Category: Poets

Harkness’ The Law of the Unforeseen

Hard to believe it was last October that I discussed a poem from Bethany Reid’s Body My House and nearly every post since then has focused on photos of birds. In other words, it is long past time for another poetry post. Bethany recommended Edward Harkness’s The Law of the Unforseen when she mentioned her own book had just been published, and I ordered the two together nearly a year ago.

The blurb in the back of the book said Harkness has forever regretted that he missed seeing Elvis Presley when Elvis visited the Seattle Fair in 1962. I have to admit that I have never regretted missing that, or even his earlier concert in Sicks Stadium, though I was definitely still a Presley fan when I was in high school in ‘62.  Otherwise, though, we seem to have remarkably similar interests and tastes, not to mention views of a disordered world.

As I’ve aged it has been harder to find poets that impress me as much as those I loved when I discovered poets in my senior year in high school and college, like Whitman, Hardy, Yeats, Roethke, Robert PennWarren, or, even, lesser poets like David Wagoner or Mark Strand who I took classes from.  I suspect poets we encounter earlier in life stand out more because they revealed life in new ways. I’m not sure at my age I’m still capable of seeing life in totally new ways, much less welcoming that kind of revelation. 

In short, I’ve learned to appreciate poets that see the world largely the way I do but can put it into words better than I can.  There are several poems that do that in this 115-page collection, but a favorite — perhaps because I have been longing to visit the Malheur or the Sacramento refuge where we see meadowlarks, is:

MEADOWLARK

He’s out there, somewhere, a quarter mile off,
hidden in the crown of that lightning-struck pine.
At this distance, maybe he’s not there, maybe his voice
is there, careening across Rocky Flats, indigoed
with camas and larkspur—wild with shooting star.


His phrases carry from his pine to here,
the ground patched with monk’s hood, cowled
like its name, among lichen-ladened scree.
She I love prowls the near-treeless meadow,
pausing to listen, binoculars aimed,


scanning for bluebirds in the wind-combed grass.
That’s when the long, twisted, complicated notes
come tumbling in a trick of acoustics to fill the expanse.
The pine hunches, blasted one night a hundred years ago,
arthritic now, a misshapen thing persevering


alone with the flowers, stones, wind, droppings
of deer and elk who have heard the same arias
sail out from deep within the green. I tell myself
it's music. It is not music, not in the mind
of a meadowlark. Still, it’s a wondrous sound


nevertheless, a little delirious, the complex notes
alarming in their urgency: I’m alive, you fools!
All that matters are the sun-fringed clouds.
Wake up! All that matters are the sun-fringed clouds.
She I love scans the lightning-struck pine.


Who’s his audience? There it is: the mystery
of poetry. Other meadowlarks, of course. Of course
the stones, the flowers, droppings of deer and elk.
Maybe the lightning-struck pine he’s in, maybe
she I love, blue-parka-ed, her ears cupped to hear.

For me, this poem captures the experience of sighting meadowlarks and adds a dimension my photographs can never quite convey.  My photographs sometimes capture the peak moment of the experience, especially for birders, as in the photo above, but even a series of them never captures the experience itself in quite the way this poem does.  

The opening line, “He’s out there, somewhere…” captures most birders’ experience with meadowlarks.  You hear the meadowlark’s song, know it has to be there, but the only clue you have to where it might be is past experience — which doesn’t count for much.  It seems counterintuitive, but it’s impossible to locate them because the song seems to be coming from all directions, as it fills the “expanse.” You’d think someone singing that beautifully would want their audience to know where the performer is, right? Why else sing so loudly?

All you can do is pick up the binoculars and start looking where it might be. Thankfully, even if you don’t spot the meadowlark, you will see its habitat more clearly than you’ve seen it before. Binoculars, like telephoto lenses, reveal things you would probably never notice otherwise: camas, larkspur, monk’s hood.  

But the experience, like the poem, isn’t just about the meadowlark. It’s about the whole place, the meadowlarks’s part in that place along with the “flowers, stones, wind, droppings/ of deer and elk who have heard the same arias/ sail out from deep within the green.” It’s not just a particular bird that draws us to a place, it’s the place itself that calls us back.  Some birders may chase particular birds, but most of us return week after week, month after month, year after year to special places because those places make us feel as alive as they are.

Bethany Reid’s Body My House

My favorite poem in the book was probably “Unripened” because it reminded me of  childhood outdoor experiences, but even though I’m currently immersed in a review of CSS I didn’t want to spend the hours involved in trying to reproduce the format the poem used in the book and wouldn’t consider presenting it any other way. “I Could Love You that Way” was another favorite, but I couldn’t put into words why I liked it. After staring at a computer screen for nearly a week waiting for words to suddenly appear, I dispersed those electrons and chose to tackle this poem instead:

It’s great reading weather here in the Pacific Northwest since it’s far too blustery and rainy to walk outside. I’ve actually been reading several different books, but I just finished Body My House by Bethany Reid. Bethany has been kind enough to leave comments on my site several times, so when I saw on her site that she had just published a book of poetry (a while ago) I ordered it (a while ago). Like most of the people I know, I have stacks of books sitting around waiting to be read, but this 63-page​ book seemed like the perfect book to read while I tried to figure out what I want to say about Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, which I also just finished reading.

What She Wanted to Put in Her Poem
 
 When he decided to end it all, he took his pistol
 to the garden and held the muzzle to his ear.

 His brains would fertilize the cucumbers,
 the heirloom tomatoes, the white flesh
 
 of the onions. His blood would seep from him
 into the soil where the beans drifted over their stakes.
 
 He would waste nothing.
 Through the kitchen window, his wife
 
 and step-daughters watched. The son of a bitch
 is nothing but a coward, his wife said.
 
 He couldn’t hear what they said.
 But he lowered the pistol. He sank to his knees.
 

 Divorce followed. Years of apartments. Jobs
 not worthy of his genius. His younger stepdaughter
 
 still remembers him standing in the garden.
 She remembers how dark the soil, how green
 
 the plants. A mist of rain, so light, adorning
 his head like a halo. How brave he was, is what
 
 she thinks (holding a pen, staring at the white page),
 to have stood from there and walked
 
 back into his life, not knowing what it would hold,
 whether bounty or lack.

I especially liked this poem because I can identify with the first part of the poem; I’ve always wanted to be buried under my tomato plants — not in a sterile graveyard.  The garden is the perfect place to retire to.  There’s a reason my study is full of Aerogarden hydroponic gardens growing tomatoes and herbs. Gardening is in my blood.

I’m afraid I’d probably be more apt to kill the spouse than commit suicide, but I could easily identify with how he must have felt when I read “The son of a bitch is nothing but a coward.”  Someone is definitely a bitch, but it’s probably not his mother.  It’s hard to imagine what kind of person would say this out loud with her daughters standing there, especially since the younger stepdaughter seems to adore him:  “A mist of rain, so light, adorning his head like a halo.” 

One suspects the daughter (the later poet staring at the white paper ?) knows, and must have had, the kind of courage it takes to step back from a moment of darkness and go on. Courage is usually identified with heroic deeds, like shooting a criminal or saving others in combat, but there are many kinds of courage. Some of us need more courage than others just to get up and face everyday challenges. Most of us experience at least a few times in our life when it takes all the courage we can muster up to just to get back on track. Poems like this remind us that we should always give others the benefit of the doubt because it’s impossible to know what struggles they might be facing.  And, in fact, we, too, can never know what life holds for us in the future.

Robert Michael Pyle’s Evolution of the Genus Iris

Whenever we visit the Bloedel Reserve we end our walk at the gift shop. Usually I end up buying garden-related items, naturally, but on a visit this summer they were featuring poems posted throughout the reserve and poetry books in the gift shop. I ended up buying three or four poetry books by local poets I hadn’t heard of before and one by Robert Michael Pyle who I knew only from his non-fiction. In fact, I wrote about Sky Time in Gray’s River several years ago.

I’ll have to admit to a certain ambiguity about his poetry though I definitely identify with his view of nature and life in general. I tend to prefer his short, concrete poems but am less fond of others when I feel overwhelmed by his “vast knowledge and lexicon of a scholar” (as touted in the cover blurb by Henry Hughes).

Evolution of the Genus Iris is short, only 70 pages long, so I’ll try to give a few examples of the kind of poems I really liked.

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

Two river otters fished the salmon,
diving and rising side by side,
almost down to the surf. Watching
their sleek and pointy loop-de- loop,
over and over and over,
I managed to miss the evening news
.

Considering the state of “The News” today, it’s probably easy to see why this is a personal favorite. It doesn’t hurt that river otters are a personal favorite, either. Though it’s obviously too long to be a haiku, it has the kind of concrete imagery that most appeals to me in haiku. It also has that surprising twist at the end that the best haiku has. In other words, this is the kind of poetry that I really favor at the moment.

While trying to figure out what I wanted to say about Pyle’s book, I started reading Sam Hamill’s “Crossing the River” and in the preface W.S. Merwin notes, “The great Chinese poets, for all their formality and regard to conventions, speak often with a surprising directness which makes them seem surprisingly intimate and close to us.” I really hadn’t thought about this before, but it’s another characteristic I like in poetry. It turns out, that’s a characteristic of my favorite Pyle poems.

JUST ABOUT

What I want to say is how mianthemum
and stream side violet and spring beauty and oxalis
cover the ground in April as thick as the mosses
and club mosses and ferns jacket
the boughs of vine maples. How
the elderberry springs beneath the spruce
and the winter wren’s many notes ride
the single chord of varied thrush. How
corydalis and salmonberry meet you
across the skinny bridge. What I want to say
is that all this ought to be enough
for anybody.

“Mianthemum” and “ corydalis” aside, this seems to me to have precisely the “surprising directness” W.S. Merwin ascribes to the great Chinese poets. Though I can’t image one of the great Romantic poets ever using the phrase “What I want to say,” it fits the tone of this poem. And he’s right, “… this ought to be enough/for anybody.”

I ended up marking ten poems in this short volume that I particularly liked and wanted to reread, as many as I often mark in a much longer book. I guess that makes it a good investment of both money and time.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Rain”

Although I liked a lot of the poems in Naomi Shihab Nye’s Words Under the Woods, it’s only 157 pages long, so I thought I would just cite one more poem, one that seemed particularly poignant to me after 30 years of teaching and provides ample evidence that William Stafford was right on when he was quoted on the back cover as saying, “In the current literary scene one of the most heartening influences is the work of Naomi Shihab Nye. Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”

Rain


A teacher asked Paul

what he would remember

from third grade, and he sat

a long time before writing

“this year sumbody tutched me

on the sholder”

and turned his paper in.

Later she showed it to me

as an example of her wasted life.

The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.

He wanted to go inside them

and live, he could fill in

the windows of “o” and “d”

and be safe while outside

birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

I taught high school, not the third grade, but I can still identify with the poem, even if I can’t identify with the teacher who saw Paul’s paper as an “example of her wasted life.” Hopefully, she was the “sumbody” that touched Paul on the shoulder providing him with the feeling that someone cared for him, though she seems too out of touch to have been the one that did that.

As a converted caseworker, it was precisely students like Paul who inspired me to turn to teaching in hopes that I could help people before they ended up on welfare. As it turned out, that was a lot harder to do than I ever imagined, and I failed a lot more than I succeeded in helping them to succeed. While that failure makes it easy to believe that I “wasted” my life trying to help students like Paul succeed, there are more important things than “book learning.” The most important thing you can do as a teacher is to make students feel good about themselves, no matter what skills they may or may not have.

Having been a caseworker and been married to a caseworker for 17 years, I was always aware that some of my students lived unimaginably hard lives, ranging from abuse to neglect, never knowing what was coming next in their lives. Before they can move on they need to feel safe, not like “birds building nests in drainpipes.”