A Bit of Bly

When I read Robert Bly I get the uncomfortable feeling that I’m missing something important and that I should enjoy his poems more than I really do. For instance, my favorite parts of The Light Around the Body and This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years are the quotations he uses to begin the various sections of the first book and the quotations he begins the other book with. If I’m inspired by the same writers that he is, I should be more inspired by his poems?

Of the two books I read, the earlier one The Light Around the Body is my least favorite, though there are still poems I enjoy a lot. Still, it’s not a good sign that my favorite quotation from the book is a Jacob Boehme quotation that introduces section IV of the book

.

Dear children, look in what a dungeon we are lying, in
what lodging we are, for we have been captured by the spirit
of the outward world; it is our life, for it nourishes and
brings us up, it rules in our marrow and bones, in our flesh
and blood, it has made our flesh earthly, and now death has us.

Unfortunately, the quote inspired me to start searching Amazon for a book by Jacob Boehme, not finish Bly’s book

It seems that Bly is up to more here than I am capable of understanding, or perhaps I am simply unwilling to put in the amount of effort it takes to truly understand and appreciate his poems. If I’m going to have to put in this much effort, I’m going back and finally figure out William Blake. Kevin Bushnell in “Leaping Into the Unknown: The Poetics of Robert Bly’s Deep Image” explores some of the problems encountered in trying to understand the poems and has obviously devoted much more time to analyzing Bly than I am ever going to.

That said, I still find:

As the Asian War Begins

There are longings to kill that cannot be seen,
Or are seen only by a minister who no longer believes in God,
Living in his parish like a crow in its nest,

And there are flowers with murky centers,
Impenetrable, ebony, basalt . . .

Conestogas go past, over the Platte, their contents
Hidden from us, murderers riding under the canvas…

Give us a glimpse of what we cannot see,
Our enemies, the soldiers and the poor.

an insightful, moving poem. Though the title at first seems a little misleading and the imagery somewhat disjointed, the phrase “longing to kill” provides enough structure to make the poem whole. The “dark” minister who no longer has Faith watching like a crow is a powerful image. And the “black rose,” or flower of death that cuts like basalt, contrasting with the red rose of love, is an equally powerful image. The western movement, though usually portrayed as the grand progress of history, leads to the slaughter of the Indians, with their “Asian” heritage, and, in turn, leads us back to the title of the poem. Finally, the last line with its subtle movement from “enemies” to “poor” calls into question America’s real motives in Vietnam. Anyone opposed to the war in Vietnam who has seen Jane Fonda’s Soldier Blue would have no problem following the imagery in this poem. Admittedly, this isn’t the only poem in the book that I found intriguing, but, on the whole, I was disappointed in the book.

I started reading This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years with greater expectations because the title comes from lines from Tao Yuan-Ming:

After a storm the leafy tree is no longer solid,
but the pine still throws a full shadow.
It has found a place to be.
For a thousand years it will not give up this place.

Perhaps as a result of my expectations, I did find this book more to my liking. That’s not to say, though, that my expectations were fully met. Too many of the poems simply elude me, hide out somewhere near the compost heap, waiting to be recycled next year into a new crop of more meaningful poems. At the moment I have no patience for the compost heap, I’m looking for more immediate gratification, a pepper burning in the mouth or a ripe melon to cool the fevers of the soul.

Still, for those willing to glean the harvest, there are delicious fruits to be discovered. “The Fallen Tree” is just mysterious enough, without being frustratingly mysterious, that I found it challenging and intriguing

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The Fallen Tree

After a long walk I come down to the shore.
A cottonwood tree lies stretched out in the grass.
This tree knocked down by lightning —
and a hollow the owls made open now to the rain.
Disasters are all right, if they teach
men and women
to turn their hollow places up.

The tree lies stretched out
where it fell in the grass.
It is so mysterious, waters below, waters above,
so little of it we can ever know!

Of course, the poem raises more questions than it answers, but sometimes the right question is more important than any answer. What is a “hollow place?” Is it an empty feeling? A sense of despair? And what happens when we turn it up? Does God fill it up with water? Is it just ordinary water that chokes and threatens to drown? Or is it holy water that refreshes? And helps us to grow anew? And finally, what the hell are we supposed to do with that last line?

The Academy of American Poets has several Bly translations and lots of links.
Robert Bly’s home page, apparently pushing Bly for poet evangelist of the year.
And here, again, is that intriguing essay on Bly’s “deep image.”
If you would like to read more, here are five more poems by Bly.

Japanese Death Poems

Talk about “no accounting for taste” even I can’t quite figure out how I’ve gone from liking Galway Kinnell to preferring Japanese Death Poems. I bought Japanese Death Poems quite by accident nearly a year ago when Leslie remarked on the title as I was browsing the poetry section.

Surprisingly, it has turned out to be my favorite collection of haiku poems, one I turn to again and again. Despite the title, or perhaps because of it, the poems constantly make me question my own attitude towards life and death.

Here’s a concise introduction to the book from the back cover:

Although the consciousness of death is in most cultures very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the “death poem.” Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet’s life.

Each of the poems is accompanied by a short description of the author and his philosophy or the circumstances of his death, but most of the poems need no explanation, standing perfectly well by themselves.

The introduction written by the anthologist, Yoel Hoffman, explains many of the conventions used in jisei. For instance, he points out that in Japanese death poems: “The flower represents the powerlessness of life before death and the delusion in our aspiration to live forever. Yet the flower also symbolizes beauty. While it’s helpful to know this before reading the poems, the flower, with its short but beautiful life, would seem to be a universal symbol of short-lived beauty.

Two of my favorite poems in the collection use this symbol:

Blow if you will,
fall wind the flowers
have all faded.
Gansan

and

That which blossoms
falls, the way of all flesh
in this world of flowers.
Kiko

Anyone who hikes the same beautiful place at many different times of year, like I do, can’t help but notice that each time you hike there it is quite different, that nature, and life, is in constant flux.

Not even for a moment
do things stand still; witness
color in the trees.
Seiju

Perhaps I like the following poem because I love the snow-capped mountains so much and because my hair is gradually, or not so gradually, turning white, for me a sure sign of my increasing wisdom, not a sign of decreasing testosterone.

Snow on the pines
thus breaks the power
that splits mountains.
Shiyo

Though all of these poems are obviously meant as guidance for life, not just how to attain the good death, the two following death poems offer particularly good advice on how to live your life in order to find true happiness.

Winter ice
melts into clear water ;
clear is my heart.
Hyakka

and

The truth is never taken
From another
One carries it always
By oneself.
Giko

How different is the poetry that results from Galway Kinnell’s awareness of death and the Zen poets’ contemplation of death, even though the Zen poets are contemplating their own immediate deaths, not the mere immediacy of Death to all our lives. Somehow there is something more comforting, though perhaps harder to attain, in the Zen poets’ acceptance of what is inevitable.

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.