Yesterday I did my radio blab on the Bardo project, which is a loose coalition of a few folks who are interested in writing about photographs that a man named Scott Chambers took--the photos are of dead salmon. I have a few dead salmon poems, and Kim Addonizio has a rather nice one that I did not get to read on the air. Eventually my reading will be archived at kuow.org but it is not there now because of some problem caused by Garrison Keillor that I did not understand.



I did read a poem by a Portland poet named Matt Yurdana--"Killing Salmon" is in the new Pushcart Collection. In it, a fisheries worker goes postal on a salmon (after hearing me read it, a friend called to say that he felt this was emotionally inauthentic.)



But the mother of all salmon poems is by Stanley Kunitz. I admire this poem so much that I will also offer my critique: I don't like the places where the poem waxes metaphysical ("the only dance is love"--surely that is not true. It reminds me of Auden's "we must love one another or die"--which he renounced.)



Where Kunitz's poem gets it right is where it offers its concise and exactly accurate depictions of the death processes of the fish--one of the great biological spectacles on which this country is founded. And its strategy of positing some mode of human understanding, then denying that we can possess it, also seems like an accurate summary of our dumbfoundedness when we are confronted with this spectacle each year.



King of the River



If the water were clear enough,

if the water were still,

but the water is not clear,

the water is not still,

you would see yourself,

slipped out of your skin,

nosing upstream,

slapping, thrashing,

tumbling

over the rocks

till you paint them

with your belly's blood:

Finned Ego

yard of muscle that coils,

uncoils.



If the knowledge were given you,

but it is not given,

for the membrane is clouded

with self-deceptiions

and the iridescent image swims

through a mirror that flows,

you would surprise yourself

in that other flesh

heavy with milt,

bruised, battering toward the dam

that lips the orgiastic pool.



Come. Bathe in these waters.

Increase and die.



If the power were granted you

to break out of your cells,

but the imagination fails

and the doors of the senses close

on the child within,

you would dare to be changed,

as you are changing now,

into the shape you dread

beyond the merely human.

A dry fire eats you.

Fat drips from your bones.

The flutes of your gills discolor.

You have become a ship of parasites.

The great clock of your life

is slowing down,

and the small clocks run wild.

For this you were born.

You have cried to the wind

and heard the wind's reply:

"I did not choose the way,

the way chose me."

You have tasted the fire on your tongue

till it is swollen black

with a prophetic joy:

"Burn with me!

The only music is time,

the only dance is love."



If the heart were pure enough,

but it is not pure,

you would admit

that nothing compels you

any more, nothing

at all abides,

but nostalgia and desire,

the two-way ladder

between heaven and hell.

On the threshold

of the last mystery

at the brute absolute hour,

you have looked into the eyes

of your creature self,

which are glazed with madness,

and you say

he is not broken but endures,

limber and firm

in the state of his shining,

forever inheriting his salt kingdom,

from which he is banished

forever.

Someone asked that I write more here. All right! I'm shooting for twice a week to keep myself reading/memorizing. I still have to work on the Swenson, though.



So I was thinking of Sharon Olds, a popular poet, and as I said her book The Dead and the Living changed the poetic landscape for me. Now that book has come to me from the library because I couldn't find it in my storage locker, and I've been re-reading, and I see that where its flaw lies (besides in the eccentric line breaks) is in how it juxtaposes the sexual with...well, things that seem to be demeaned by the juxtaposition (a starving woman/her eggs in her ovaries dropping.) There was a time that sexual juxtaposition was revolutionary I suppose. It seems dated now, though, when it is used to elevate a poem's ability to startle (when there's nothing else startling or even happening particularly.) Or maybe it is indicative of a youthful period in a writer's life. I know I juxtaposed the sexual shamelessly. In my case I think this was indicative of a complete lack of taste. Someone, I forget, maybe Eliot, or Auden, talks about how taste should be a hallmark of a poet's merit. But I think that's wrong: bad taste is not irrelevant Or else what do we do with Whitman? Larkin? In certain ways I wish my taste had matured earlier in my life. But bad taste taught me things too. It can make a person fearless.



But I think the thing about Olds that was revolutionary was the forthright way in which she proceeded. Nothing arty-farty to jazz the poems up in a false way (this would be Sexton's flaw.) So here's a good example from Dead and Living, which came out in the eighties and is still in print.



THE ISSUES

(Rhodesia, l978)



Just don't tell me about the issues.

I can see the pale spider-belly head of the

newborn who lies on the lawn, the web of

veins at the surface of her scalp, her skin

grey and gleaming, the clean line of the

bayonet down the center of her chest.

I see her mother's face, beaten and

beaten into the shape of a plant,

a cactus with grey spines and broad

dark maroon blooms.

I see her arm stretched out across her baby,

wrist resting, heavily, still, across the

winy ribs.

Don't speak to me about

politics. I've got eyes, man.

I have been thinking about Sharon Olds ever since reading a bad review of her new book in the New York Times. In rebuttal I said to myself: Well we must remember The Dead and the Living. How much that book seemed to change everything in the 80s. Perhaps I was merely young. But at the time it riveted me with its fearlessness and its forthright voice.



So I went to my storage locker to find the book because I was going to post something here that would solidify my rebuttal--some superbly crafted small thing that was not about the self. I couldn't find the book, so the posting on that score will have to wait. But my thinking about Olds also made me think of Anne Sexton, who, it seems to me, is a grandmother to many of us no matter if we renounce her or not. I think all the charges of self-indulgence that have been lobbed at her make us forget the early work, which is tightly constructed and not at all hobbled by the poet's autobiographical life. So I'll post one that I mean to memorize, and I think it's a testament to the poem's craft that I can recall it so well even though I've never thought about it much.



(By the way, I did memorize the Logan.)



(Also: I just went to get this poem out of the Norton Anthology but there were no entries at all for Sexton--very surprising.)



HER KIND



I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.



I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.



I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.