Unfurling within form

I have been occupied lately trimming the ivy away from statuary faces on the fence, the edge of the brick walk, and from the Red Queen who surveys the rock pool, thinking about poetry as I worked.

There are certain opposing principles which, to my mind, are always yoked in dynamic balance (or imbalance): classicism/romanticism, reason/passion, justice/mercy, apollo/dionysus, bone/flesh.

Form & flow. Sometimes the flowing is contained by form, as a stream flowing through a rock chasm, and sometimes the form is surrounded by flowing, as when ivy crawls over statuary, or roots enclose a stone:

then dead at last to all but art,
      as though possessed, he drew and drew,
      his every line a root that grew
around and through her buried heart.

Stanzas are like walled gardens, where luxuriance is contained like Pre-Raphaelite hair growing within a coffin:

…except the hair of poppy red
      that down upon her shoulders spilled
      in such luxuriance it filled
the confines of her coffin-bed…

At other times the luxuriance of natural description overflows from stanza to stanza like water flowing through a succession of rocky pools, filling each container in turn, before spilling into the next:

A cloud of remnant flames that sway
      on slender stalks above a mound
      of green entangled frond on frond
whose petals droop and drop away

to lie in tatters on the grass ~
      while still the heavy-headed blooms
      imbue the air with drowsy fumes
that linger long before they pass.

—————- (the stanzas above from An Elixir of Poppies).

Form makes flowing visible.  Even smoke drifting aimlessly from a pipe unfurls according to its own internal form, coelescing into recognisable fronds and swirls.  If it simply spread out uniformly, it would vanish before our eyes.  Form without flowing is a dead shell.  Flowing without form is diffusion, dissipation.  Water contained in a vessel.  Without the vessel,  water spills and disappears.  Without water, the vessel is lifeless, meaningless.

With a buoyant heart . . .

I have dropped the workshop. Two missed classes due to my father’s death led both the prof and myself to the conclusion that I had missed too much and that I would be better off withdrawing and taking the class again at a later time.

I can breathe again, as though miraculously restored. Why is it I feel so liberated?

For one thing, it means I do not have to confront traffic and crowds of undergraduates tonight, but can instead sit quietly in my garden with a glass of cabernet. It means I do not have to find something intelligent to say about poems for which I feel no affinity, but can read whatever I please from my own library.

With a buoyant heart I close Jane Kenyon and open John Keats.

Memorial poems

We returned a day or two ago.  I was reluctant to leave my family back in Illinois, though it was good to be home, back among my animals and books and garden.

I completed the poem for my father the day before leaving town, and had it printed with two others, all centered around the image of Spoon River, on whose banks my father spent much of his life.  I read the new poem, Final Flight, to a room of about a hundred family members.  A strong dollup of vodka in orange juice ten minutes before the reading ensured a confident delivery.  I trust my dad was somewhere nearby.

 

 

Three Poems from Spoon River
in Memory of Philip J. Omanson

 

 

An Abandoned Bridge on Spoon River

The decrepit ironwork spanning the Spoon
has carried no traffic for decades now
except for the truants who brazen the bowed
timbers to cross it. As such boys will,
in the manner of boys immemorial,
they loiter midway, lounge about, lie down
and, peering through rifts in the rotted wood,
beguiled by that which only boys know,
they gaze on the mud-laden current below.

Cumuli pile above a near meadow
where breezes conspire, ruffling the calm
of leaves and rippling the water’s film.
The boys hardly notice, gazing as though
the bridge were the rim of a sacred well
and the river ~ some whispering oracle.

 

 

 

 

Final Flight

It began as many such things begin,
in a little way, many years before
when he was a boy — began as a sound
on a summer morning, heard on the wind –
a humming so intermittant, so faint,
he knew it was nothing, or nothing much –
and yet, on a whim, he climbed up a ridge
and, looking out over a swath of corn
and a bend of Spoon River, he strained to hear
what he guessed by now was the distant hum
of a motor all but lost in the blue, –
and then he saw it, just skirting a cloud,
the first he had ever seen — a glimmer
of wings … suspended … then banking away
in a glint of sun.

                              And later, years later,
he lifted up out of those very fields
in his own Aeronca, a bright little bird
the color of ripened corn — and he circled
for a long last look at his father’s fields,
at the gabled house set back among trees,
at silo and barn and crib and, beyond,
at old Spoon River just catching the light –
a ribbon of oxbow bends through a meadow,
diminishing now as he rose aloft.

And even long after the sun had set
the land held on to its glow, as darkness
collected in hollows and wooded ravines
and spilled out endlessly over the earth
in a low and tawny smoke.

                                              Overhead,
a few faint stars in the deepening blue
were mirrored by fainter constellations
of farmlight lying below — and still
he climbed, with no sense it would ever end.
He rested his hand on a wooden spar
and felt a vibrancy deep in its grain
as though the entire plane were alive.
And climbing still, he settled more snugly
into his seat, as farmlight and star
and the very earth seemed to fall away.
The luminous dials — altimeter, speed
and compass — assured him that all was well,
though he knew in a deeper part of himself
that this was a flight unlike any before,
that all he had known of the earth and sky,
of all the unnumbered arcs of the moon,
were darkening now to an autumn dream
ahead of the winter.

                              His course was clear,
and he summoned himself for the final time:
the reassuring glow of the dials
enveloped him, and the engine’s unruffled
heartbeat bore him soundlessly upward
and upward into the mercy of night.

 

 

 

Epitaph

Concealed under corn, the wreckage of farms,
rotted timbers of buried silos and barns,
the hard rusted shards of harrows and plows,
the fallen-in hollows of cellar and house,
long-buried fragments of saucers and crocks,
doorknobs and buttons amid clay and rocks:
such are the secretive depths of the sea
of corn that extends to eternity
from the banks of Spoon River: beneath the sky,
beneath all we see, generations lie.

Uncanny moment

Sitting at the table in our garden yesterday morning, working on the elegy for my father, I looked up to discover a small blue bird perched on the table looking at me.  Instantly it flew off.  It seemed too small to be a bluebird, so I would guess that it was a blue bunting.

In many cultures the dead return in the form of birds and animals, and in some Native American tribes blue birds are sacred.  I don’t know that I think it was actually my father, but it would be just like him to show up in our garden as a bird, as he was so often surrounded by wild birds, which he always fed in his own garden.  I’m not sure it was him, but I’ve never seen a blue bunting here before, and it was just as I was thinking intently about him.  Whether him or not, it seemed uncanny.

Elegy

My father died this afternoon, peacefully in his own bed.  Mother was with him

Around midnight I went for my usual walk with dog & cat.  Sky was clear with bright stars.  This night, for the first time, the Pleiades are visible in the northwest.

I have been asked to write an elegy for the memorial service.  I feel completely inadequate to the task, but will of course undertake it.

workshopped: Pavane for a Brief Affair

Yes, I’m in a poetry workshop.  My first.  Yes, I’m nuts.

It’s a nice class.  I haven’t been in a class of such obviously bright, and I mean very bright, students — who are remarkably considerate of one another — in several decades.  They have redeemed my view of human nature.  The prof treats everyone with respect, as an equal.  She is very fast, very funny.  Cuts to the heart of a poem like a rapier.  It’s a very fine class, and I feel fortunate to be in such accomplished company.

But the distance between my sensibility and, as far as I can tell, everyone else’s — and certainly the prof’s — can only be measured in light years.  I may be fortunate to be there, but I don’t belong.  I am a fish among birds, or a bird among fish.

 

Seeking perspective

After my Pavane for a Brief Affair was critiqued I was so disoriented that I found it impossible to collect my thoughts, and had absolutely nothing to say.  Now, in order recover my sea legs, and keep myself from impulsviely dropping the class, I am going to try explaining Pavane — for my prof & classmates, if any ever read this – but most of all for myself.  I can handle my aesthetic isolation in the class if I can just step back and see it clearly.  I’m not seeking acceptance, just perspective.

I will also use this section of the blog for my ongoing thoughts on poetry.  The workshop is certainly useful for that reason alone.  Because of it, I find my thoughts racing on the subject of poetry for hours every day, and I need to set them down and give them some form.  I also want to wring the excess emotion out of them, shake them out & air them in the sun.

 

‘Pavane’ as a musical piece

Pavane is intended to function as a musical piece, as indicated by its title.  It has been through many dozens of versions and many hundreds of reading-aloud sessions, in an attempt to refine and perfect this music.  Sentence- and stanza-length were designed to work (with considerations of breath) as small musical movements.  My concern was both for the movement within each stanza and for the transition between stanzas.   Sound must, of course, be united with image (symbol) and meaning.  I wanted the transition of image to image, and scene to scene, to synchronize with transitions in rhythm and tone.  Ideally, I wanted the three qualities to harmonize.   The shifting bank and forth between present and conditional tenses is deliberate and is one way of manipulating shifts in tone.  Pavane might be considered as a “tone-poem” (to borrow a musical category): peaceful, subtly modulated, a consistent quiet tone throughout.  When two members of the Akron Symphony first read Pavane, they immediately responded to its musical qualities and began discussing the possibility of setting it to music – though nothing came of this.

All that said, now it needs to be added that the poem bears little or no resemblance to a pavane at all.  It is akin, I would say, to one of those quirky, sad, sweet pieces by Eric Satie.  But how to fit that into the title?  I may need a new title altogether.

 

Trigger of the unconscious

I have a friend who is a psychiatrist.  She specializes in counseling victims of violence, also in counseling disturbed artists, writers and poets.  She has counseled a number of combat veterans for post-traumatic stress.  She frequently uses art, stories and poems in her therapy.  What she looks for is art that is effective in triggering the unconscious — in setting loose the inner demons, and beginning a process of recognition, acceptance and healing.  I am simplifying, of course.  The process is complex and subtle, involving psychology, neurology, analysis, empathy — and I don’t pretend to understand it.  I know only that she has used several of my poems in this process, and the Pavane poem in particular, both for its combination of sound and image, and for the ambiguous and unresolved relationship between the speaker and woman in the poem.  She says that these two aspects of the poem have proven an effective trigger of the unconscious for several patients.

 

A wanderer of the streets

Pavane had its genesis in an actual situation.  I was once deeply involved with a woman who was descending slowly into madness, and who would disappear for days at a time, wandering the streets of a large city.   I spent many nights searching for her.   On one occasion I met her by chance in the middle of a bridge, in a drizzling rain.  We talked for maybe half an hour, then she left again, disappearing into the night.

Other parts of the poem are also drawn from life.  The woman in the poem is based on several different women  I have known, wives & lovers.   But who the woman in the poem is based upon is of course beside the point.  I add the information in response to the possibility raised in class that she was simply a figment of the speaker’s (or my) imagination.

 

Who is she?

Why don’t I say more about what sort of woman she is, or more about their relationship?  This was a common complaint in the class.  In my view I say enough about her, providing all that is necessary to form a clear impression.  She is self-contained; she haunts the night; rain is her presideing symbol, with its connotations of melancholy and eroticism; she appears and disappears mysteriously for reasons known only to herself; she drinks absinthe alone, so is quite possibly an addict; she is above all enigmatic.  What more needs to be said?  Is this not already a compelling portrait?

 

Their relationship

As for their relatonship — again, I believe enough has been said.  Often to say less is to say more.  I am interested in what is left unsaid.  Consider any number of short narrative poems by EA Robinson, where stories are told in such a way that many more questions are raised than are answered.    In Pavane, a number of things are clear about their relationship.  We know that the speaker and the woman are deeply joined in some way; that neither of them values the formalities of marriage, but are focused only on the nature of their bond; that the speaker is more attached to the woman than she to him; that he is obsessed with her while she seems, in contrast, almost indifferent to him; that their relationship is full of contradiction; that it is both sad and humorous.  Does more than this need to be stated? 

 

Madness and music

One of the primary ways I deal with trauma is by the attempt to turn it into beautiful music.  Especially madness.  For me a high point in all of literature is Ophelia’s song, and the passage describing her drowning — one of the most beautiful and disturbing pieces of musical language ever.  As mentioned, I was married to a woman who moved irretrievably into madness.   I lived with another woman who died of dementia.  I worked for several years as a nurse’s aide on the graveyard shift in a locked ward for the criminally insane. 

I use the music of language and the suggestivness of symbols to transfigure the madness in my own life.  Meet evil with prayer, madness with poetry.

Pavane is essentially a lyric, a song.  The prof called it a narrative.  Its sentence structure, and presentation, perhaps, make it a narrative.  But in its qualities of non-linear sequencing, heightened musicality and general irrationality, it is more lyric than narration.  I think of it as a quirky little song of madness.

The prof questioned the use of ‘Pavane’ in the title, wondering how it furthered the poem in any way.  I think she is right here.  Perhaps I should change ‘pavane’ to simply ’song’.  I was thinking of Ravel’s  Pavane for a Dead Princess, of course.  Being mad is not unlike being dead — both entail looking at life from across a chasm.

 

Class comments

Rereading everyone’s comments on Pavane, especially the prof’s, the suggestions and criticisms they offer seem not unreasonable.   Their analysis is largely sound.  My misgiving is that the analysis is often so close, so tightly focused, that the overall sense of the poem gets lost.

To my mind the poem is the right length, as are the stanzas.  The movement through the poem is just how I want it.  I would not seriously consider revamping any part of it.  Small adjustments, yes, but nothing more than that.

A recurrent suggestion is that I should not be afraid of digging deeper — into the character of the woman, into the relationship.  In another poem, sure, but not this one.  It’s length, it’s movement, seem right to me.  I can’t expand a part of it without unbalancing the whole of it.

I am also advised not to be afraid of clarity.  Prof says: ‘enigmatic = good / cryptic = not so good’.   I like that, in principle.  I’m not sure I agree with her on which specific parts are only cryptic. 

 

A different set of readers

This poem – in its many earlier versions, as well as later – has had a number of very perceptive readers over the years, and I balance their views of Pavane with those I just received in the workshop.  The responses of my older readers — very well-educated, well-read individuals, most of whom teach in the humanities, but not in English, and all of whom have read a great deal of poetry for the love of it — stand in rather starp contrast to most of the workshop views.  In general, what most strikes my older readers in the poem – elegance, subtlety, humor, ambiguity – were mostly unremarked by the workshop.   And conversely, what most struck the workshop — unconvincing and inadequate character development, slightly archaic diction & syntax, lack of clarity, overwrought language — went unnoticed by by my older readers.

What this says to me is that there is a real difference in sensibility involved.  I can say with confidence that each of my older readers possesses  a sophisticated understanding of relationships, and most of them have described the poem’s depiction of a love relationship as subtle and wry.  The workshop never mentioned humor at all, except to wonder whether or not the poem was serious or humorous.  It never occured to me that a poem had to be one or the other.

The workshop is full of specialists, of poetry.  Specialists, regardless of their field, have certain traits in common — in particular a tendency to lose sight of the larger perspective.  There was almost no discussion of the poem as a unified piece.  Nothing, for instance, about the symbolism of rain, or of the night, throughout the poem  (only that these elements reminded some in the class of a grade-B movie set).    The whole tends to get lost in an intense focus on the finer points.

 

Clarity / ambiguity

I want to say a little more about this.  Clarity seems particularly prized in this class.   “Risk clarity”, as the prof writes on my poem.  I’m just not sure that, in poetry, clarity always takes us closer to the truth.  Whatever happened to ambiguity as a value in poetry?   The relationship between the speaker and the woman in Pavane is ambiguous, by its nature, at its deepest level.  That is the plain truth of the matter.

 

Why Paris?

I’ll need to address this sooner or later.  I set many of my poems in Paris, and the class tends to see this as a cliche. 

Well, here’s the honest truth: I set so many of my poems in Paris because I have spent most of my life on the couch in a heavily-curtained room – poorly-lit by gaudy Moulin Rouge lamps – drinking cheap absinthe from Prague, and watching bad romance movies on Lifetime TV.

Aside from that, my wife is French; she spent part of her childhood living in Paris, and her natural mother was a Parisian.  A significant turn in our relationship occured in Paris.  Most, though not all, of my poems set in Paris were written in Paris.  As an historian of the First World War, much of my research is centered in Paris.  One of my wife’s academic specialties is 19th-century French art history; another is 13th-century illuminated manuscripts made in Oxford & Paris.  She also taught French for many years.  We have six- or seven-hundred books on Paris and Parisian history, literature, art, philosophy and music in our home.  We are in the preliminary stages of translating the poems of an obscure 19th-century Parisian poet, Jehan Rictus.  Paris is simply part of the fabric of who we are.