suddenly, in every tree...

By way of example…

much & nothing, part 3

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Tess Gallagher

Choices


I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
should be.

*

As I read this piece by Tess Gallagher, collected in a marvelous anthology, The Poets Guide to the Birds (Anhinga Press, 2009), edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, I find it supporting my premise of the writing process – allowing the poem to find us. The grand awakening that is embodied in the line “Suddenly, in every tree” is the turning point – in my reading of the poem – for the poet to find his or her voice, and for the poem to settle into that voice. The poem’s final line posits that this is the way it should be.

This is a remarkable poem that carries inside it the Buddhist principle of no nature, of being one with and not separate. In our creative selves, we may want to force – say – the poem, but that is not the truth, nor is it the way. The strongest reality is the unseen presence, the shadow figure, the vision. That part or place which is often ignored in the mad dash to find the great truth. If the unseen nest is not realized, all that remains is contrivance. It may be well-structured and well-accepted, but it’s not the real piece of writing it could have been.

I am certain that Gallagher would not want the reading of her poem to be limited to a focus on the creative process. The fact that it also speaks volumes – from such a few lines – about daily living, about relationships, about our connection with the natural world, about the self, is the underpinning of the poem’s strength.

Note how the nest, though hidden, unnoticed, is already well-established and thriving when the poem’s speaker, searching for what she believes is a greater find – vast drifts of snow over mountains – finds, as if by accident, the nest, the home. This realization shows that the speaker’s life will never be the same, and that is one of the true marks of greatness.

much & nothing, part 2...

Explaining Much, Explaining Nothing, Part 2


I do write about the self – whatever that is, and I’m not certain at all … even to the point of questioning its existence – but that writing, for me, by and large, is placed elsewhere as well. It may very well be that I can only approach myself in relation to otherness. A force, as Newton posited, will push against something, and meet with an equal force.

Let me offer this poem as a representative of that layer of my own writing. The genesis was my reflection on a then recent surgery on my wrist. The surgery was relatively minor, but when the blade enters the body, and one must be put under, minor no longer applies. An accounting will take place. There’s a dream, a winter, and the music of the great Charles Mingus – parallel lines (or worlds) that meet on the page.


Storm

               “Cumbia and Jazz Fusion,” Charles Mingus,
               Recording, NYC, 10 March 1977


Birds throat the jungle to life—
squawking green to percussion
to oboe, bassoon.
That’s how the song begins—
but what I can’t see when I listen
is Mingus’ shoulders, wood curving
from his belly, both hands
on the upright’s long neck—
and no way to know
that in his hands, in the music,
in darkness between recording

and this room, years away,
where I sit listening,
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
an impatient ghost,
is beginning its own
flexed pleasure paradigm
in the pulled bars of the bass clef
at song’s end— in the fade.

I lift my own right hand—
so recently under the surgeon’s knife,
the wrist letting go its lump
—and trill my fingers, for circulation,
in counter to the coup d’état
of trumpet and sax whose blare
is a red sun bearing down
on the warm sea— a last border
where colors blend
to deep and perfect silence.

And then I sleep— my head filling
with thick, wet trees
and river gods and boats run aground.

In the morning— you, dearest reader,
remove the bandage, kiss my opened palm,
dress the wound

while January, fresh-pillared
in wood smoke, gives up
its first snow to our roof.

                     —originally published in Writer’s Quill

explaining much, explaining nothing...

If I were to attempt a description of my own writing – I would have to use the word landscape. There are birds, rivers, mountains, the sea... But I must add that it’s a landscape that’s not limited to nature. The landscape is often contrived or already existent. The setting is usually one that is viewed rather than one that is traversed. And it’s usually empty. What that says about me as a writer, I’m sure, must explain much – though not to me. I don’t try to get at that. If you move too close to something, the perspective disappears. Maybe it’s too fragile.

One of my earliest and most vivid memories – I must have been three, maybe four – is my looking through, carrying around, or always having close by… my father’s college text Art History of the Western World when he was a student at Florida Southern. I became lost in those paintings, the photographs, the sculptures. What was most fascinating was not that the pieces of art put me in another place – it was that places inside me opened. And that was phenomenal for me at that time in my life.

Way leads on to way, as Frost writes, and I found myself approaching film, for example, in the same way. I wouldn’t really – and still don’t – watch a film. I study a film. I’ve never been able to approach any of the arts from the point of entertainment. I don’t write to entertain; I don’t read to be entertained. I don’t want a good read. I don’t want just to listen to good music. I do want the world(s) of music all around me. If I’m in the right place, something gets at me, and that makes me who I am.

It makes since, then, that my own work unfolds in a few phases or gatherings: film, art, music, literature. That may be a weakness – I can’t say – but I can’t seem to break free of that, and I’m not certain that I want to. My world – maybe even my life – is a reaction to, an understanding of, a going into the arts. Always has been. Instead of creating a new world for a protagonist, I place characters inside an already created world. A view from inside a film. A piece of music. Reaction to painting. And so on. Many of the people in my works are dead. But, reality is such a difficult notion to approach. The reality in my head may be the blues singer’s death in 1938. Or at least my take on that death.

I do remember that Stanley Kunitz said that poets don’t really (or shouldn’t would be more clear) choose the subjects of their poems. The poem chooses the pen, chooses the writer. I rest in that. Call it surrender, call it giving in, call it going into. So be it. Here I go.