or meaning; and “melopoiea,” or sound. You can see how in a phrasing such as this description of a beetle, Gerstler is following along the lines of those previously radical, now traditional, free verse virtues:

Black as a bobby pin, its shellacked butt
for some reason (mating stance?
insect religion?) thrust up in the air.

(July 3rd)

This excerpt also reminds us of the distinction in Japanese poetry between haiku and tanka. The haiku, being the shorter form, traditionally only has room for the bright objective perception, which is to be put across without any irruption or gloss of subjective interior reflective commentary of the speaker. So in a poem like the following, all there is, is the objective perception; there is no subjective commentary:

the teal duck call
faintly white
the ocean black

(Basho)

However, in the slightly longer Japanese form of the tanka, traditionally the objective perception is coupled with a subjective bit of reflection, or even dominated by internal thoughts, for instance in these by Ono No Komachi:

Since seeing
you in sleep,
I start to believe
it’s dreams, not waking
that holds my hope.

*

I go to you
ceaselessly through dream highways --
the sum of this
less than one
waking glimpse.

(Ono no Komachi) 

The one form external, the other internal. In Gerstler’s poems we find a mediation between the two.  This is not surprising when we consider that Gerstler’s background includes a B.A. in psychology from Pitzer College in 1978 and her M.F.A. in nonfiction from Bennington College in 2000. The impetus of psychology, one would think, is to drive the author in search of the internal, the reflective; whereas the impulse of nonfiction would be more external and documentary.

Gerstler is clever in her choice of subject matter. In a poem such as this, the theme, having to do with the imminence of death, is reinforced via a meticulous accretion of detail with seems to give a slightly panicked effect, a hysteria suppressed or sublimated via ritualistically recited décor, rather like a funeral burial rite of some lost civilization:

Bathe the body in quinine.
Then let his wrists
be braceleted with the stings
of tiny iridescent insects.
A group of ten restless boys
should encircle the sleeper
whose marrow is to be rekindled.
The boys must sneeze violently
without covering their mouths
till the body is wet.
A poultice of figs and licorice
smeared over the lips
has often proved useful.
Rub footsoles with prickly poppy
and buttermilk. Place a live
green treefrog over each nipple
and stroke the frogs tenderly
until they are calm. Cover the empty
genitals with white duck feathers.
Allow relatives to huff and puff
and blow the feathers away.
Under no circumstances should
anyone sweep them up or collect them.
They must float where they will. . .

(Recipe for Resurrection) 

This kind of carefully stacked detail circling around a suppressed depressive big theme like death must instantly remind us of Elizabeth Bishop, who chose a similar path to dealing with abstractions, i.e. the Big Questions of her age – by burying them in exquisitely observed and recounted sensory detail from which, from underneath, the unstated themes would sort of leak (unlike her friend Robert Lowell, who, typically male, declared them explicitly). Consider, by Bishop:

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.

The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.

–Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied . . .

(The Sandpiper) 

Do you see the same effect of a sort of suppressed anxiety or interior abstract concern, sort of leaking out gradually through all the glittery, meticulously stacked details, like the water streaming through the sandpiper’s feet?

Humor is a great preservative of the neurotic. Without humor someone like Franz Kafka could have hardly survived. When humor gets pushed around by death it might get stained, change into black humor, but the humorous tickle, the current, the ironic, topsy-turvy resistance, which is inherent in humor, remains. There is always a destabilizing element in humor, a critique of whatever somber power structure the humor is addressing – this is the irreverence of humor. Sometimes without humor there would be nothing to do but cry. Humor makes us like people. The presence of ironic self-deflation in an author is a welcome sign, a similarity to ourselves. It is clear from Gerstler’s interviews that, like Bishop, and unlike Lowell, she maintains a sense of humor:

IM: In terms of the craft, specifically your economy of lines, a lot of your poems are very narrow—

AG: Skinny poems.

IM: But the line breaks are all nearly perfect.

AG: Oh, I’m glad you think so, not everyone is of that opinion. People have a lot of different ideas about line breaks. Once I applied for a job teaching, and the guy said [Amy affects a deep guttural accent] “Your poems,” he was Austrian or something, “they break arbitrarily, they’re so chaotic, what is this poem about?” So I said “The chaotic inner-contemporary life.”

IM: He bought it?

AG: I think he kind of rubbed his beard and looked at me like, I don’t think we should hire this person.

(Interview with Ignition Magazine)

She is not full of herself, she is not pretentious. In the Ignition interview she adds:

IM: How would generalize your own work?

AG: It’s like the poets whose work I like, maybe more of wishing this is the case: black humor, imaginative weirdness, and there is a weird way my work has a Romantic quality. I like things that are dark, in the head, a lot about mental life, as opposed to plums, or writing about a forest, which I do sometimes, but if it’s about a forest, it’ll be a forest I pulled out of a book. I’ve been in plenty of forests anyway—it’ll be a literary forest. And sometimes it’ll be science or medical stuff, or stuff about mortality.

IM: Do you go through a lot of medical magazines, or textbooks?

AG: I used to work at a doctor’s office, in the front, or sometimes in the back washing off the equipment and I’ve always been interested in science. My undergraduate degree is in psychology, so I’ve cut up a rat brain and stuff like that.

IM: Well, that could be fun.

AG: Maybe if they were plastic models, but they were real creatures.

You can see the reference to humor in that excerpt; there is also the important reference to using “a forest I pulled out of a book” as subject matter. This relates to the idea of how, for a kid who lives in the Bronx, the only real forests he sees might just be the ones he sees on TV. More generally, this substitution of the screen image for the ostensibly “real” image applies to all of us. Ask yourself – in a given day, do you see more human faces around you in the street – or on the singles chat room popups on your msn email? I know that I have seen more New York cityscapes by watching dumb cop shows on TV than ever via actual travel to New York. So then: can we use the New York cityscape, as seen on the cop show, as poetry subject matter, as opposed to the “real” New York experience of actually going there? What is the real difference anyway? If I am “really” in New York, that means I am assaulted by it literally via all the senses, say, as I stand on a streetcorner in Greenwich Village. Whereas if I watch an episode of some cop show set in New York, the assault is strictly visual, and requires a little bit of imaginative transference or heightening to forget about the intermediary screen, and in imagination, stand there on the street corner with the actors. But even if I am literally physically there, in Manhattan, I am having to use a little bit of constant self-forgetting and imaginative heightening, to cease thinking about the fact of the little camera lenses of my pupils and movie screen of my retinas, and just lose myself in the sense-data, forgetting the weird strange facticity of the biological machinery which processes that sense-data. In a sense, all that the interposition of the TV screen is, is adding another little piece of machinery, this time mechanical not biological, into the picture . . . these are the sorts of thoughts that were explored by the meth-head sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick to great length in the 60s while French left-wing freaks like Baudrillard were charting through the same area of hyper-reality and simulacra in France more or less at the same time. Anyway the point is, this all becomes one giant big fat chunk of the obvious social-cultural situation, the daily subject matter, that the poet has to chart, to deal with.

With the lack of pretentiousness that we detect in Gerstler comes a kind of psychological believability, a verisimilitude of voicing, in that her ability to successfully stay real and unpretentious and sometimes funny not just in her own daily life, but actually in her writing, means that she is able to carry life over into her writing. One critique we might have of a poet such as Robert Lowell, in spite of all his formal craft beauties, is that his overall tone is so damn depressively monotonous, his poetry-voice is always on a downer trip, and that somber bummer-ness seems to be coupled with a certain pretension or elevation, an inability to be realistically funny, light, in the verse. I think this might be coupled with or derived from the simple fact of the psychical-biological scene, situation, of writing: if you think about it, the situation someone is in when they are working with thoughts and words and writing a poem is drastically different from most of the other normal situations of their day. When you are taking a shower, or eating a bagel, or kissing a lover, (hopefully) you are not as immersed in words, in thoughts, reflection, in poetry, as when you are working on a poem. So the problem, for some writers, becomes that when they are working on their poems, they get caught up, immersed in, dominated by, the special existential situation of writing a poem – with the emphasis on thoughtfulness, reflection, worries, brooding – and so in their poems, the tone starts to get dominated by a dark serious pretentious quality – a quality which is at best only a very narrow slice of the full spectrum of emotional tones of non-poetry daily life. In other words the tone of the poem starts to become narrowed and darkened by the specific nervous, psychological, emotional pressures and influences forced upon the writer by his or her situation of writing. I think this can be a very bad thing, because life is broader, wider, less wordy-worried, more feckless and weird and thoughtless than the narrow situation of being immersed in words and brooding and ceaselessly working on and revising poems like Lowell used to do day in, day out, utterly obsessed – isn’t that a reasonable explanation for why all his poems are downers? It might apply to Philip Larkin too. Whereas, by contrast, maybe one reason why a poet like Rumi is more full of fun and stupidity and humor, is because (at least in legend) he would whirl around and dance and spout off his poems verbally improvised on the spot without revision – i.e. maybe a little less thoughtful, a little more ecstatic? And maybe one reason why Gerstler is able to bring across lighter, more funny and quirky tones in her poems is because she is somehow treating the stance, the situation, of working on the poem, in a lighter way?

Call upon me if you need
contact with that breezy,
self-conscious type of turmoil
that chases itself all day,
forming little whirlwinds.

(Her Account of Herself)

It is not that she avoids serious subjects. Poems like this from her books Crown of Weeds and Medicine allude to her younger brother, Marcus, who died at the age of 33 in 1998, after a long struggle with brain cancer. So now we see the nervous accumulation of faux-ritualistic detail and suppressed or sublimated death-horror-sense in the poem Recipe for Resurrection, which I excerpted earlier, in a whole different way. The stakes suddenly go up – yet all this really shows is our own habitual clichéd thought-patterns as readers, perpetually forgetting that all writers are just humans and all humans are constantly in the shadow of death and dealing with sickness and death at all times, immanent or present, among themselves, their families, their friends. We should look at a poet in that light at all times, and from the start, instead of having to be shocked into it by the addition of biographical detail, which only restates the obvious, that we are all vulnerable and battling sickness and death. I remember how my estimation of Keats’ poems went up one I learned how he had nursed his brother Tom through a long struggle with tuberculosis which finally killed Tom, and then later killed Keats. I should have begun with that same wounded, more empathetic, more humane approach to reading the poet. I should not have to be shocked down into empathy by being explicitly told “yes, this poet was near suffering, near death” – as if that could ever not be the case for any human being.

Resist the temptation
to fall to your knees
and beg his forgiveness. Instead
armed with pinches and kisses,
fistfuls of pumpkin seeds
and biscuit crumbs, let him
be breathed on by the subtle
dusty gusts from a lily's
golden-tonsilled throat.
Graciously welcome the truant
soul home as you stutter your love--
the thin tuneless exhaust
we exhale every day.

(Recipe for Resurrection)

You can see how by the close of that poem, her tone is in fact growing less irreverent, more conventionally heightened or serious. Such a tonality is also evident here:

I don't have to explain myself.
You understand, my readers, my dears:
man with a green thumb who's all ears,
girl locked in a closet for years,
elephant attendant, Russian hospice nurse,
picture bride married off
not for better but for worse. . .
. . . The day will finally
arrive when we know whose grip
we're in, who owns the explosives.
But we can't make that day come.
We must wait for it.

(Song) 

Now we are much closer to Lowell: the use of the orphic-prophetic “we” to use a metaphor (the “explosives”) to deal fairly directly with the Big Theme of death – the explicit positioning of the poet as a figure up on a stage or sorts, addressing “my readers.” I think it is interesting that Gerstler experiments with this sort of tone, which stands in contrast to the more subversive funny yet also maybe more scattershot and neurotic tone of something like this:

In an empty bathroom
with a good echo, wipe
and slice some young
cucumbers while screaming
at the tops of your lungs:
"I've boned more chickens
than you've ever even seen!"
Wash your hands in a nicely
flavored meat stock
while listening to radio
accounts of investigators
searching a muddy bean field
for clues to the cause
of a major plane wreck.
Bruise some shallots.
Bring the shallots
and cucumbers into the kitchen
and put them down the garbage
disposal. Leave it running
for mood music. Bone
yet another frying hen
and throw her out the window
into your creepy neighbor's
garden, where she'll regain
feathers, innards and skeleton,
cackle back to life and start
pecking bugs off the shrubs.
Then whip up a batch of
really eggy french toast.
Lay sections from a letter
that was never responded
to on top of the hot toast
slices and pour melted butter
over each. Take the handkerchief
of a pastor who's recently
delivered a beautiful
tearjerking eulogy
and boil till gelatinous.
Skim off the grease.
Serve with looter's spittle,
croutons, the eyelashes of a man
who hallucinates nonstop,
slices of peeled lemon
and a glass of port wine.

(Recipe for Trouble)

This kind of tonal restlessness, which the tonal distance between these poems indicates, represents forward motion for the poet, just as walking is an instability, a falling forward. Where she is able to mix together, in an organic fashion, bits and pieces of all of these various tones, we glimpse a light tone beyond the tragic, which brings to mind Nietzsche’s comments about the Greeks, where he said that the best tone would be a Greek lightness, a light skipping Mozartian tone which is certainly aware of the tragic, even infused by it, and yet transcends it, remains in touch with happiness, pleasure, the child:

This spring's uncertain currents
waft you back to the past, where
mother and father, huge painted
saints wearing paper crowns,
hold court in the dark, wielding
red-tipped cigarettes like scepters. . .

(Spring Tonic) 

In a passage like this one, I get the sense of a tone that is somehow managing to stay light, even playful, even as it shreds through the most heavy, portentous subject matter, as here, the Parent, the Past. My sense is that this kind of uncanny Greek lightness, to use Nietzsche phraseology, is where Gerstler may be headed.

In a comment about contemporary American poetry, Gerstler had this to say:

One specifically American thing about past and present American poetry (for those practitioners of it who write in English) is their use of beautiful, chewy, tawdry, vigorous American English as their medium. This is kind of a big deal. Recently, I've been making lists of movie titles to use in constructing poems. I realized one reason I felt drawn to the packed, colorful titles of American films is that so many of them seem to present the funny, irrepressable melodramatics of American English in a nutshell--our language with its distinctive mixture of slang and preachiness, the elevated and the silly, the heady and the democratic, the lofty and the colloquial, reverence and irreverence, the straightforward and the shifty. I can't get enough of these titles—to my way of thinking they condense and reflect so much American poetic energy as manifested in the language itself over the past several decades. Here are some titles to illustrate what I mean:

"The Heart of the Matter," "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," "Handcuffs or Kisses," "Peace to Him who Enters," "The Wharf Rat," "The Happy Ending," "No Tomorrow," "Tin Gods," "Monster on Campus," "A Chorus of Disapproval," "Why Be Good?," "Feel My Pulse," "Sitting Pretty," "Fatty's Day Off," "Call of the Flesh," "Inherit the Wind," "Tin Gods," "The Girl He Left Behind," "She's Gotta Have It," "The Stars Look Down."

I could go on for pages but I won't. Movie titles are particularly interesting to think about in terms of what makes American English American, because they often seem to represent an attempt to marry literary and popular culture—"high" and "low" art interests in a single one to five word phrase—and I think that attempt, (besides being a play to attract the largest possible audience and hence cash in at the box office) is indicative of a deep, longstanding double urge in the American psyche: to be as learned and rooted in great, historical traditions as other, older cultures; but also to be original, iconoclastic trailblazers who invent and embrace the new. I think American movie titles are one of many manifestations of these two impulses in American culture and language, and of the tension generated between those impulses. Americans can be wowed by both princes and gangsters, by both grace and spunk, by the prince in the gangster and vice-versa. American English, and by extension, American Poetry reflect this duality of interest and ambition (so does American prose, for that matter) which gives our language a lot of its personality and punch.

You can see in this statement how Gerstler’s mind sets up contradictory oppositions (high/low, princes/gangsters), then seeks to fuse them or move between them. She is interested in using poetry as a way of mixing oppositional tones and sustaining two or more tones at the same time, in a poem, or using a poem to stay low and colloquial, but also high and transcendental, at the same time. Consider the mixed tones here:

Yesterday, your tired wife and I
drove to the medical examiner’s
to retrieve your personal effects.
She dropped me off at the front
entrance. The women at work
in that bland flat-roofed building
looked like secretaries at various
high schools you were principal
of over the last thirty years. The
back room was being remodeled,
so ideal placement of FAX
machines and the shredder
were under discussion. An older
woman with dyed blonde hair
searched the property closet twice
for your watch. “It’s here on the
computer,” she said, shaking
her head, “but I can’t locate it
on the premises.” She phoned
the exam room to see if they still
had it “down there.” Finally, on her
third trip to the closet, she found it.
I signed for the sealed, formaldehyde
smelling plastic bag, a form printed
on it in black ink. Reason confiscated/
offense. Arresting officer/chain of custody.
Location where obtained. The same form
for every crime, accident, fatality.
When I returned to the car, I found
your wife asleep at the wheel.
Not wanting to disturb her, I stood
and watched her awhile through
the rolled up window. What would
I give this waking minute, my car
my house every book I ever owned, trifles all,
to be able to kiss your brow and rouse
you now as if from a needed sleep?
I tore the bag open with my teeth.
It tasted awful. Inside, your every day
watch with brown leather band, still ticking.

(Watch)

This is a wonderful poem. The poem is rich but not thick with imagery, and the imagery, the progression of detail-notations and sensory particulars, somehow seems to sustain a certain lightness or freedom of tone, even while the subject of the poem is as heavy and grief-filled as one could choose. It is as if the poem reflects the honest position of the speaker as empathetic witness of the dead man’s wife’s closer, harsher grief – there is even a sort of spunkiness, a resilience, a life-energy, in the acuity of the little notations and descriptions along the way, including the “bland flat-roofed building,” the woman with dyed blonde hair, the bits of office conversation, the careful notation of the form language printed on the bag, then the pause by the car window, the looking at the resting wife, then the very common, or shared, sentiment of wanted to give all to resurrect the dead one, balanced immediately by the taste-reference of tearing open the bag, which acts as a sort of corrective against any sentimental aftertaste of the preceding statement. It is a very well-crafted poem with a very balanced tone. The grand (yet horrible) theme of the death is like a magnet held under the page, organizing and lining up the iron-filings of imagery – in contrast to some of her other poems which seem to be more helter-skelter with imagery because the underlying theme or tone is less centered and more like a free-floating anxiety. She seems to be centered and enriched in her organizational structure and she becomes more balanced in her tone, because of the fact of the central death as subject matter. We have seen a similar effect in Thomas Hardy’s poems to his dead wife, Donald Hall’s poems to Jane Kenyon, and Robert Lowell’s poems to fallen comrades such as Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell. And yet I would say that Gerstler’s tone in her death-poems is less monotonously negative than Lowell’s or Philip Larkin’s.

In a poem such as the following, her craft seems vaguely reminiscent of Stephen Dunn:

Now we heathens have the town to ourselves.
We lie around, munching award-winning pickles
and hunks of coarse, seeded bread smeared
with soft, sweet cheese. The streets seem
deserted, as if Godzilla had been sighted
on the horizon, kicking down skyscrapers
and flattening cabs. Only two people
are lined up to see a popular movie
in which the good guy and the bad guy trade
faces. Churches burst into song. Trees wish
for a big wind. Burnt bacon and domestic tension
scent the air. So do whiffs of lawn mower exhaust
mixed with the colorless blood of clipped hedges.
For whatever's about to come crashing down
on our heads, be it bliss-filled or heinous,
make us grateful, OK? Hints of the savior's
flavor buzz on our tongues, like crumbs
of a sleeping pill shaped like a snowflake.

(A Non-Christian on Sunday)

She is confronting the big black gap-space left by removal of safely believable Christian ideology, a theme mined in American poetry at least as far back as Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and even before that, Emily Dickinson. The references to contemporary suburban normal pop culture, in order to carefully locate the speaker and the scene in a believable landscape, are very much like Dunn. Specifically, note how she carefully deploys he Godzilla metaphor for the empty streets, as well as she reference (apparently) to John Woo’s movie Face-Off. The sensory particulars act as ballast against emotional kenosis, emptying-out, depression in the face of the vanishing of the religious ideology and subsequent spiritual exposure to blank worries about death without the protection of the Christian armature. The effect of placement of a discernable speaker in a contemporary landscape suspended externally between pre-technological nature and post-technological pop culture, and suspended internally between sensory delectation (“burnt bacon”) and post-religious free-floating anxiety (“domestic tension”) is very much like Dunn, for example:

The sky in the trees, the trees mixed up
with what's left of heaven, nearby a patch
of daffodils rooted down
where dirt and stones comprise a kind
of night, unmetaphysical, cool as a skeptic's
final sentence. What this scene needs
is a nude absentmindedly sunning herself
on a large rock, thinks the man fed up
with nature, or perhaps a lost tiger,
the maximum amount of wildness a landscape
can bear, but the man knows and fears
his history of tampering with everything,
and besides to anyone who might see him
he's just a figure in a clearing
in a forest in a universe
that is as random as desire itself,
his desire in particular, so much going on
with and without him, moles humping up
the ground near the daffodils, a mockingbird
publishing its cacaphonous anthology,
and those little Calvinists, the ants,
making it all the more difficult
for a person in America
to close his office, skip to the beach.
But what this scene needs are wisteria
and persimmons, thinks the woman
sunning herself absentmindedly on the rock,
a few magnificent words that one
might want to eat if one were a lover
of words, the hell with first principles,
the noon sun on my body, tempered
by a breeze that cannot be doubted.
And as she thinks, she who exists
only in the man's mind, a deer grazes
beyond their knowing, a deer tick riding
its back, and in the gifted air
mosquitos, dragonflies, and tattered
mute angels no one has called upon in years.

(Stephen Dunn, Landscape at the End of the Century)

In an interview with The Cortland Review, Dunn had this to say about landscape:

All my landscapes, all the localities in my poems, provide occasions for exploring and discovering various concerns of mine: desire, loss, joy, disappointment, otherness, the impingement of the larger world on my little world—the usual stuff. The politics of such. The sentience and ambiguousness of it. Explorations, in other words, in search of attitudes. In the course of such explorations, if I happen to deliver qualities and aspects of New Jersey, that's all to the good.

This brings us all the way in a circle back to the beginning of my essay with my note about the tanka versus haiku. In American poetry, the middle path of free verse has always seemed to be one of a mixed external and internal landscape. Where in older European poetry one might find transpositions of the one realm onto the other – for example personification or anthropomorphic description of the outside world as if it were internal – I think that in the best newer American poetry the purity of the external space as one that is external, not personified, is preserved, while at the same time, the equal truth, of the internal mindful space, as an equal landscape, has been supported. Thus, for example, in Wallace Stevens’ poems, one might see a sense of external nature as blindly dehumanized and without human spirit or thought – but at the same time, the richness of the imagination and the internal psychic landscape of the mind is enforced, precisely by the vivacity and peculiarity of the tropes and musical twirls which is uses to describe his perception of external blankness:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(The Snow Man)

When he says “and not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind, / In the sound of a few leaves” what he is saying is that one should try not to fall into easy personifications of nature. He is saying that older European poetic formulations such as “the rosy-fingered dawn” or “the dreadful night” are archaic and outmoded because they describe the natural not in its own independent terms but in human terms without respecting its otherness. That is the reason why the “pathetic fallacy,” as it has been called, is something a lot of good poets avoid. Who is to say a weeping willow is really sad? Do we really believe that the wind “mournfully” blows? By describing outside nature in human terms, we may end up disrespecting the otherness of nature, the squirrel’s being as squirrel, as opposed to the squirrel seeming to be a little nervous idiotic homunculus of a creature. It is important to respect otherness as itself. Therefore, it can be helpful to think in terms of letting the external landscape be itself and letting the internal landscape be itself. Buddhists tell us that when you take that far enough, to your surprise you may find that the internal landscape is not you either and no “you” is necessary and there is no inside or outside or lack of inside or outside and then perhaps we are free. Thich Naht Hanh says “There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.” Gerstler in her writing always stays close to the texture of ordinary real life, either in her sense-details, or her emotional tone, or both, and to me that is American Buddhism, Amerizen, without her even knowing it. “In Buddhism the most important precept of all is to live in awareness, to know what is going on…to be aware of what we do, what we are, each minute.” (Hanh, Being Peace, 65-67). Further “all phenomena are interdependent … endlessly interwoven.” (Hanh, Love in Action, 129). “In Buddhism there is no such thing as an individual.” (Hanh, Being Peace, 45). There is no such thing as a separate object or experience, because no part of the world can exist apart from all others. Everything that looks like a separate entity is actually dependent on, and interwoven with, something else. Everything is made up of other things. “We have to discard all distinctions between self and non-self.” (Hanh, Love in Action, 133). “Unity is diversity and diversity is unity.” (Hanh, Love in Action, 129).

Thus the thought of inside and outside, internal and external landscapes, suddenly vanishes. “To understand something is to take that thing up and to be one with it . . . there is no distinction between the contemplator and the contemplated.” (Hanh, Being Peace, 38-39). In Thomas Marvell’s words, sitting in a green arbor the observer becomes “a green thought in a green shade”:

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

(Andrew Marvell, The Garden)

The internal becomes the external, inner is outer. This is one of the mystical results of poetry, which as an art, is really too fluid and nondoctrinal to be compared to Zen as I am seeking to do, but what the hell, I think it can be fruitful.

Zen is very simple... What are you?
In this whole world everyone searches for happiness outside, but nobody understands their true self inside.
Everybody says, "I" – "I want this, I am like that..." But nobody understands this "I." Before you were born, where did your I come from? When you die, where will your I go? If you sincerely ask, "what am I?" sooner or later you will run into a wall where all thinking is cut off. We call this "don't know."
Zen is keeping this "don't know" mind always and everywhere.
. . .
Meditation in Zen means keeping don't-know mind when bowing, chanting and sitting Zen. This is formal Zen practice. And when doing something, just do it. When driving, just drive; when eating, just eat; when working, just work.

(Zen Master Seung Sahn)

Amy Gerstler “just does” writing, and she does it well. I will let her have the last word in this essay:

Perched on a bar stool
not long after a major
earthquake, I cried out
for a stiff drink
and felt instead
an awful substitute,
strong emotion,
filling me as though
poured from on high
into a hole drilled
through the top of my head,
only to leak out the soles
of my feet.

(Chain of Events)

Thank God for the leakage at the bottom, for the porosity, in Hanh’s words, the “interbeing” of self, or else, indeed, we would be full of sadness, among all the other so-strong and so-difficult emotions.

Duncan Hannah

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