Quiet Times

I woke at three last night (not an uncommon occurrence) and was struck by how quiet it was. The weather being warm as it can be in December in Florida, we have the windows open, and I listened to the silence. A screech owl was repeating its steady quavering note (not the one that descends), and that was the only sound.

It reminded me of a couple of passages in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Twain evokes the rural countryside of 19th-century America. There's this one at the beginning of the book:

The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.

And this one, as Huck rides the raft down the river:

And how far a body can hear over the water such nights! I heard people talking at the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too -- every word of it. One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights now. T'other one said this warn't one of the short ones, he reckoned -- and then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed again; then they waked up another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn't laugh; he ripped out something brisk, and said let him alone. The first fellow said he 'lowed to tell it to his old woman--she would think it was pretty good; but he said that warn't nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it was nearly three o'clock, and he hoped daylight wouldn't wait more than about a week longer. After that the talk got further and further away, and I couldn't make out the words any more; but I could hear the mumble, and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off.

Maybe I like to wake in the middle of the night because I enjoy that silence, find myself craving it during the day sometimes, when the next-door neighbor's dog barks incessantly, and jets pound overhead on the way out of OIA, and a Harley Davidson farts its way down Bumby, half a block away.

I suppose it's almost a cliche--I know I've read it several places--that poetry arises out of silence, or out of listening, at least. I know that I need silence to engage with the material that becomes a new poem, and can't imagine trying to write with music in the background. How could I hear what was trying to come through that way? I love Frost's sonnet "Mowing," which begins,

There never was a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself.
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound,
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

I don't own an Ipod or any other device that requires my ear or ears to be plugged. Give me bird song, even if it is at times challenged by the ambient sounds of the city. It's still there if one practices listening, elemental, intense, something almost said, like any good poem.

As If

It's happened again. Ten years after my first book, A Small Fire, was published, a new one, As If, is out. As far as productivity goes, that's a pretty weak track record. The Hass's and the Olivers and the Glucks can put out a book every three years or so. I've stopped wondering why I'm not prolific. I am what iamb. Ten years' work is maybe something to celebrate, though. Here's the Wind Publications page for the book: http://windpub.com/books/asif.htm

Booking It

For the last several months I've been finalizing the content and ordering of my second book of poems. The publisher has it now; it's out of my reach, on its own, is what it will be. I had a lot of help in this process from poet friends--Phil Deaver and Debra Kang Dean--and I appreciated that help. For while I had little trouble deciding which poems belonged in the collection, I was stumped at trying to decide on the order/arrangement of the poems.

Gregory Orr's essay "Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry" was a revelation for me. In it, he defines the four temperaments necessary for poets to possess in some degree: story, structure, music, and imagination. I've always felt that my strengths as a poet are structure and music. And, while it might risk being reductive to say so, story and imagination seem required in the arrangement of poems in a manuscript. The individual poems tell stories, but, ideally, the ordering/clustering of the poems in the book will at least suggest a story, or something that approaches story (a color? motif?). The more I write here, the more this idea seems to recede. But especially in collections that resist narrative continuity, manuscripts like mine that contain a predominance of lyric poems, some kind of coherence can be difficult to come by.

And maybe it's just easier to work with someone else's manuscript; maybe I've just been too close to these poems for the last ten years to be able to see how they're meant to play off of each other. That's where good editors like Phil and Debra come in.

The book, titled As If, is due out from Wind Publications in a couple of months.

I've written two new poems in the last week, after a nine months' drought. I mean, I've been trying to write--jotting notes, making lots of false starts. This happens every few years, so I've not been particularly concerned about it. But it's strange, coming back to the blank page and finally having something coherent appear.

Even odder, one of the new poems focuses on an event that occurred 50 years ago, something that, presumably, has been lurking in memory all this time. To try to analyze why that showed up now--and why it offered itself in a poem--is probably pointless, maybe even destructive of the creative process. It was hearing the barred owl almost every morning for two weeks of late, or it was re-reading Greg Pape's American Flamingo. It was putting in the fall garden last weekend, or something my old friend Phil Deaver said about writing.

The danger here, for me, is to make too much of the fact that poems have come through the door again. They might disappear again next week and be gone for months. I can't just grind them out. I learned that years ago. But I do have to be ready for them, and that means listening.

Mendelsohn's The Lost

I've just finished Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, and am finding it tough to describe the book because it's so good in so many ways. The guiding impulse behind the book is Mendelsohn's curiosity, then growing obsession, to learn exactly how his great uncle Shmiel, and his wife and four daughters, died at the hands of the Nazis in the Ukranian village of Bolechow. So, the book is technically a memoir, as it chronicles Mendelsohn's treks all over the planet to interview the few survivors from the village still alive (out of 3,000 Jewish inhabitants of the shtetl, something like 48 managed to hide from the Nazis and emerge at war's end).

But The Lost is also an extended meditation on love and family, Yiddish culture, and the uses of memory, among other things. The book has an elaborate structure, moving between the detective story focusing on when and where the lost family members perished, his memories of growing up under the influence of his grandfather (Shmiel's brother), and passages in which Mendelsohn compares ancient and contemporary glossings of the first several parashas--the readings from Genesis with which the Torah begins. Yet that structure, though it is explicit, never feels cumbersome or ostentatious.

And the writing itself is gorgeous. Toward the end of the book, when Mendelsohn has made his final discovery, he gives us this:

"I had traveled far, had circled the planet and studied my Torah, and at the very end of my search I was standing, finally, in the place where everything begins: the tree in the garden, the tree of knowledge that, as I long ago learned, is something divided, something that because growth occurs only through the medium of time, brings both pleasure and, finally, sorrow."

Though the book isn't poetry, passages like that are. I cannot get this book out of my head, and I can't recommend it strongly enough.

One Week After the Equinox

The first slightly cooler and drier air is filtering in at dawn this morning. This weekend, it's time to put the cool weather things into the garden: onions and leeks, lettuce and carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. The beans and squash and tomatoes and cucumbers are all blooming, and we're swamped with key limes.

I've been reading Debra Kang Dean's marvelous renku journal of a year in her book Precipitates. Here's a brief passage from the section framing the equinox:

A cup of coffee
to wake with, for a nightcap
two glasses of wine--

you'll find, instead of the silence
you were after, oblivion

like the flood waters,
muddy and thick, making of homes
islanded houses.

Here, a spring-blue sky above
Walden Pond, all aglitter.

Into the water
they faded. Footprints on
the path disappearing...

At trail's edge, a red-spotted
purple emerges, turns back.

This year, for the second
time in equal measure, daylight
clear and cool, cool night.

A time of balance--light and dark, temperate weather, and this year at least, no hurricane crossing the Carribean at the peak of the season. Yesterday afternoon a mockingbird was singing, as if it were spring.

Listening for Poems

I've been re-reading a collection of essays on poetry edited by Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett titled Poet's Work, Poet's Play. In Eleanor Wilner's contribution ("The Closeness of Distance, or Narcissus as Seen by the Lake") is this assertion: "Anyone who has ever written a real poem knows that the surprise of its significant form seems to arise in an odd in-between state of deepened attention when the will--which is the hammer of the ego--is relinquished in favor of some other shaping faculty, a passionate mindfulness....In the act of imaginative remove, the intellect serves not the ego but the life it illuminates." Yes, I thought when I read that. I've often been aware of that state when listening to a "real poem" unfold. There's the sense of being there/not there, of sensing things from a different perspective than usual. I "wake up" an hour later and think, Where have I been, and where did this piece of writing come from?

This is obviously not a startlingly new idea--Frost expressed it with his metaphor of the poem as a piece of ice on a hot griddle, finding its own unpredictable way as it melts. But for me, when this state occurs it is almost transcendent, partly because it comes on unpredictably but more because I experience a melding of intense awareness and the sense of not being completely in control--it is more like listening, taking notes from some source that is partly inner and partly outer, than it's like "saying something" that I'd consciously been thinking about.

Here's a poem I wrote in response to an assignment at the last residency for the MFA I've recently finished.

Ecce Homo
--Gerard Douffet, Flemish, about 1623

Behold the man, his forehead running blood,
halo hovering, as if it might ascend
the way they say he did after three days.
The man looks tired. His eyes upturned, he leans
toward Pilate on his left, as if about
to offer him a deal. The painter's lit
his face so we can guess just what he feels,
the mortal suffering he knows is coming.

But does he know what's coming in his name,
the wars, the knives and retributions?
No matter. The Bible says it was all planned
for him, and for us. They'll nail him up.
He'll taste the taunts, the vinegar, the spear,
and then the bloody centuries begin.

The assignment was to visit the Speed Museum of Art in Louisville, then write a poem in response to some piece of art there. Without really thinking why at the time, I was drawn to Douffet's depiction of the scene when Pilate presents Jesus to the crowd before the crucifixion. I took a few notes about the painting, then left the building, sat on a bench outside, and began work on the poem. Within half an hour I had the poem almost as it appears here, with only a couple of word changes.

While it might not be wise to try to analyze too rigorously how the poem came about in that way, I can say that my fascination with the sonnet form and the blank verse line provides an instinctive shape for me to fill when stepping into a poem. I've written a lot of poems that more or less take that shape, so I almost don't have to count lines, etc. as I go. But maybe more importantly, I think it's my long argument with Christianity that gave me the poem--not only drew me to that particular painting among the many in the museum, but provided the entry into the material, the way of "translating" the message of the painting into the language of my ambivalence.

Surely that too is a part of this almost magical process of listening for a poem--the idea that saving up, mulling over, images and ideas lets pressure build, so that when the "right" impetus appears, the poem is in some way already shaped, and that sensation of the ice on the stove top takes over. For a little while, the usual way of apprehending the world is sublimated or suspended, and that other, mysterious force, what Wilner calls "passionate mindfulness," puts the poem on the page.