The Hide-and-Seek Muse, page 22
Poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield (whose evocative versions of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri poet Lalla and the sixteenth-century north Indian bhakti mendicant ecstatic Mirabai grace Halpern’s anthology) is a visionary. Rarely making spirituality and her own long Zen practice her overt subject, Hirshfield nonetheless creates poems which possess a subtle lucidity that is accessible and understated on the one hand, and suffused with a resonant “beyonding” of the self and the quotidian on the other. Her poems press the experiential [an act of spiritual attention on the order of fellow visionary Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote in a journal (1871), “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you”] in order to transcend soma and solipsism in service of what Halpern calls a “revision[ing of] the world, perhaps even ‘the creation of [a] better world.’”
Some might flinch at the notion of any ideal as unfathomable as the creation of a better world, and yet there’s nothing Pollyanna-ish about Hirshfield’s project. As Rosanna Warren puts it, Hirshfield’s “poems appear simple, and are not. Her language, in its cleanliness and transparency, poses riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature.” Yet how pull off a poetic practice visionary and optimistic over decades characterized by increasingly entrenched social, cultural, and political extremes of irony, skepticism, abstracted emotion, rampant materialism, technological cocooning and detachment, superficiality, and thoughtless, fundamentalist fear and isolationism? What accounts for the golden hold and continually refreshed staying power of this remarkable poet?
The riddle, the existential joke of being, of meaning, of Dickinson’s “prank of the Heart / at play on the Heart,” is as powerful a source as song for the lyric poem. Central to Hirshfield’s vision is a kind of holy delight that is at the heart of riddles and koans—not the momentary humor of punning or mere cleverness or showing-off, but rather the deep pleasure of discovery of the word in or behind or beyond the world, and vice versa. Northrop Frye writes, “The real answer to the question implied in a riddle is not a ‘thing’ outside it, but that which is both word and thing, and is both inside and outside the poem. This is the universal of which the poem is the manifestation, the order of words that tells us of battles and shipwrecks, of the intimate connection of beauty and terror, of cycles of life and death, of mutability and apocalypse.”
“Bruises,” “The Promise, “and “Sometimes the Heart is a Shallow Autumn River,” all from Hirshfield’s Come, Thief, operate, in their various ways, as visionary riddles about the aging body, the “autumn” of life, and what abides. Interestingly, the titles provide the “answers” from the start (Frye: “it is common to give the ‘solution’ of riddle poems in their titles, and in such poems we move from work to title. Here is what I have to say about something; guess what it is”), allowing Hirshfield room to move into her material in a manner also essential to her poetry: it is the getting there (the Way) and not the destination, the answer, that is the source of her joy and revelation.
“Bruises” begins with a playful displacement of agency. It is the world, the speaker announces with the wry understatement of a stand-up comedian, even the world beyond our ken, that grows awkward and bruise-prone, not we:
In age, the world grows clumsy.
A heavy jar
Leaps from a cupboard.
A suitcase has corners.
Others have no explanation.
What follows, in a seamless but ecstatic turn I associate with Hirshfield, is an apostrophic call to the speaker’s “Old love, old body” (here the speaker could be addressing an old lover as well as conflating, appositively, “love” and “body”—that is, her body is her old love) to recall other, prior, more erotically caused contusions (“carpet burns down the spine, / gravel bedding / the knees, hardness to hardness”). The address to the body continues in the penultimate stanza, in which Eros (“You who knew yourself kissed”) is mixed with the more dangerous love-bite language of venom and stings. The punch-line, perfectly timed and granted a stanza break and the full weight of the silence of white space around it—“Now kissed by this”—is the sucker punch, returning us to the title and first line with renewed and deepened awareness: there are many kinds of bruises, and the hardest, the most painful mark we bear is the full on and in the mouth registering of our aging, our mortality.
“The Promise” (a promise is itself a kind of riddle) teases us and draws us in: what is the promise? what is being pledged? by whom? to whom? why? A surprise, then, not to be given a straight narrative, description, or definition of said promise, but rather an anaphoric catalogue of what appears to be less a promise than a command. In each stanza, the order to “stay” is pitched to an array of fauna and flora, and the response in each case is charged with a darkly whimsical humor, figurative and metaphysical:
Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.
Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.
Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.
Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.
Even the great and enduring earth, to which the speaker appeals after she feels her own body’s mutability, will not obey the speaker’s command, but rather looks back “with a changing expression, in silence.” Flowers fade, spiders build transient houses in air, leaves redden and fall, bodies, too, tremble and fail, and the cosmos itself is in eternal and indifferent flux. It is not until the last stanza that Hirshfield, without fanfare, reveals her answer: it is love and love alone that is capable of making a promise to abide. This “answer” might seem simple or unearned if not for the accrued force of the poem’s incrementally repeated litany. It is the stations of the spiritual riddle that enact Hirshfield’s vision in this poem: its difficulty, its veracity, and its worth.
Something I’ve admired about Hirshfield’s work since I began to read it years ago is its timeless ethos. There is nothing in any of these three poems (formally, imagistically, in terms of diction) that would suggest they couldn’t have been written hundreds of years ago or belong to some future era. Even earlier poems like “Why Bodhidharma Went to Howard Johnson’s” strike me as timely (and wisely funny) to all ages. I have long speculated that Hirshfield’s practice of translation (she is especially well known for her versions and translations of Japanese and Chinese poets) has contributed to this rare quality in her work. It’s as though she only uses words she might be able to translate from a foreign tongue, and this lends the work the shimmer of several minds at once—allowing that breaking of one world into another, of the discovery of worlds within worlds, words within words.
I especially feel this in “Sometimes the Heart is a Shallow Autumn River,” a “definition” poem of figurative dazzlement and shape-shifting. Metaphor, of course, is also riddling, tricking us into seeing the seemingly inevitable but unlikely alliances between two different entities. Even the opening stanza, with its pair of metaphorical “equations,” is of at least two minds, suggesting that the heart is both what is in the bed of and what is reflected in the “shallow autumn river.” In stanza two, Hirshfield offers a new metaphor, a meta-metaphor, in which the frog/leaf-music/gem/iris/poem slips “between the water and its reflections” like an angel, an entity belonging both to land and water, earth and heaven. The final note in this figurative chord cuts straight to what’s at stake: “And caution, and hope, and sorrow? / As umbrellas are, to a mountain or field of grass.” Such a profoundly comic vision here, of the highest order—we see those little umbrellas of our worry and our self-absorption and our cares against the vast expanse of the motions of the universe. And this returns us to the title, to our hearts, to what we can hold and refract and reflect and let go.
We see, then, how Hirshfield fulfills Halpern’s notions of what makes for a visionary poetics. Hers is a poetry that honors its language, fulfills the shape of a mystery and discovery shared by the riddling koan, and pursues its ecstasy of deep seeing, something akin to Hopkins’s instress. It is not new to think of all poetry as a kind of “translation” from experience to language, but in an essay about W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic writes, “Translation is one of the very few human activities where the impossible actually occurs on a fairly regular basis. Merwin once said that translation of comedy is one of the great disciplines because in translating jokes, if one gets anything wrong, nothing works. This is true of poetry too, where not only the words have to be translated but also the tone of voice, the prosody with its meaningful pauses, and various other near-intangibles that make a poem or a joke what it is.” Hirshfield’s poetry is serious in the most comedic sense (“comedy”
POETS IN THE PRINT SHOP
POETS IN THE PRINT SHOP
Several years ago a colleague in the studio art department and I team-taught a course we called The Matrix, an experiment in bringing together eight advanced printmaking students and eight advanced poets to make new work, including several high and low-end collective books. A matrix, in the printmaking lexicon, refers to the plate—zinc, copper—or other material (stone, collage) used in printing, but when we advertised the course we had a lot of interest from initially thrilled and then bitterly disappointed fans of the 1999 science fiction film of the same name, undergraduates who thought that it was high time that the cinema icon got the serious attention it deserved in the academy.
There was much enthusiasm among the young artists and poets as well, and our idea as instructors was to throw them (and ourselves) into the water, with the presumption that our disciplines—poetry writing and intaglio printmaking—were distinct enough to generate fruitful friction and close enough to allow for revelatory and empathetic artistic exchange.
This “throwing into the water” turned out to mean many things, perhaps chief among them the potentially dangerous fact that although half the class had never before set foot in a print shop (described by my art colleague as a “fifteenth-century chemistry lab without the safety features”), we were almost immediately involved in processes using acids and other toxic substances. Most fumes emitted in poetry writing workshops tend to come from the ubiquitous coffee cups and from occasional traces of cigarette smoke brought into the room after breaks; by contrast, we regularly left the print shop with filthy hands and heads high as kites from our unaccustomed breathing in of acetone, inks, resins, and other substances in a myriad of containers marked with skulls and crossbones.
Another learning curve for the poetry students was an initiation into the time commitment involved in the serious pursuit of studio art. The typical advanced poetry workshop meets for three hours once a week; print-making courses meet for 2 and a quarter hours twice a week. Our particular course was scheduled in the mornings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, commencing at 9:30 AM; allowing poetry students to explore their consciousnesses before, say, noon was another gift of the collaboration. And while it is understood that the advanced poetry student commits a lot of out-of-workshop time to musing and writing independently, this activity can be done in coffee shops, bars, subways, or in the privacy of one’s bed or bathroom. Printmaking students also devote many, many hours outside of class to generating and completing projects, but this work must be done predominantly in the print shop. Another ambivalent plus, then, for the poets was the discovery of a new (and there aren’t many) 24/7 venue in Charlottesville.
Despite the fact that the studio art department had been relocated for the two years that we taught The Matrix to two ventilated, corrugated metal, temporary outposts while a new, state-of-the-art facility was being built, despite the early hour of our class, despite the time commitment and the extra work (my colleague and I both taught the course as an overload to our regular departmental course commitments), the Matrix experience was intensely rewarding. I found the printmaking students, who were used to experimentation and to thinking on their feet, to be exceptionally open to the making of poems, even though most of them had never attempted poetry writing before the start of class. Perhaps because intaglio printmaking is a “negative” art (what one etches shows up in reverse on paper; what’s etched away appears dark, and vice versa), “opposite” exercises (in which students “pull” new poems off of extant ones) yielded exciting new work; similarly, write-in, erasure, and strike-through exercises used techniques familiar to the printers, who were used to staining, gesso-ing, Chine collé layering, and all manner of obscuring, illumination, and multi-valence. As part of the course, all of the students were engaged in semester-long, serial, “flood-subject” projects, both individual and collaborative. As printmaking is intrinsically serial, this aspect of the course also came naturally to the print-makers.
As the poets and printmakers collaborated over time, the poets became more comfortable with a fresh range of attitudes, vocabularies, processes, and energies. We became less anxious about “ownership” (while poets are sometimes fiercely territorial and proprietary about their productions, printmakers tend to seek ways to creatively sabotage, manipulate, and in other ways sample and become involved with each other’s work) and also more comfortable with foregrounding the processes of our drafts rather than privileging the final product. Often, for example, something marvelous would result from a “mistake” that a student might make along the way—an over-bitten plate, or an aberration caused by burring or over-inking. My colleague would point to the print (and here’s another exciting difference between poetry and printmaking workshops: in poetry classes, the works under discussion are passed around on discreet pieces of paper or viewed on laptop screens, while in the print shop all work on paper is posted vertically, tacked to the wall, for the community to see) and say, look, that’s exciting. Now figure out how to do that deliberately.
We talked a lot, as we worked together, about “the stain” and about defacement, about the line, about the bleed. All of these printmaking phenomena, new to us poets, had exciting parallels and possibilities in poems. Crucially, we learned about and made paper. We also learned to create, stitch, and bind folios. We dyed endpapers and covered and glued and pressed hardcovers. For one book project, we were privileged to work with a metal artist, who showed us how to use gilt and lapis to emboss a front cover. I doubt that any poet participating in the Matrix course now looks at or handles a book without thinking of its materiality and its making. Printmaking discourse also provided the poets with a trove of new words, all, again, with suggestive resonances in poems, as well, terms and phrases such as false bite, bon à tirer, burin, mezzotint, criblé, creeping bite, and retroussage.
Of the many gifts of the printmaking experience for poets in the Matrix class, perhaps chief among them was the reminder to writers working primarily in digital media (computer and other virtual type) that writing is, or can be, drawing. And lines drawn by hand, whether etched into a metal plate or scrawled across the blue staves of a Moleskine notebook— forays made into the matrix— possess an inimitable warmth and immediacy of expression and effect. Printmaking reminded us to attend to the ghost, to the mark, of what Keats called our “living hand” in our poetic efforts. The materiality of our techniques was revealed to us anew with each pull of a print, each dip of the plate into its acid bath, opening us up to the crucial connection, in all art, between idea and praxis, and, importantly, to the power of mistake, flaw, and the grace of a hand-made thing.
BRIAN TEARE
Hello
But we would rather believe that music is beyond any
analogy with word language …
—Ives, Essays Before a Sonata
—interval from felt
to string a struck
ear’s the soul’s seat
set ringing —easy
now song has a few rights can break
a law if it likes if our ear veers hymnward
it won’t wear no ribbon to match its voice
—intellect is never
a whole soul
finds things there
—must a song always
be a song
some
in this book can’t be sung
Charles Ives (1874 – 1954) was a prolific modern American composer of striking originality who, like his poetic contemporary Wallace Stevens, made a successful living as an insurance executive. Influenced by and experimenting alike with popular and sentimental parlor songs, polyrhythms, brass bands, tone clusters, and dissonance, Ives worked largely below the radar during most of his life, though his pieces garnered the respect of Aaron Copeland, Arnold Schoenberg, and others, and made possible the later experiments of artists like John Cage. Reportedly as humble and humorous as he was artistically ardent and intrepid, Ives, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1947, gave away the award money, saying “prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.”
Poet Brian Teare, whose evocative, playfully serious lyric and textual experiments I have followed for some years, is an innovator of this order, and his attraction to Ives, who shared Teare’s interest in musical / textual sampling and quotation and his passion for the American, and particularly the “New Englandly,” context (both Teare and Ives, for instance, have written about Thoreau, Emerson, and other Transcendentalists), makes sense. Ives’s biographer Jan Swafford writes, “Filled with quotes of music from Beethoven to Stephen Foster and American hymnodists, Ives’s mature work is music about music, or rather music as a symbol of human life and striving and spirituality.” Teare’s poems, whose original spin on field poetics makes startling use of the hungering page, acoustically and visually, seem to me to be poetry about poetry, about the relationship of music to song, song to text, song to song, and as work which represents, as Ives said of his own compositions in a prose piece accompanying a privately printed song collection, 114 Songs, “marks of respect and expression.”
