I will put in a plug for a book I worked on as an editor. Malena focuses on the state murder of Argentina’s desaparecidos—the 30,000 civilians kidnapped, tortured, killed, and “disappeared” by the military junta in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The novel, which features an American of Argentine descent who must make a profound moral choice when he discovers the horror of the junta’s killing prisons, shows how we are implicated in the horrors of our larger world and must be brave enough to turn guilt into action.
As I read yesterday about his funeral with its big, all-star cast of mourners, it occurred to me that Seamus Heaney made a point of criticizing “something too male and assertive” in the complex but largely transcendent “Under Ben Bulben,” Yeats’s funeral poem to himself, which concludes with the lines on Yeats’s own headstone. What would Heaney have thought of 80,000 football spectators applauding Heaney as “the world’s most renowned composer of verse”? In point of fact, it is said to have been an excellent funeral full of humor, tears, and grace notes; but only one poem was read. It occurred to me that, if such things were possible at this late date, Heaney would be the best person to write a poem about his own funeral and burial. A poem like that wouldn’t have the feel of a traditional elegy or eulogy but something more befitting such a humble, passionate, and earth-loving soul. Such a poem would be distinct from the high strains about a man’s surpassing destiny that tend to resound over the airwaves. Like his best verse, it would accessibly epitomize his knack for tactile evocation, sinuous rhythms, and recognizing the manifold aches and terrible contradictions of this life. It would include moving memories that only Heaney could evoke, as he did when he recalled his own secret communion with his mother at her funeral in “Clearances,” or when he recalled his father in “Digging,” equating the poet’s work with “the squat pen” with his father’s work doggedly exhuming potatoes with a spade. Reflecting the harsh realities of a pastoral existence, such a poem would be rich in slimy, rifted, dirt-stained observations on the precariousness of life in the midst of its continuance.
On the day of Heaney’s burial, I was reminded that—as Derek Walcott emphasized in his conversation with his Irish friend and fellow Poet Laureate just last spring at AWP—Heaney generally did not imitate Yeats, the master with whom he is most often compared. Though he was at heart a private poet who remained in touch with his origins as a farmer’s son, Heaney felt an obligation to respond to global events. Still, at no point in his career did Heaney climb up into a Yeatsean heaven or golden Byzantine dome of high art, nor did he pursue the sweep of the Whitmanean sublime. Instead, he painstakingly delved toward a vertical earthbound frontier, where–as when he excavates a multiplex ancient homeland in poems inspired by P.V. Globb’s The Bog People–“The wet centre is bottomless” (“Bogland”). He relishes the way each layer of his history “has been camped on before,” and he accepts that the center cannot hold. He admits that, in returning to a land “Of country people / Not knowing their tongue,” he “will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home” (“The Tollund Man”). In these works, there are no pretentions to a mythos of reassurance or to a mighty principle of political order underlying everything.
This is not to say that Heaney should not be grouped among the political, postcolonial poets—such as Neruda and Milosz—who have produced some of the most interesting work of our age by redefining the sociopolitical center in terms of the “periphery” of America and Europe. But Heaney remained resistant to slogans, partisanship and propaganda. Only he could address the sanguinary strife of late twentieth century Irish history—not to mention ongoing sexism in the West—by anatomizing bodies extracted from the alluvial mud of ancient peat bogs. It is well known that Heaney grew up Irish Catholic in Northern Ireland under British rule. In the poem “Punishment,” he contemplates the naked, peat-tarred body of an Iron Age girl submitted to ritual sacrifice for committing adultery:
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur…
Heaney has the courage to admit to his own voyeurism and sinfulness, even as he lays claim to deep empathy. At this moment, the poet is simultaneously referring to Catholic women in modern Ireland who have been shaven, stripped, tarred, and chained to railings by the IRA for keeping company with British soldiers. Surprisingly, the speaker does not claim to have sided fully with humane, civilized people who express public outrage at such unspeakable atrocities. He has to admit, after all, that he did nothing to prevent such crimes and is guilty of a subtle kind of treachery with which we are all familiar:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
He admits even to having committed pagan, tribal vengeance in his heart. Groups can be more immoral than individuals, but the poet can still speak the truth about political violence by examining how even he has never relinquished his ambivalence. (In “Terminus,” he asks, “Is it any wonder when I thought / I would have second thoughts?”; “I grew up in between.”)
As he suggests in his essays and his often-anthologized lecture “Feeling into Words,” Heaney was not unaware that he was influenced as much by Hardy’s grim, unsentimental “regionalism” and even Wordsworth’s intricately nostalgic journeys through his own rural west country as by Yeats’s mid-career interest in the World Soul of Irish art. But, as was the case for Joyce, bringing the present into a significant relation to the past still was always Heaney’s agenda. Heaney himself called this jolt of reapprehension “a returning of the world itself.” It is just that he focused on his relation to local traditions and to the world of his own memories and inner conflicts. In “Station Island”—where he ambitiously merges present and past in the midst of his reworking of canonical myth—he even has the ghost of Joyce challenge him, a version of Dante’s Pilgrim, to “keep at a tangent” when the circle widens and “swim out on [his] own” to find his own “echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, // elver-gleams in the dark….”
With these thoughts in mind, I’ll conclude by presenting a Heaney poem entitled “Personal Helicon” that I used to hand out to students in my poetry writing classes. I offered it as a “Helicon” for them, asking them to follow this example, to write poems about their own “mirrors” and personal source materials. I love the various ways in which this piece presents personal reflection as a source of inspiration:
Personal Helicon
-for Michael Longley
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
Everything described here—however strewn with heteroclite growths and implements–is also part of a self-portrait. The poem contains echoes of Wordsworth’s boy of Winander, who would call out to owls in the listening dark…that they might answer him. As in the language of Jutland, where the bog people were exhumed, Heaney’s lexicon includes a good number of hardy Anglo-Saxon terms such as “fungus” and “brickyard.” Very few of the rhymes are predictable—and Heaney would of course conclude by rhyming “rhyme” with “slime” and “into some spring” with “echoing.” Anyway, this is the only “Helicon” I know of where a rat can slap across the poet’s reflection and the Olympian “spring” in question is allegedly “beneath all adult dignity”—which of course it is not, because Heaney is simultaneously referring to what draws the gaze of his mind’s eye as he writes, including the “trapped sky” and “darkness” from which the poem emerges, stanza by stanza. This descent, this “dark drop” into the wet earth, is more a resurrection than a burial.
During my brief but memorable and productive sojourn at Soaring Gardens (courtesy of the Ora Lerman Foundation, thank you) I had the amazing good fortune of stumbling upon and subsequently reading, cover to cover, practically in one sitting, the correspondence of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. For thirty years or so these literary largenesses carried on a passionate, vivid, funny, and extremely specific conversation about literature, politics, daily life AND poetics.
“Bunny” and “Volodya” have a lot to say to one another. “Bunny” is thoroughly American, and like so many of his generation, in love with the promise of communism. He is endlessly optimistic about the Soviet experiment. Focused on the social and class context of literary works, he praises Dos Passos and Faulkner and Jane Austen and tries mightily to persuade “Volodya” to see things his way. “Volodya” will have none of it. A liberal minded white Russian, he has no illusions about the violence of the Russian Revolution, a violence that he sees present from before the get-go. When Bunny waxes enthusiastically that Russiais now full of poets declaiming in public places, suggesting that this is a happy outcome of the revolution, Volodya points out that this declaiming of poetry had been going on for a long time. It’s Russian tradition, he maintains, not a Soviet innovation.
And so it goes for years. These two men, in a very private conversation, discuss literary and political matters of great consequence. They are friends; they share a lot in their conversations, much of it about versification. Bunny was studying Russian (late in life he took up Hungarian) and was fascinated by Russian versification. How do you do an iamb in Russian? What does an iamb mean in English? How do all those long “ion” words in English affect the way a poet can write a line? Those questions get huge amounts of attention and all in extremely specific terms—these two guys are looking at the details of words and lines. They don’t generalize much and when they do, one or the other gets annoyed.
Eventually their differences over versification—and politics—cause a breach in the friendship and a break in communication. Happily, they reconnect before Bunny’s death.
But during the years of intense communication, the reader sees just how deep the friendship is in spite of profound disagreements. Bunny recommends Volodya for writing jobs, teaches him how to manage editors, negotiates proper payment for Volodya and secures them joint projects that don’t necessarily work out. They comment, sometimes brutally, on one another’s work. Bunny doesn’t like Lolita, for example. He says so quite bluntly. Volodya is dismayed by Bunny’s introduction to Chekhov stories, in which the American critic focuses on the class relations in the stories, rather than on Chekhov’s literary mastery. For his part, Volodya very patiently helps Bunny with Russian and supports him as wives change and babies are born.
These are private letters by public figures. Their quarrels are passionate and urgent and between them. The writing is clear and lucid and not polemical, though politics and culture shape identities and values.
Flash forward. Forced to return to the world, 2013, because of a burned out well pump that meant no water, I find more comments about Mark Edmundson’s complaint about contemporary poetry, recently published in Harpers. Today in the Boston Review I findan article denouncing “conceptualism” in poetry and advocating a return to “affect.” (I didn’t know it had gone, but that’s a complicated matter for another time.) Many comments follow Stephen Burt’s rebuttal to Edmundson, and responses to the anti-conceptualism piece are pouring in to the Boston Review. Some people are really angry one way or the other.
In both of these cases it seems to me that the writers have created straw man arguments, kerfuffles for the sake of—well—kerfuffle, made public so that there can be some trumped-up firestorm of public debate.
It leaves me wondering what these people would say in private. Would they write letters to a close literary friend about the subjects of these kerfuffles? Do the subjects really matter to them? Do these people care deeply about what they are saying? Does it occupy them at breakfast? Would they spend 30 years debating the questions? Would they really?
When I first started writing poetry, it was an accident. I’d always thought I was a fiction writer, but my lines on the page kept shrinking, compressing, and then one day….oooops a poem. So I figured I’d better read some poetry. I picked up A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, edited by Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone. Under the name of the last poet in the book, Leslie Scalapino, there was a poem titled “EPILOGUE: [anemone].” When I read the poem, a light bulb went off: I realized there must be infinite things language can do. I often go back to this book, and this particular semi-prose poem, as to a conversation with an old friend. Here is an excerpt:
I was able to describe my feelings:
by saying it was like being an insect who puts its feelers
out into the flowers of a plant, and sucks from them, as we were
(sucking) from the restaurants and bars of the city. . .
I realized later there was an odd foreshadowing in the poem of how—as if by a long seduction—I would grow into the city and the city into me, but all the time still with a sense of being outside myself.
I look forward to picking up copies of many new books and journals this week at the AWP conference in Boston. Since anticipation is a product of memory, and since both of the authors celebrated below are coming out with new books, I’ve also decided to review their last books. These are two of the many collections I picked up last year at AWP in Chicago:
ANNUS MIRABILIS, Sally Ball, New York: Barrow Street Press, 2005
What is the nature—including the congruencies and limits—of knowing, identity, love, and hope? In Annus Mirabilis, Sally Ball explores such central questions with continual reference to the lives and modi operandi of Leibnitz and Newton. A poet who loves great eighteen-century thinkers is one who takes interest both in the search for universal principles and in the observations that lead us there, but there is a twist. Ball, as a modern poet, also focuses on the act of comprehension itself, on observing carefully observed, as when we see the six-year old Leibnitz sorting through leaves in the poem “1652.” Here “Curiosity / and certainty collide,” right down to what we make of the look of “the love itself.” The poet is often absorbed in “the measure of wanting to see” (“Toward the Opticks”). Indeed, the speaker of “Given” wants “to see the lens itself, / the one Newton made.” In the course of this quest (and meta-quest), the poet also contemplates mythic mainstays such as the moon and cosmogony, but from multiple angles, and with a sense of irresolvable anguish that grows as the book proceeds.
Perhaps you knew that Newton engaged in certain reclusive practices, such as celibacy and alchemy. But did you know that he never saw the sea? I used to teach a little Leibnitz, but largely to dispel clichés about knee-jerk optimism unfairly attributed to him by Voltaire in the form of his parodic Pangloss. Newton and Leibnitz were not only precocious, industrious and eccentric: they were both polymaths of the highest order. Ball is a (sometimes literal) follower of Leibnitz and Newton, of the very walkways they trod, of the tropes their lives and works provide the poet, and of the ironies that, in turn, necessarily follow. In “In Hannover: Clairvoyance,” the poet appears at Leibnitz’s house with her sick child and her other ongoing concerns. She contemplates Leibnitz’s portrait and (thinking of Newton “as master of the English mint”) throws a coin (presumably stamped with a portrait) into the reflecting pool. Her pilgrimage and her wish for a magical diagnosis and solution nevertheless defy the limits that Newton would impose on “the regulated dream.” In this poem, we recall that Leibnitz was highly accomplished not only as a mathematician and a philosopher of harmony among the monads, but also as a diplomat. Could there ever be just one portrait of such a man? Indeed, didn’t and doesn’t his rivalry with Newton in itself become part of his portrait? In this book, it certainly does. We later visit Newton’s portrait as well, or at least a photograph of an imprint of it, in a poem called “Newton’s Death Mask.” As she reflects on her portraits of them and their ghosts, Ball’s fascination with these figures and their rivalry becomes ours.
In the title poem “Annus Mirabilis,” the plot thickens (and the work breaks into sections, sometimes clustering in stanzas of longish lines, sometimes falling into single-line or even single-word stanzas). We learn here and elsewhere that Newton and Leibnitz both happened to have complementary ideas about miracles, that each (though the matter was and is still debated) independently invented the differential calculus…and the list goes on. Important differences are also noted—not in a systematic way, but in one imbued with self-reflexive curiosity. The vanishing point of resemblance (its risks and redemptions) is a critical theme throughout this book—not only where Newton and Leibnitz do and do not align, but also, for instance, where work and conviction meet paralysis—“weakness? sickness? / Where’s the line?” The poem I just quoted, entitled “Function of X,” harks back stylistically to the earlier “Proofs,” but it takes on a greater problem. It is the problem at the heart of the book—that of human relations, the relation of Y to X, her to him, the solver to the irresolvable. We are made to see, in passing through a twisted logical vortex, how much more complex than logic human life and human relations are. To quote, for just one out of many examples, the poem “Candle under Glass”: “What can it possibly mean / that I am happy / when the person I love / has no capacity for happiness?”
As the collection progresses, the poet looks more and more deeply “inside the hospital”—at a father’s uncertain operation, a loved one’s persistent depression—while keeping Leibnitz and Newton and their solutions (and “Dissolution”) in the equation. Much seems to come together in the late poem “Entreaty to the Air”: the abstract mock-math meets the physical specificity of “The slightly flexing muscle”; the language of science meets that of domestic life and want. Indeed, “Any point can be one of intersection.” This poet has a very gifted and unusual mind.
OF GODS AND STRANGERS, Tina Chang, New York: Four Way Books, 2011
Tina Chang’s Of Gods and Strangers is full of sensual, heartfelt, excitingly nervy incantation: the warmth and magic of a dazzling artist. In enacting a spaciotemporal journey within and beyond the borders of America and the West, Chang also explores a long history of aspiration, adventure, and damage. The poet combines her perspectives on contemporary life with imagined visions of the Empress Dowager, Tzu Hsi, the last emperor of China, who ruled from 1861 until her death in 1908. This figure is, at different times, playful, torchlit, rebellious, lipsticked, bejeweled, distraught, perfumed, electric, magnetic. In “Empress Dowager Boogies”—the oxymoronic title is representative of the tensions in this volume—she is eager to “let” her “majesty and birthright go.” Soon, however, she displays “A face powdered so rouge it becomes an empire” (“Dowager in Matrimony”). Her feet are wrapped, and her mouth is stuffed with fog as she prepares to meet her groom. There is truth and compassion in this portrait, but this character has many other facets. Later in the volume, a century after she has ordered the deaths of the artists who failed to envision her most perfect sky, the cause of her own death is identified as suffocation by riches: “nostrils and mouth stuffed with diamonds” (“Reign”). The poet-as-dowager (one poem is explicitly entitled “The Poet as Empress Dowager”) can accordingly identify with an exotic caged creature (“The Empress Dowager Has One Bird”). It also makes sense that images of reaching for an elusive, heavenly freedom abound. The poet’s other alter egos include the more modern image of herself in youth as a furious DJ, a vixen who slowly takes off her coat “like a religion.”
These tensions—between tradition and contemporaneity, between entrapment and freedom—point toward a deep exploration of the divided self. One often senses that a speaker is grappling with a fractured identity, that she is caught between polarities, backgrounds, or modes of being. At one point, we are told that she and her lover were born between “twin lightning storms / on opposite sides of the earth. / White birds colliding into black birds that high” (“Sex Gospels”). And the very openness of the sky or road can itself define a kind of trap. The central consciousness of this book is often set adrift: “What is this force / that makes me continually lost? What is it that I want / in all these disappearing cities?” (“Baguio”). Indeed, in “Cutting It Down,” another speaker’s self-portrait can mirror that of Frida Kahlo in all her broken glory:
she held her own twin’s hand, one who was
laden down by tradition, another freed from it,
the forced embrace and cleaved tongue flicking
like a serpent’s. When God multiplied the soul,
it fractured, splintered beast wandering in the mirror,
strangeness of pleasure in tandem. What does that say
about the spirit, one’s own disaster split in two,
to halve the pain or double it?
But does such torment arise primarily from within or without? To follow these various personae is to feel threatened, at times, by “invisible bandits” (“Sex Gospels”) and shady men in the Tunisian black market (“The Evolution of Danger”), threats on the outside that mirror threats on the inside. To luxuriate in these poems is to be haunted by desert nights and moon-fear, by the split head of Trotsky, by a dying horse, a hacked-open goat, an unstable bridge over rushing water, even the blackened body of God. Are such evocations primarily personal, or are they political? Are they historical or psycho-spiritual? Are they erotic or military? Are they about love or death? Such questions are reductive in a world where a poem entitled “Patriotism” can begin with “shrapnel” and a “guilty mouth,” describe the act of digging down “below kneeling, below bowing” to the place where “you can mount the cry,” and end with “my tongue waving like a flag.”
In the third section of the volume, entitled “Territory,” what might have been an intimate journey clearly opens out onto wider territory. Here we bear witness to explicit atrocities and natural disasters in Ethiopia, Haiti, and Sri Lanka, wars between gods and devils, “history” that “you can never fix” (“A Full Life”). But even in poems such as these, we inhabit a surreal atmosphere where (for instance) a simile can almost liberate itself from its usual descriptive function, making a play for its own deadly freedom: “It is as simple as a lone man wrapping / himself like a gift with a bomb at the center” (“Substantial”).
For all its elaborate gesturing toward the definitions of fracture and trouble, Of Gods and Strangers is full of “So Much Light” and “Possibility.” The book opens with “Unfinished Book of Mortals” a long, fascinating poem which defies all spaciotemporal bounds; Chang concludes, wittily and refreshingly, with the dreamlike “Author’s Notes on Imaginary Poems.” Some pieces, such as “Wild Invention,” are so full of wild game (in multiple senses of the term) that they cast fairy tale spells. Several provide an antidote to death by riches: Chang’s linguistic and visual lushness is often balanced by restraint (as in “Lord,” “The Idea of Revelation,” and “Epilogue”). I’m a sucker for all the startling, leaping imagery and all the unexpected turns in this book. More importantly, Chang always has her finger on the pulse of the human condition. She glimpses burning buildings, suffering cities, and figures swept out to sea. It is as if she could survey the whole canvas of the human struggle on earth, while recognizing that it is the personal that provides a window onto the universal. With “birds rummaging in [her] breastbone, ” the speaker of a concluding poem has the courage to declare, “Strange God, I understand the human void.” Of Gods and Strangers is a gorgeous, unnerving, revelatory read.
There’s reading and there’s reading. Much of the year I’m teaching and I’m reading what I’m teaching or I’m reading what I need to read to teach what I’m reading. It goes like that.
But in the summer I read. And this past summer I sat on the screened-in porch of my little crackerbox house in the country and read Celan. I had Felstiner beside me and Celan in front of me. I had a notebook and a pen and sweet summer breezes. And I read slowly and closely, trying to take in everything this great poet had to teach me, and I got only so far in the summer. So I keep reading–for urgency, for compression, for the amount of work a single word can do. (I don’t read German, but having both English and German allowed me entrance, brief and imperfect, to the power of the words.) Devastated by the loss of his parents at the hands of the Nazis, and struggling to make meaning in spite of that, Celan wrote poems unrelenting in their power and beauty. I’m a beginner. I will go on reading. I hope I will learn.
Sally Dawidoff
Liu Xiaobo, June Fourth Elegies, translated by Jeffrey Yang (Graywolf Press, 2012)
Every year for twenty years, Liu Xiaobo, the blacklisted Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote a memorial offering to those who were killed in Tiananmen Square on 6/4/89. His haunted poems may haunt you: “Remember those black-haired dead souls / who hold up the white-haired mothers. . . If my eyes are plucked out, I’ll use my eye sockets to stare at you / If my body’s eaten away, I’ll use my scent to embrace you” (2005). Jeffrey Yang tells us that, throughout the process of translating the nearly 100 pages of poems in this collection, he was unable to communicate with Liu; the poet is serving a long prison term for co-writing a manifesto calling for democratic reforms. Liu writes out of anguish, refusal, and outrage. From his luminous introductory essay to June Fourth Elegies: “The living should really shut their mouths and let the graves speak.”
Elisabeth Frost
Catherine Barnett, Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012)
One of the most beautiful & innovative books of poetry I’ve read in the last few years.
David Groff
Aaron Smith, Appetite (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)
Aaron’s book is a bold and uncompromising confrontation with the body and its dangers, from the perspective of a gay male poet. In poems too urgent to take refuge in the decorousness that defuses many poems about desire, he writes with wit, smarts, and heart about the connections that all of us (queer or less queer) attempt to make using the precious and problematic vessels of our selves.
I like reading about evolution (I studied biology in college), and I am researching connections and inspirations for my second book, entitled “Stay This Easy Way Down.” The subtitle of Stott’s book is “The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough.” Often a poem can be or feel like “one tiny creature,” and as poets, we know what importance this “tininess” holds. We inhabit an exterior world which needs to be reconciled with our interior world in order for us to grow and progress. Parallel developments occur but are often visible only when we look back. Writing a poem is a way for me to inhabit the present–since I feel sometimes the past can mock the present, and the future is an emptiness because time does not inhabit it yet.
Stephen Massimilla
Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
A Village Life defines a real departure form Glück’s earlier work. Composed in long, lucid lines, it is more open, more ample than anything she has written before. The themes—aging, lost youth, a marriage heading south, the vulnerability of children, etc.—are not new to Glück. But the geographical unity is novel: All the poems are set in an imaginary village, where the tensions between the valences of rivers and of mountains, thought and action, the ideal and the real, illusion and “truth” are realized in evocatively suspended meditations. These reflections shed light not only on the spaces between the stages of life, but between human compassion and the indifference of nature, including, sometimes, human nature. One of the many questions the book raises for me is what it could mean to postulate “omniscience” in a narrative or ontological sense. In a social village full of childhood memories, grown-up problems, and confrontations with the self, what can it mean to speak of the “savagery” of the natural order or backdrop? Isn’t our conceptualization of time and indifference in itself a moral, human, and even judgmental act?
The poems are alive with a wit, spontaneity and freshness of form I so admire. As a young mother with no free time, Browne re-conceived of writing as a collaboration with language and happenings that came her way, and she composed in short bursts. There is found language from her children, the voting polls, a Russian novel; sonnets that are amulets; and my favorites, love sonnets to the light.
I keep coming back to Come, Thief, Jane Hirshfield’s 2011 volume. My husband Clay and I used a poem from it, “A Blessing for Wedding,” at our marriage ceremony last year. I’m sure the poem is going to become to be recited at a lot of nuptials in the years ahead. Unlike most epithalamions, and most blessings, it stays blessedly off the subject, admitting nature, birth, death, in a litany of “todays”:
Today when the fire keeps its promise to warm Today when someone you love has died or someone you never met has died Today when someone you love has been born or someone you will not meet has been born
Within this larger world the marrying couple is contextualized:
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Occasional poems are awfully hard to write. So often they strain to please their readers or the participants in their occasions, striking the bell too hard with their clapper and flattening out. But this poem can “surprise you inside your ears,” as do Hirshfield’s other poems. She writes from a place of Buddhist understanding (she has been lay-ordained in the Soto Zen tradition since 1979) but unlike certain other poets possessed of a system for spiritual apprehension, her poems constantly, gently, surprise. For the reader her connections can be subversively breathtaking, like being slapped on the side of your head while sitting on your meditation cushion.
I always feel my poems must start with conflict—“emotion recollected in anxiety,” as Galway Kinnell put it—but Hirshfield begins with a measured curiosity (a natural perception, or a musing to be expanded upon) and ends with discovery. Her stance of near-serene inquiry allows for perceptions that spin out like a bird with its own logic and startlement.
In “Sweater,” the garment that “takes on the shape of its wearer” and a spilled cup of coffee converge into a promise of renewal, and patience:
Patient the table; unjudging, the ample, refillable cup. Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given, stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical pullings on.
Thank goodness for the shock of that “unmetaphysical,” stitched right into the middle of the poem’s last line. Like Hirshfield’s poem, it brings us back to the blessing of the thing itself.
Tuesday morning I went to the East River around 730 a.m. and that was wild…I walked across 10th street with my dog Jesse to get there and at that time had no idea that a 14 ft wave had hit. I noticed many cars were rearranged and some just sitting in the middle of the street and I realized the water must have been that high. Then I went across the FDR on the 10th street overpass and saw the drive was closed and flooded in some areas. I walked down from 10th on the promenade all the way to Delancey. There was so much debris-oddest thing was a beehive which pieces and slats covered about a quarter of a mile. Plus I saw a splattered mouse. The beehive I think had been at the environmental center farther down across from Delancey. The wind was still high so I went back after an hour or so because I wanted to stay inside. No phone, news, emails, etc. I slept the whole day off and on, plus went out with Jesse a few times…and had a couple glasses of wine too. And kept reading the Roosevelt biography I had stopped reading a few months ago. I talked to a few people in the building and on the street. Everyone was just trying to figure things out.
When I went outside, a lot of people were clearing out of the neighborhood with suitcases and the stress and confusion was high. There was actually quite a bit of traffic and without traffic lights I saw my fair share of close calls with pedestrians, cars, etc. This seemed like the most danger both Tuesday and Wednesday – the dumb drivers. By Wednesday afternoon the FDR had opened and Bloomberg had restricted incoming passenger count, so things were more under control. Plus people seemed finally to realize that if there is not a traffic light, this does not mean you have the right of way. It means you have to be extra careful. This was not a 9/11 situation where people were nice after the event. It was/felt like an ‘every man for yourself situation!’
