John Logan

John Logan’s The Zig Zag Walk Poems: 1963-1968 is another of those books I bought several years ago that turns out to be, unfortunately, a book I probably won’t remember whether I read or not a few months from now

Though I was originally attracted to this book because many poems featured areas in the Pacific Northwest and California I’m familiar with, I was disappointed to discover that none of the poems made me see these areas in new, different, or more vivid ways.

While all of the poems are pleasant enough to read and there are eloquent phrases, lines, or images throughout the poems, few poems seem memorable.

This did make me wonder about what determines “taste.” I obviously liked several of these poems years ago because I never buy books lightly, not on a teacher’s salary. So, how do I account for the fact that none of them seem to appeal to me now? Have I changed so much in that time that I’m no longer interested in the same things? Or, was I the victim of a “fad” in poetry when I bought this book? As I read more of these books I bought years ago, I will have to consider this more deeply.

Though none of the poems seemed particularly memorable, I did find a few poems, as I do in nearly every book of poetry I’ve ever read, that made me see my world in a new way. Probably my favorite is one that got me thinking about Morris Graves’ paintings I had previously seen, or not seen, considering what he saw, at the Seattle Art Museum. After reading this poem, I think I need to make another visit to the museum to see if I would now look at them in a new light, because Logan certainly saw them in a very different light than I did.

Three Poems on Morris Graves’ Paintings

1. Bird on a Rock

Poor, thick, white,
three-sided bird
on a rock
(with the big red beak)
you watch me sitting on the floor
like a worshiper
at your melancholy shrine.
All you can do is look. I mean
you lack any kind of wing or arm
with which to go home.
The three-toed foot of each odd limb
forms a kind of trapezium
about its edge
(though there is no web).
Oh bird, you are a beautiful kite
that does not go up.
You cannot even get down.
Because you’ve lost your mouth (it’s gone)
only your great eyes still moan.
You are filled with the ancient grief,
fixed there lonely as a god or a thief.
Instead of limbs to bring you nearer
Morris Graves has given you
the sudden awful wings of a mirror!

2. Spirit Bird

Looking at Morris Graves’ Spirit Bird
(1956), suddenly I
understood the structure of angels!
They’re made of many colored streams
of the most intense, most pulsing light,
which is itself simply the track
of the seed of God across the void.
Each length of light seems to be a thread
that forms this angelic or spirit
stuff. But it’s not. It’s finer than that.
What gives the light its substance and shapes
the streams into the spirit thing
(apparent limbs and parts of body)
is the heavy, almost solid and
somehow magnetic eyes of angels.
These create the dark into which they glow,
and pull and bend about these sweeps of light.

3. Moor Swan

I’m the ugly, early
Moor Swan of Morris Graves.
I’m ungainly. I’ve got
black splotches on my back.
My neck’s too long.
When I am dead and gone
think only of the beauty of my name.
Moor Swan Moor Swan Moor Swan.

I may not have discovered a new poet to read, but I did discover an artist whose works I would like to pursue. I’m already making plans to stop at the museum named after him on my next trip to California. And the discovery of a new painter is as exciting as the discovery of a new poet, because it seems to me that they operate on very similar planes, particularly an artist like Graves whose works seem so metaphorical and symbolic. I think you might actually have to live in the Pacific Northwest, particulary the Puget Sound area, to understand the aptness of Bird Depressed by the Length of the Winter of 1944.

Though I was unable to find references to these particular paintings, I was inspired to look up the following on the web:

A list of various paintings on the Graves’ paintings on the web:
And an article
A few images:
And another image of a bird:

I may even have to spring for the book at Amazon:

Galway Kinnell

In keeping with my resolve to catch up with my reading of unread books before I buy new ones, I just finished reading Galway Kinnell’s Selected Poems published in 1982. Considering I bought it at the University of Washington bookstore for $12.50, that’s probably about the year I bought it. I knew I had fallen behind in my reading, and I know those Greek tragedies I bought in college keep calling me, but this is ridiculous.

I doubt it’s fair to judge a poet by a book published nearly twenty years ago, but it does cover poems published from 1946 to 1982, and I’ve been unable to find anything much newer on the web. So, I’m going to venture a guess that these poems are representative of his works, especially since they’re all I have to judge by at the moment.

Considering how much difficulty I had getting through this collection, I can imagine why I put off reading it for so long. Simply put, Kinnell has a Master’s degree in Despair, with a minor in “Death.” At his best, a poem like “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World” rivals, in my opinion, T.S. Eliots’ more famous “The Wasteland.” In fact, I prefer it to Eliot’s poem because it seems more immediate, more graphic, more relevant, and, yes, less pretentious. Ah, but I never did like poems very much that required more footnotes than lines to understand.

“The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World” requires no footnotes. It shatters through graphic image after graphic image the myth that America offers immediate wealth and happiness to its immigrants, as summarized in these lines that appear near the end of the poem:

From the blind gut Pitt to the East River of Fishes
The Avenue cobbles a swath through the discolored air,
A roadway of refuse from the teeming shores and ghettos
And the Caribbean Paradise, into the new ghetto and new paradise,
This God-forsaken Avenue bearing the initial of Christ
Through the haste and carelessness of the ages,
The sea standing in heaps, which keeps on collapsing,
Where the drowned suffer a C-change,
And remain the common poor.

The poem is a brutally honest portrayal of a brutal, dehumanizing environment. It’s hard not to flinch as you read it. Yet, unfortunately, it rings true.

In a later poem Kinnell manages to take a famous line from Whitman and transform it into a very different view of America:

And I hear,
coming over the hills, America singing,
her varied carols I hear:
crack of deputies’ rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs
at night,
sput of cattleprod,
TV groaning at the smells of the human body,
curses of the soldier as he poisons, burns, grinds, and stabs
the rice of the world,
with open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses

Undoubtedly this brilliant allusion to Whitman makes these images more striking, and the poem captures images that dominated the 70’s. But it also reaffirms Kinnell’s image as a cynical portraitist of America’s dark side, one who offers little light from the other side to balance this view.

Even what should be a tender moment comforting a daughter who has awakened in the middle of the night is turned into a meditation on the fragility of life:

You cry, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

The tender thoughts of the last line certainly provide a tender touch to the vignette, but I can’t remember ever having feelings like this when I woke up to comfort my daughter in the middle of the night. Thank, God. (But, maybe that’s why he’s a famous poet and I’m not.)

Fortunately, for me, at least, the collection ends on a more positive note with a number of poems that seem to emphasize what we can hope to learn from this despair:

Goodbye
1
My mother, poor woman, lies tonight
in her last bed. It’s snowing, for her, in her darkness.
I swallow down the goodbyes I won’t get to use,
tasteless, with wretched mouth-water;
whatever we are, she and I, we’re nearly cured.

The night years ago when I walked away
from that final class of junior high school students
in Pittsburgh, the youngest of them ran
after me down the dark street. "Goodbye!" she called,
snow swirling across her face, tears falling.

2
Tears have kept on falling. History
has taught them its slanted understanding
of the human face. At each last embrace
the snow brings down its disintegrating curtain.
The mind shreds the present, once the past is over.

In the Derry graveyard where only her longings sleep
and armfuls of flowers go out in the drizzle
the bodies not yet risen must lie nearly forever…
"Sprouting good Irish grass," the graveskeeper blarneys,
he can’t help it, "A sprig of shamrock, if they were young."

3
In Pittsburgh tonight, those who were young
will be less young, those who were old, more old, or more likely
no more; and the street where Syllest,
fleetest of my darlings, caught up with me
and bugged me and said goodbye, will be empty. Well,

one day the streets all over the world will be empty—
already in heaven, listen the golden cobblestones have fallen still—
everyone’s arms will be empty, everyone’s mouth, the Derry earth.
It is written in our hearts, the emptiness is all.
That is how we learned, the embrace is all.

The American Academy has a short biography and a recorded poem by Kinnell.
Here are two poems by Kinnell.
Modern American Poetry includes poems and more.

I Think I Found Myself

Song of Myself
1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

Walt Whitman from “Song of Myself”

For years when I thought of “the concept of myself,” I would automatically think of Whitman’s long poem “Song of Myself.” Upon first reading this poem in college, I fell in love with it. It stated more eloquently than I could ever hope to express an image of myself that I hoped to attain in my lifetime.

Yes, I knew even then that this was a romanticized, idealistic view of mankind, just as the Christianity I was brought up with offered an idealized view of man’s ability to attain perfection if only we could follow Christ’s example. But this view also fit in quite well with the Transcendentalist view of the world and the Romantic tradition in England that I admired so much in my early years in college.

Though my later experiences with people, particularly as a soldier in Vietnam and as a caseworker, would certainly call into question this view of human nature, I think I still held to it unconsciously. It was my inspiration for my work as a caseworker and as a teacher. I felt, given the right opportunity, people would find the best in themselves and become better people.

Perhaps it wasn’t until I taught a literature class that included Lord of the Flies and When the Legends Die that I really re-examined these beliefs. I grouped these novels and accompanying short stories into two opposing views of human nature. The first group suggested that man was inherently evil and that only society’s rules kept mankind from slipping into anarchy and crime. Having taught 9th graders for several years, I could certainly see where Golding got his inspiration. The second group suggested that man was inherently good and that society’s evils corrupted some men and drove them to crime. The story of an Indian youth nearly destroyed by the “white man’s” school seemed just as convincing as Golding’s vision of boys run amuck on a deserted island.

When students wrote essays justifying one view or the other, I accepted either answer as correct because intellectually there is little convincing evidence to prove one view’s superiority over the other.
Deep down, though, I knew I was living my life believing that man was inherently good and society corrupted him. That was probably the only way I could have operated as a caseworker and as a teacher. I couldn’t have taught if I had had to maintain absolute discipline in the classroom and crush any student who dared to challenge my authority. I was there to help students, not control them.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I have been immune to the apocalyptic vision of mankind. It’s hard to reject out-of-hand visions like those in Road Warrior or Matrix. It’s even harder to ignore the capitalistic greed that continues to sacrifice the environment to meet an insatiable need for things, useless or not. It’s almost as hard to believe this will ever change considering that Emerson decried over a hundred years ago that “Things are in the saddle/And ride mankind.”

In moments of despair, I even envision a Malthusian world where the nature can no longer support the hordes of people overwhelming it. With such a vision in mind, it’s hard for me not to justify environmental radicals who defy the law to preserve the wilderness. In the end, though, my faith in man’s ability to learn from his mistakes hand, causes me to contribute generously to environmental groups rather than to pick up my shotgun and defend what’s left of my favorite western wildernesses.

My intellect at times goads me into believing this is a corrupt world driven by individual and corporate greed, but my heart, defying all logic, still wants to believe Whitman’s view is right on the mark.

Doc Searls offers a tribute to Whitman and an interesting compilation of lines from "Song of Myself."

Looking for Myself

The Civil War

I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
I will dig up the pride.
I will take scissors
and cut out the beggar.
I will take a crowbar
and pry out the broken
pieces of God in me.
Just like a jigsaw puzzle,
I will put Him together again
with the patience of a chess player.

How many pieces?

It feels like thousands,
God dressed up like a whore
in a slime of green algae.
God dressed up like an old man
staggering out of His shoes.
God dressed up like a child,
all naked,
even without skin,
soft as an avocado when you peel it.
And others, others, others.

But I will conquer them all
and build a whole nation of God
in me – but united,
build a new soul,
dress it with skin
and then put on my shirt
and sing an anthem,
a song of myself.

Anne Sexton from The Awful Rowing Toward God

It frightens me how much I like this poem, not to mention this whole book of poems. The anguish in these poems is so intense, so palpable, that I know immediately, no matter how uncomfortable I may be, that I am directly in touch with a human soul in anguish. The poems must appeal to my shadow, my darker side, because they’re not the kind of poems I’m usually drawn to, at least I hope I’m not.

But there is something so authentic, so powerful, so frightening in this poem that I am irresistibly drawn to it – like it or not. What I find most frightening of all in the poem, though, is the last line, “a song of myself,” with its allusion to one of my favorite poems, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Although her stated goal may be the same as Whitman’s goal of becoming One with the Oversoul, the means of doing so are so frighteningly different that both poems are cast in a new light.

The poem begins calmly enough with feelings that I, and most readers, have certainly felt: the desire to conquer opposing forces drawing you different ways so you can go where you want to go. And certainly pride is as much a problem with me as it is with most people. (It’s hard to be humble when so many people are drawn to your web site:)

Thank God, though, I’ve never thought about taking “scissors” and digging my pride out. If I had feelings like this, I would damn sure keep only child-safe scissors in my house. Like most people, I, too, have felt that whatever goodness is in me is fragmented and leading nowhere, but using a crowbar to pry out the “broken pieces of God” certainly is not a pleasant prospect. And trying to put a giant puzzle of God together, especially since I have no idea what he looks like, would probably take the patience of Job, not just a chess player.

It’s even harder to identify with the images of God that appear in the next stanza, particularly the one of God dressed up as a “whore in a slime of green algae,” though maybe that’s just because I’m a man. The image of God dressed as an old man somehow reminds me of Blake’s Nobodaddy, and the image of the child certainly brings up images of the newborn Jesus. However, the image of the child as a soft avocado peeled without skin is a deeply disturbing one. God only knows what the “others, others, others” are. Are they so horrible that she can’t even describe them? A truly frightening thought.

I want to believe the narrator will be able to conquer all these elements of herself and build a new soul and sing an anthem of herself. However, it seems unlikely she will be able to “conquer” all these pieces of God, much less “build a whole nation of God.” Can one conquer even one omnipotent God? I’m somehow left with the feeling that if she puts on a shirt it will be a “hair” shirt as a sign of her self-flagellation.

While her despair seems so great that it is almost unthinkable that she can overcome it, this is precisely what we most wish for her. In the end, though, all I am left with is the slight hope that somehow through her ability to articulate her despair so brilliantly and through her deep insights into herself she will be able to conquer these demons that haunt her.