Carolyn Kizer’s tribute to Morris Graves

When I first read Carolyn Kizer’s Ungrateful Garden I completely overlooked the poem "From an Artist’s House" which is dedicated to Morris Graves. I overlooked it simply because I knew little or nothing about Morris then, Recently, though, I keep running into Morris Graves, everywhere. As a result, he now seems more and more like a key figure in the Northwest artistic movement. As often happens, the more you study a subject, the more links you discover to familiar and unfamiliar ideas.

Needless to say, then, that the following poem resonates with me:

From an Artist’s House

for Morris Graves

1
A bundle of twigs
On the roof. We study pictures:
Nests of hern and crane.
The artist who built this house
Arranged the faggots here.

2
In the inlaid box
With a gilt hasp concealing
A letter, a jewel?
Within, a bunch of feathers,
The small bones of a bird.

3
The great gold kakemono
With marvelous tapes and tassles,
Handles of pale bone,
Is a blaze on the wall. Someone
Painted an oak-leaf to the silk.

4
Full of withered oranges,
The old,lopsided compote
Reposes on the sill.
Poor crockery, immortal
On twenty sheets of paper.

"Moor Swan" 1933 Morris Graves

The concrete details in the poem of a mini-study of Graves’ style and influence. At least at this point in his career, Graves was most famous for his painting of birds, and, though the paintings are more symbolic than realistic, they convey the feeling that the artists truly understands the very nature of birds. And as the second stanza suggests, the birds seem to be the most valuable thing in life, more valuable than any mere jewel. The third stanza suggests the fusion of eastern and western art that takes place in Morris’ paintings. And the final stanza, suggests that Graves’ paintings will, by their own immortality, make the "poor crockery" immortal, too.

Carolyn Kizer’s Ungrateful Garden

Considering how fond I was of Carolyn Kizer’s The Ungrateful Garden, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I haven’t bought another book of her poetry since that one came out despite my best intentions. As soon as I’ve caught up with my backlog of poetry books, I’ll have to remedy that problem, though I must admit I haven’t been able to find her books very easily when I have looked for them.

I much admired Kizer’s sense of irony in many of the best poems in this volume, but I must admit even more of my admiration for the poems stemmed from a similar attitude towards nature and towards man’s betrayal of nature:

The Ungrateful Garden

Midas watched the golden crust

That formed over his steaming sores,
Hugged his agues, loved his lust,
But damned to hell the out-of-doors

Where blazing motes of sun impaled
The serrid roses, metal-bright.
"Those famous flowers," Midas wailed,
"Have scorched my retina with light."

This gift, he’d thought, would gild his joys,
Silt up the waters of his grief;
His lawns a wilderness of noise,
The heavy clang of leaf on leaf.

Within, the golden cup is good
To lift, to sip the yellow mead.
Outside, in summer’s rage, the rude
Gold thorn has made his fingers bleed.

"I strolled my halls in golden shift,
As ruddy as a lion s meat.
Then I rushed out to share my gift,
And golden stubble cut my feet."

Dazzled with wounds, he limped away
To climb into his golden bed,
Roses, roses can betray.
"Nature is evil," Midas said

In the title poem from this volume, Kizer turns a well-known fairy tale to her own purposes. Surely, the role of greed in modern man’s destruction of nature has not gone unnoticed in the Northwest where a miracle of nature has been stripped of its forests and its bountiful salmon by human greed in relatively recent times. And when floods or other disasters have resulted as the final consequences of this greed, man has blamed the events on nature, not on his own greed. Certainly the lust of western business pioneers like Weyerhauser have “damned to hell the out-of-doors” with their clearcuts that destroyed not only the trees but the salmon that relied on the streams that ran through those forests. And, yet, if nature, as a result of these atrocities, should bring floods or destructive mudslides, it’s nature and not human greed that is generally blamed. For, as our Puritan forefathers so loudly proclaimed, “Nature is evil.” The dark woods hide evil, and for civilization to thrive forests must fall to serve man’s needs. And so they have.

“The Intruder” is a much subtler poem than “The Ungrateful Garden” but it, too, effectively portrays man’s betrayal of nature, the betrayal of the darker, less pleasant, side of nature. In a sense, this poem reminds me of recent Republican arguments that Alaska’s northern expanses should be turned to oil fields because they “aren’t even pretty.”

The Intruder

My mother– preferring the strange to the tame:
Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung,
Frog’s belly distended with finny young,
Leaf-mould wilderness, hare-bell, toadstool,
Odd, small snakes loving through the leaves,
Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all
Wild and natural -flashed out her instinctive love,
and quick, she
Picked up the fluttering. bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet,
And held the little horror to the mirror, where
He gazed on himself and shrieked like an old screen door
far off.

Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing
Came clattering down like a small black shutter.
Still tranquil, she began, "It’s rather sweet…"
The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint
In the caught eyes. Then we saw
And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow,
Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed,
The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud,
Swiftly, the cat with a clean careful mouth
Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.

But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor
Remained, of all my my mother’s tender, wounding passion
For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life
Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,
Whose denizens can turn upon the world
With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw
To sting or soil benevolence, alien
As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot,
She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap,
She washed and washed the pity from her hands.

Now, admittedly, I haven’t gone out of my way to build bat homes or to attract them to my yard, for they aren’t nearly as “desirable” as birds. Still, the mother seems to have a taste for the strange; it’s the unexpected that seems to disgust her.

Nor is it the event itself that so shocks, but the result that disturbs. We realize, as the poet does, that we cannot afford to wash the pity from our hands simply because the animal does not fit our definition of cute or desirable. The cat with its “clean careful mouth” may be more acceptable to the woman because of that, but it is no less destructive of the natural order of things because of that cleanliness. We, probably, or no less guilty than the mother of forgetting about the destruction of “undesirable” animals.

Surely, we reason, it’s a good thing to kill off the sharks that prey on swimmers or surfers, until we realize that the massive destruction of any one species upsets a balance that has been attained through centuries of natural selection. I, for one, am not fond of snakes, but I still endure the garter snake in the compost heap because it is probably an important part of my organic garden. I doubt, though, that I would be so understanding if it were a rattlesnake, even though the rattlesnake might be as important to its ecosystem as the gartner snake is .

The truth is, though, that if were going to manage to save what little is left of our natural environment, we are probably going to have to be wiser than the mother and learn to accept denizens that “can turn upon the world/ With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw/To sting or soil benevolence” if we are really going to preserve nature as we know it.

Naomi Shihab Nye ‘s World View

By nature and as a result of fighting in the Vietnam War against an enemy who was not my true enemy, but who was the enemy, or at least the imagined enemy, of someone in my government who may well have been my true enemy, at least if “true enemy” is defined as someone who is trying to get you killed, I am not very political. I do vote semi-regularly, or at least I vote semi-regularly against those who I do not want to vote for, but I do so with little faith that my vote will have much effect or will, indeed, insure that the person I would never vote for will not get elected. Witness the election, or rather, non-election, of our present president.

Still, I cannot help but care about the world and the people who live in that world, and the Middle East is certainly one of many places on the earth that needs everyone’s good will if it is ever to transcend the hatred that has engulfed it. Though I seriously doubt that there is much I can do that will affect the situation there, including writing a weblog that, realistically, affects very few people’s thoughts at all, much less influences their political thought, I wish all of the people there the wisdom to overcome the problems that threaten to destroy them all. Philosophically, I support Meryl Yourish’s campaign to ensure that there will never be another holocaust, but I also suffer for the Palestinians who must endure an unending war. To do less, seems to me to be less than fully human.

That said, I find Nye’s poems on the Middle East even more moving than her domestic poems discussed yesterday. As the American daughter of a Palestinian immigrant and an American wife, she offers insights into the Middle East that seem particularly relevant in these troubled times. It is impossible from the poems themselves to determine if Nye is a Christian or a Muslim, but it is quite clear that she is a loving, caring person with great insight into the complexities that await all who venture into this area.

The poem “Half-and-Half” is a great place to start looking at her insights since she is certainly half-and-half herself, as perhaps we are all half-and-half:

Half-and-Half

You can’t be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can’t love
anyone else. Says he.

At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa,
he’s sweeping. The rubbed stones
feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
across face, of date-stuffed’ mamool.

This morning we lit the slim white candles
which bend over at the waist by noon.
For once the priests weren’t fighting
in the church for the best spots to stand.
As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.

A woman opens a window — here and here and here
placing a vase of blue flowers,
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making a soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out.

Which of us doesn’t know about “broken bits, chips?” Whose life is whole? Certainly anyone who works with glass would know about them. If you love Jesus, you have to love someone else, don’t you? Isn’t that the essence of Jesus? Are the priests who are “fighting in the church for the best spots” really fighting for Jesus, or are they half-and-half? How many Christians can manage more than half-and-half? And is soup, the ultimate comfort food, anything but half-and-half, “leaving nothing out.” Most of us live our lives “from what has been left in the bowl.”

As a lover of books, I find “Ducks,” with its discussion of the Iraqi reverence for books particularly moving:

Ducks

We thought of ourselves as people of culture.
How long will it be till others see us that way again?
Iraqi friend

In her first home each book had a light around it.
The voices of distant countries
floated in through open windows,
entering her soup and her mirror.
They slept with her in the same thick bed.

Someday she would go there.
Her voice, among all those voices.
In Iraq a book never had one owner – it had ten.
Lucky books, to be held often
and gently, by so many hands.

Later in American libraries she felt sad
for books no one ever checked out.

She lived in a country house beside a pond
and kept ducks, two male, one female.
She worried over the difficult relations of triangles.
One of the ducks often seemed depressed.
But not the same one.

During the war between her two countries
she watched the ducks more than usual.
She stayed quiet with the ducks.
Some days they huddled among reeds
or floated together.

She could not call her family in Basra
which had grown farther away than ever
nor could they call her. For nearly a year

she would not know who was alive,
who was dead.

The ducks were building a nest.

I wonder if the light around the books was real, just as a work of art is often illuminated in our country, or if it is a virtual light, as in a “holy” work? Rather reminds me of the light around spiritual objects in a Morris Graves painting. And again, the image of the soup. Too bad I don’t like soup better than I do; it’s hard to keep the proper symbolism in mind when you don’t react to soup, that stuff made from leftovers, as most people do, isn’t it? Still, it is a comforting image.

How delightful to think that “a book never had one owner – it had ten.” Does a book ever really belong to anyone once written? Still, it’s delightful to see the respect which books, and knowledge, were held by some people. It is a startling contrast to America where books have become so common that they are no longer esteemed. It makes one wonder why books are not checked out more often from American libraries, and whether it is the best books, the poetry books, books only a librarian can love, that are left on the shelves in the local library.

How sad to watch the three ducks build a nest while you are torn between your two countries and your family that is now part of both countries. Obviously, one duck must have been as lonely as the person from Iraq, a duck caught up in a traditional three-some, where one party is doomed to be left out.

The final poem here is a poet’s poem, one tied to the very meaning and power of words:

Darling

1.

I break this toast for the ghost of bread in Lebanon.
The split stone the toppled doorway.

Someone’s kettle has been crushed.
Someone’s sister has a gash above her right eye.

And now our tea has trouble being sweet.
A strawberry softens, turns musty,

overnight each apple grows a bruise.
I tie both shoes on Lebanon’s feet.

All day the sky in Texas that has seen no rain since June
is raining Lebanese mountains, Lebanese trees.

What if the air grew damp with the names of mothers?
The clear-belled voices of first graders

pinned to the map of Lebanon like a shield?
When I visited the camp of the opposition

near the lonely Golan, looking northward toward
Syria and Lebanon, a vine was springing pinkly from a tin can

and a woman with generous hips like my mother’s
said, "Follow me."

2.

Someone was there. Someone not there now
was standing. In the wrong place
with a small moon-shaped scar on his cheek
and a boy by the hand.
Who had just drunk water, sharing the glass.
Not thinking about it deeply
though they might have, had they known.
Someone grown, and someone not grown.
Who imagined they had different amounts of time left.
This guessing-game ends with our hands in the air,
becoming air.
One who was there is not there, for no reason.
Two who were there.

It was almost too big to see.

3.

Our friend from Turkey says language is so delicate
he likens it to a darling.

We will take this word in our arms.
It will be small and breathing.
We will not wish to scare it.
Pressing lips to the edge of each syllable.
Nothing else will save us now.
The word "together" wants to live in every house.

The first section is dominated by images of the narrator’s discontent that flows from her memories of Lebanon. Although her life is not ruined, nothing seems to go quite right. The tea tastes sour, the strawberry goes bad, and the apple is bruised.

The second section takes us back to that visit to Lebanon and the bad memories that is the cause for her summer of discontent in Texas, and although it’s never quite clear, it seems that someone who had shared her life for a short while has been killed, “someone not there now.” Of course, it’s also the narrator who is not there now.

The third section is the critical one, though, the one where the precious word “together,” almost a prayer rather than a word, a “darling” word because it is such a fragile word in Lebanon. And yet, it is such a precious idea that it, and it alone can probably “save us.”

We, as a nation, are blessed by the constant infusion of talent from abroad, talent that in the long run helps us to realize our true potential. We need to do more to foster these younger poets who can help us to understand ourselves and the problems our society faces more clearly.

There’s a good set of links at The Academy of American Poets

Naomi Shihab Nye ‘s Fuel

Naoomi Shihab Nye’s Fuel provides a pleasant contrast to A.R.Ammons The Selected Poems. Not only are Nye’s poems about human relationships, rather than man’s relationship to nature, but they also rely on concrete details to convey their message, rather than metaphysical arguments.

“Bill’s Beans” for William Stafford is the second poem in Fuel, but you don’t completely understand it’s significance until much later in the book when it is alluded to in the poem “Fuel,” which of course is also the title of this volume of poetry.

Bill’s Beans
for William Stafford

Under the leaves, they’re long and cutting.
I pull a perfect question mark and two lean twins,
feeling the magnetic snap of stem, the ripened weight
At the end of a day, the earth smells thirsty.
He left his brown hat, his shovel, and his pen.
I don’t know how deep bean roots go.
We could experiment.
He left the sky over Oregon and the fluent trees.
He gave us our lives that were hiding under our feet,
saying, You know what to do.
So we’ll take these beans
back into the house and steam them
We’ll eat them one by one with our fingers,
the clean click and freshness
We’ll thank him forever for our breath,
and the brevity of bean.

Although the beans are obviously symbolic of Stafford’s contribution to Nye’s life, they are also very real beans. When they are picked we hear them snap and smell the soil they are grounded in. But they also suggest the magic beans that Jack received, the ones that reached up to the “sky” over Oregon. More specifically, Stafford seems to have given the narrator the very “lives that were hiding under our feet.” They may be magical beans, but they are magical because they granted what was already there.

Stafford’s role as teacher is made much clearer in “Fuel” when his teaching is contrasted with a teacher who was obviously more interested in maintaining control than she was in teaching her students:

Fuel

Even at this late date, sometimes I have to look up
the word "receive." I received his deep
and interested gaze.

A bean plant flourishes under the rain of sweet words
Tell what you think-I’m listening

The story ruffled its twenty leaves.

*

Once my teacher set me on a high stool
for laughing. She thought the eyes
of my classmates would whittle me to size.
But they said otherwise.

We’d Laugh too if we knew how.

I pinned my gaze out the window
on a ripe line of sky.

That’s where I was going.

This apparently simple poem says quite a lot about good teaching versus bad teaching in very few words. The first teacher’s “deep and interested gaze” is beautifully contrasted with “the eyes/ of my classmates would whittle me to size” and “I pinned my gaze out the window.” The real dunce here, of course, is the grade school teacher who thinks laughter and joy aren’t a vital part of learning. Stafford was a good teacher because he was willing to really listen to his students, not just lecture them.

Another of my favorite poems because of its reliance on concrete details is “My Friend’s Divorce:”

My Friend’s Divorce

I want her
to dig up
every plant
in her garden
the pansies
the pentas
roses
ranunculus
thyme and lilies
the thing nobody knows
the name of
unwind the morning glories
from the wire windows
of the fence
take the blooming
and the almost-blooming
and the dormant
especially the dormant
and then
and then
plant them in her new yard
on the other side
of town
and see how
they breathe

What a beautiful, concrete way of showing the beauty that the ex-husband has lost through the divorce. Better yet, it seems as if all this beauty is likely to thrive much better across town, away from the ex-husband.

Could there be any better revenge than to thrive beautifully after a divorce?

What a pleasant way to describe a divorce and deal with all the bitterness and recrimination in a concrete way rather than to focus on all the inner hostility and resentment that is implied rather than stated.