Every love has its landscape. This place... haunts you in its absence.
Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
I came across this in my moleskin, a snatch of thought from a year ago. How evenly it matches my recent reading: Healy's Islands Project, Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return. And on my computer, the scattered notes of Curtis Fowler's Waking the Poet. "Nothing is as real as place," says Healy and whether that place is time (both limited and expanded) or whether that place is a city street in another country, the backyard of our childhood or the shape of our room as we fall asleep, it penetrates us.
Place catches us in its mesh. We see through its net; respond and react to the idleness or the activity that it engenders, the individuals who walk through it, whose memory substantiates it. And yet, the obverse is also so: we create our landscapes. It all results in a strange symbiosis.
Is it any wonder then, that when we step away from the known boundary of neighborhood and town and state and country, that we are best able to objectify? That when we are released from the comforting bonds, the known pockets and valleys of the familiar, we can see with a fresh eye and decide without the scrutiny of our own habits? Place is as much an entanglement as it is a unifying fabric. When we walk outside the knit of the known, we can begin weaving something new.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Landscapes
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Healy, The Islands Project
Healy, Eloise Klein. The Islands Project. First. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2007.
What are these islands in the vastness of open ocean and what is their origin? Think: fragments surfacing as separate entities; volcanic eruptions, fractured parts of a whole. Imagine islands as independent chips off the block of the earth table, coalescing into forms with self-sustaining ecostructure and infrastructure; islands as individuals apart from the concentrated countries with their clumps of citizens, cultures, languages, taboos. Healy’s islands evolve separate but equal to their collective counterparts, similar in shape, texture, needs but obstinately, essentially apart, different. And yet, there is origin, the mother, the durable inevitable connection.
The islands of Healy’s newest book of poems are echoes and convolutions of the original islander, Sappho: these are women thriving in self-sufficiency. They are islanders of time and continent, akin in their independence. These islanders include the poet herself, who recognizes a door and whose own “complicated embodiment” contains glimpses, scraps and fragments of adjoining lives. Whose own life of sight, memories, auric echoes, anger, metaphor and physicality embodies and recalls other “isolates aswirl with life.”
And what is this “project,” a term signifying a concerted effort, a mission, goals, specificity? It’s an effort to get at the geography of these landscapes, the origins of these islanders, to rediscover the door, recognize the entranceway.A random rescued piece
becomes a better bit
when joined, when each bit
meets its neighbor and the isolate
is shown to be a rich piece
of an unfolding archipelago
Healy’s mission is to take “the lonely isolate / or broken note,” those scraps of papyrus that remain of Sappho, combine her song with the songs of other islanders, and show “the fragment is not a scrap, not a bitter lover, alone and disconsolate” but part of a greater made whole by the joining.
The mission is to recoup the “lost notes” of Sappho and join them with her twins, to turn echoes from statue to flesh, retune the lyre, let it echo anew into ”the clang of things.” Different music for a different twin who hankers for “hard things,” whose own music led her with a “chrome handle to a different and difficult world.”
To reclaim that echo, Healy arrives “to see for herself,” the silent, empty island that was Sappho’s, a physical quest, the catalyst and a first door toward this recognition. “Nothing is as real as place,” and the beach at Skala Eressou is that “hardscape” origin.
“I am living in a lineage of desire / defined by others before me.” The desire defined in the pages of The Islands Project are living fragments of the poet’s mother, whose thoughts roamed like scattered winds. “She is my other / blasted heritage, beautiful in disarray.” That island of fragmented beauty is twinned with a procession of other women: “The Singing School,” enumerated by their uniqueness and their commonality: “all of them,” the poet says, “have passed down Sappho’s street.”
The map of that lineage extends from the beach at Skala Erresou to Echo Park, where two isolates touch within the hardscape of a car, the heat of their fission fogging its windows, the fog replicating the shape of the unknown, not yet visible form emerging. Here the map turns from the four-year marriage, the solid coding and broad lines of the heterosexual country, takes a plunge into the waters of women-loving, swims out into that vast sea as another islander.
As Healy makes her way toward Sappho, she offers homage to recent and long-gone islanders. Here are the ex-pats of Paris: Barney and Stein, Barnes, Brooks, Colette and De Pougy and Rosa Bonheur with her livescapes of horses, portraits of dogs. And here is the Flower Shop where the blight of AIDS fed on the sap and sweetness of its proprietors. Here is Artemis, not Aphrodite (what heresy to bloom fullgrown out of the brain of a god) and old Walt. And in the back and forth marathon swim toward Sappho, there are those others who protest, who frustrate, who proclaim otherwise, who doubt, who get in the way, who deny.
Isolates have their origins, and Healy searches backward a generation, moves forward a lifetime. She uncovers origins. She affirms the future:Whatever emerges, a poem
written by a lesbian poet
has a heritage of flame,
and no matter what Sappho was,
any woman who “comes out”
springs from a burned life
as a poem.
With The Islands Project, Healy achieves something more than poetry, something more than narrative. Though the story is cohesive, satisfying and encompassing. And many poems stir with gracefulness and strength, honesty and robustness; their tonal quality and diction rising out of the ordinary.
These lyrics are more aligned to ritual, and yet there is a vital freedom coursing through them that denies the stricture of form. The Island Project sings of release. It has the feel of a compilation long-stirring, biding its time and finally emerging.
BUY THE BOOK HERE
Monday, August 20, 2007
Mary Oliver: master as pupil
Oliver, Mary. Why I Wake Early. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
I have yet to tire of Mary Oliver. In book after book, her words flow by like leaves in a spring, simple, uncluttered, a flash of elegance. Why I Wake Early slowed my enchantment.
Oliver covers the same ground: snapshots of the land outside the writer’s doorstep (and within). The diction keeps its clarity. No excessive modifiers. But there’s a bothersome element in a few of these poems - a fancifulness that I’d not before noticed, as in “The Arrowhead,” where the spirit of its possessor intrudes with too clever, too pat, too predictable dialogue.
“I would rather drink the wind,” he said
I would rather eat mud and die
than steal as you steal,
than lie as you still lie.”
The chastisement is unremarkable, more fitting for middle school reading consciousness. Or Oliver leans too heavily on the easy abstraction, stealing conclusion from her readers. For example, “Beans,” a severely hyphenated prose poem, concludes with this question: But, what about virtue? as if filling in the blank for the dull witted reader.
But Oliver redeems herself with the perfectly clean, evocative glimpse of “The Snow Cricket,” where her lines row across the page in spontaneous rhythm, with the reader as passenger, eyes open to her scene. There is the cricket, its “little mouth-cave,“ and the swell of loneliness as it sits “pale and humped” all evening in its “leafy hut in the honeysuckle.” Oliver entrances again. She pours out the stream of her vision uncluttered by concepts. She visits Blackwater Pond, the font of her visions, to introduce gentleman snake with his “lazy wake” and “narrow mouth,” using just enough verbiage, a modest modifier or two, just enough to open and point the lens of the readers’ sight. We follow her in the path of a beetle as it makes our narrow, busy, glum lives more destitute with its “sighing,” its “humming,” its existence nestled against the soft undersides of a fragrant flower. This is irresistible Oliver.
Is she a pantheist or a Romantic with her glorification of the simplest living being? More than anything, she is a storyteller. Her lyrical apologues show us the live lore. And if at times, her pen is a hammer or her words are bulbs of explanation or if she invokes a machinating “He” of biblical standard, then this is just the writer seeping in, a blunt aside. I can live with it - the master as occasional pupil is far more reassuring than alienating.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Blue Pastures: Oliver's finest, again
Oliver, Mary. Blue Pastures. First. San Diego: A Harvest Original, Harcourt, Inc., 1995.
Just as I’d thought that I’d imbibed the sweetness and the crust of Mary Oliver, traced her thoughts on the craft of writing, believed I had an inkling of what moved her, along comes Blue Pastures, a gift dropped into my hands.
Here is another Oliver: the truant school kid in Ohio, hauling Walt Whitman in her backpack, the high school grad who was privy to the “secrets” of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In Blue Pastures, there is also the familiar naturalist, trekking for miles in search of an owl’s nest, and the poet of the ponds and coves, of Provincetown beaches, cataloguing the detritus of Herring Cove, the “bright trash of the past,” and giving us her “Sand Dabs,” entry moments that may or may not lead to a finished poem.
This collection of vignettes is about recollection and revelation. In “Staying Alive,” the poet I’d thought so private says:Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.
I quickly found for myself two such blessings - the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.
But this is not a story about victim or anger or the sludge of grievance. Far from it. This is Oliver’s remedy: “… having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.” So much for the critics who want to contain her in the realm of “nature poet” or “romantic poet.” So much for the harpies who call her asocial, who clamor for human messiness in her lines. Oliver found her cure in the wellspring of adjacent worlds: writing and nature.
Blue Pastures teems like a school of brilliant fish; it has the luster of an eggplant, supple and smooth and dark. Her language mimics the lyricism of her verse: elegant and simple. She observes and absorbs and shines back to us what she sees. She is the Magician that channels, using the wand of the pen. This collection is testament to her urge to not just write but to witness, and not just witness but to become participant in what’s out there. As Oliver says: “It is the instant I try to catch, … not the comment, not the thought.”
Evaluating this book, in the scheme of other Mary Oliver books I have read, I want to call it the finest. But this unreserved enthusiasm comes each time I get a taste of Mary Oliver. It’s immediate and it endures. So that this response illustrates what Oliver calls the service of poems: “I look for them to be ongoing presences within my life, not interludes-not places apart.”
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Beauty and Brutality: Facts About the Moon
Dorianne Laux. Facts About the Moon. First Edition. NY, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
The title poem appears midway in Laux's newest collection, a deliberate placement to emphasize not so much the tone but the archetypal drive of this work.
The poem begins in a plain-spoken literal way: "The moon is backing away from us / an inch and a half a year," then drifts toward a personification in which the speaker tells the reader:I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
Laux personalizes the equation of a grieving mother into the image of such a being, "romanticizing" her culprit of a son. A mother who has "forgotten the bruises and booze," is coupled with a cold-eyed observer who wants to "slap her back to sanity" until the observer recognizes the futility. There's no logic in the room for "you know love when you see it, / you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull."
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped
Facts About the Moon follows a similar structure: poems of literal image and personification ("The Trees"); poems of anchored abstracts and allegory ("Democracy," "The Ravens of Denali"). Again and again, she portrays the "brutal pull" of love, whether in her lyric to a fallen hummingbird or the narrative journey leading to a brother's grave.
The "lunar strength" emerges in poems such as "Moon in the Window" or in the aching couplets, the catalog of "What's Broken." She celebrates it in odes to a lover ("Face Poem," "Kissing Again," "Vacation Sex") and in her delicate lyrics to nature ("Cello," "Mornming Song," "Starling," "Come Spring" and "The Life of Trees").
Laux makes the mundane valuable, incorporates those things that determine everyday order and rhythm: jigsaw puzzles and laundry. She juxtaposes the tedium of housework with what matters: "the bleachy,/ waxy, soapy perfume of spring."
Facts About the Moon contains the variety and brutality of what is under the sun, in motion across the earth, characterized by a babysitter suckling her eight year-old charge, a pool hall starlet and sisters bonding: "Pretending we were beautiful,/ pretending we were dead." The pedophile father, Fred the German neighbor, symbol and antithesis of the Holocaust, the shadow of Mathew Shepard, strung up and left for dead - all these citizens of earth are gathered together in this volume, anchored by the moon and undone by the moon. In the background, the soothing, patient perfection of this planet's wildness. These are the facts, brutal and common, of the moon.
