The Public Common

It's easy to be nostalgic for the past, of which we have relatively little data, if we're trying to picture life before the formation of our own brains.

Lately I've been thinking of Emily Dickinson: her biographers report that she read the newspapers and that the newspapers printed poetry. Dickinson even submitted poems for consideration, once, I believe. She was rejected and turned her back on all that. There came the famous poem about publication being the auction of the mind.

Oddly, there were poems in the newspaper (New York Times) last Sunday. The theme was: poems of the season. Were the editorial writers on vacation, so they dispatched the student intern to dig up some poetry?

My favorite was by Sarah Lindsay, a copy editor by day, whose poems normally are third-person, fantastical, a combination of research and wildly detailed invention. So I was surprised to see this straightforward first person elegy, built on the platform of an extended metaphor. In technical terms, the poem is all vehicle (ha ha); the ground of the metaphor, the real death, is stated but not dwelt on. I found it haunting because it is so directly stated, the scene so vivid.

THE DRIVER

Twice we watched him leave us:
Once when the car loaded with us died
and rolled to the side of a highway into Nashville
in boiling August; later with cancer.
Empty jug in one hand, he walked away
step by step on a strip of pavement
about as wide as his shoulders,
hot wind of traffic panting on his left.
He would find help. He would attract it. Slowly
the rippling heat from the asphalt dissolved him,
his shrinking back looked like anyone’s —
he was gone before it disappeared.
We stood staring anyway
by the highway barrier wall
with mimosa tree-tips reaching over
as the other cars rushed by us
toward their accidents at a hundred miles an hour.

Speed

High speed internet has recently come into my life, and with that Youtube. So I post a clip of John Berryman reading Dream Song 29:


There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.




The body language in the clip is fascinating, especially Berryman's conducting of the poem with his long index finger. The liquid quality of his body (is he drunk?) and the angles at which he sets his chin.

The ending is justly famous, and now, looking at it again, I see how the whole poem works to point a finger at that secret guilt that some of us (all of us?) are hobbled by. That we have committed an irremediable wrong, and yet we don't know what is is; there is no evidence. And yet, inside, we are wrung. The heart is squashed.

Somewhere Robert Pinsky makes a distinction between guilt and shame, but he doesn't quite articulate the qualities of the difference. Berryman, I suppose, is talking about guilt, as the ending makes clear. But I can't tell which of these I feel. Perhaps both.

I'm back, we'll see

Two nights ago, I went to see the movie "Under the Salish Sea," which consisted entirely of footage of the undersea life of Puget Sound, of the Salish Sea. Among the amazing footage was the hunt of a gray whale by orcas. They exhaust the larger whale by chasing it, they lie on its head to drown it.

Coincidentally, I'd just been made aware of this poem by James Dickey, which is a style of poem that I'd not been exposed to before: the poem as thriller (like the movie "Jaws.") It makes the heart race, and it's impressive how Dickey gets from the southern U.S. to the arctic, via his boy-reading of the explorers.

Pursuit from Under

---

by James Dickey

Often, in these blue meadows,
I hear what passes for the bark of seals

And on August week ends the cold of a personal ice age
Comes up through my bare feet
Which are trying to walk like a boy's again
So that nothing on earth can have changed
On the ground where I was raised.

The dark grass here is like
The pads of mukluks going on and on

Because I once burned kerosene to read
Myself near the North Pole
In the journal of Arctic explorers
Found, years after death, preserved
In a tent, part of whose canvas they had eaten

Before the last entry.
All over my father's land

The seal holes sigh like an organ,
And one entry carries more terror
Than the blank page that signified death
In 1912, on the icecap.
It says that, under the ice,

The killer whale darts and distorts,
Cut down by the flawing glass

To a weasel's shadow,
And when, through his ceiling, he sees
Anything darker than snow
He falls away
To gather more and more force

From the iron depths of cold water,
His shadow dwindling

Almost to nothing at all, then charges
Straight up, looms up at the ice and smashes
Into it with his forehead
To splinter the roof, to isolate seal or man
On a drifting piece of the floe

Which he can overturn.
If you run, he will follow you

Under the frozen pane,
Turning as you do, zigzagging,
And at the most uncertain of your ground
Will shatter through, and lean,
And breathe frankly in your face

An enormous breath smelling of fish.
With the lungs staining your air

You know the unsaid recognition
Of which the explorers died:
They had been given an image
Of how the downed dead pursue us.
They knew, as they starved to death,

That not only in the snow
But in the family field

The small shadow moves,
And under the bare feet in the summer:
That somewhere the turf will heave,
And the outraged breath of the dead,
So long held, will form

Unbreathably around the living.
The cows low oddly here

As I pass, a small bidden shape
Going with me, trembling like foxfire
Under my heels and their hooves.
I shall write this by kerosene,
Pitch a tent in the pasture, and starve.

Report: that I have been making progress when it comes to memorization: "Richard Cory" by Robinson, "Pied Beauty" by Hopkins, "Casabianca" by Bishop, "When I Consider How My Light Was Spent" by Hopkins, "The Voice" by Hardy, "Three Moves" by John Logan, "Of Mere Being" by Stevens, "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Most of these have rhyme to help me along, except for "Of Mere Being," which was difficult, because it lacked this mnemonic device.

Recently I discovered James Schuyler, one of the New York poets who also qualifies as a nature poet, who puts nature off kilter enough to rouse the skeptical. This poem is one that's been an the back of my mind; now to bring it into the fore.


Salute

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

For the past year I've not written on this web site because (as anyone who googles me knows) I've maintained a web site, for my neighbors, on the great blue herons who nest in my neighborhood. The nesting area is threatened by development, not that they're an endangered species, yet I would still be sad to see them gone.

The heron site ended up under my name, when I'd intended to use a pseudonym, so that my public writing life would not be "soiled" by this purely local endeavor. And why do I regard the mixing of the two as soilage? Why don't I want it known that I spend/waste/utillize time not just in the supposedly high-minded task of writing poems but also in trying to make real change on a purely local level? Beats me. But I do not underestimate my capacity for shame.

The irony is: the heron web site may have hurt the herons. It alerted everyone to their presence, everyone including the developer, who promptly laid out his roadbed through the rookery (though the impact of the road waits to be seen).

One of the reasons I haven't written anything here is that for the past year I've been writing on a web site/blog that is devoted to a great blue heron rookery (nesting area) in my neighborhood that is threatened by development and which state biologists hadn't been aware of. The result is that the developer must build in such a way that minimizes impacts to the herons (which are not endangered). And the primary victory is that herons continue to nest there despite logging of the development site and the access road to the development, which runs through the rookery.


Here is a poem about the GBH that someone made me aware of when I was blogging for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Turns out that it is Portland's official bird, and William Stafford was commissioned to write a poem about it.



Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron" by William Stafford

Out of their loneliness for each other
two reeds, or maybe two shadows, lurch
forward and become suddenly a life
lifted from the dawn to the rain. It is
the wilderness come back again, a lagoon
with our city reflected in its eye.
We live by faith in such presences.
It is a test for us, that thin
but real, undulating figure that promises,
"If you keep the faith I will exist
at the edge, where your vision joins
the sunlight and the rain: heads in the light,
feet that go down in the mud where the truth is."

This anthropomorphosizes the bird a bit more than I would like, but I think it is terribly difficult to write "the civic poem."

I'm off Harriet (the poetry foundation's web site) and have been entertaining thoughts about coming back here. Not to post my poems (because I want to give them time to find their vessels) and not to trumpet my own career (don't go anywhere to speak of) but perhaps to post a poem occasionally or to steer people to something good I've read.

Meanwhile, I do appreciate everyone's kind words.