The poet Robinson Jeffers developed a concept called inhumanism. The idea is to shift the metaphorical center of the universe away from what it is to be human to the larger non-human world — in other words, to be able to appreciate the startling beauty of existence human beings need to be able to recognize our limited role, and therefore, our actual place in the greater organization of all-that-is.

That’s all good as far as I am concerned. The problem is that in much of Jeffers’ work there is still that moral stain of “what should be.” Morality, a human invention to meet our evolutionary needs, is not inhuman.  Judging our place in all-that-is through the lens of what-should-be falls short of the idea of booting us out of the center of the universe.
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The title poem from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest has a stanza (the middle of three) that goes

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

I know what he means by “Blue, this blue.” I understand that “blue” the word, and that colour, they both hold the same things, this set of experiences, these feelings. The memories float under the word and when it is used; there they are, pushing up against awareness, skewing perception a little to the left, a little right.

Rudbeckia hirta

The Rudbeckia, for me, is like this. In its Fall form there is a bag it carries, full of memory and feeling that transfer — onto a poem, an essay by Searles, my sense that the moon pulls at me, sliding as it does, invisible across the day-sky.

Bits from that Rudbeckia bag spill out at the oddest moments. Sometimes I can figure it out, but others? No. But I trust it, this ability to transfer meaning acquired one way, and then transfered to some other entity, by some other process, to be used some other way. The thing I would love to know…how are we able to do this?

Which is, of course, is how I come to be reading Searle and Lakeoff and Johnson.

By the way, the moon has set and the leeks are soaking in the sink.

I’ve been gardening interspersed with reading Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” poems randomly selected from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. All the while I have been deeply conscious of the fact that the moon has been crossing the day-sky unseen.

The moon rose sometime around midnight (it is at last quarter) and is, as I sit here writing, close to setting. It will set before dark, and since I have been poorly this weekend, it was daylight before I woke and so, for this day, although I can feel the tidal pull of the moon on my awareness, I have not seen it for at least two days now.

I feel better today, having slept the lion’s share of two days and when I went out this morning for tea, the garden presented itself as a “must do.”  Some plants are still strong, even though the nights have been a bit frosty, but others have long since died back. The tomatoes, cilantro, the lupins, the sweetgrass and the poppies have become dried letters from summer.  When I pulled the dead tomatoe branches today, there was a faint smell left, and I even found one small orange tomatoe left clinging to a wizened branch. The poppies dried to leave architecturally beautiful seed pods on elegant stems.  I have saved those and put them dry into a ceramic pot outside my door. On dark moon next I’ll cut back the lupin pods and place them there along with the poppies.

The moon will be in Cancer at the moment, sinking to the horizon, just north of west. That’s how it feels, that the moon in Cancer is sinking to the west, but of course what is really happening is that I, on a spinning earth, am backing away as I stand and look to where I know the moon to be – that as I spin backwards, the edge of the earth is rising up and hiding constellation after constellation, until finally, it will hide a moon already hidden.

What has that to do with Searle and poetry? More on that after I go pull the remaining leeks.

I have a little book about poetry and thinking that I return to over and over. It is called Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. I have read, over the years, a number of books about poetry but it remains my favourite.

When I first opened the book, it was to the first essay. By Dennis Lee, it is called “Body Music: Notes on Rhythm in Poetry.” The first bit of the title is OK but the second?  Bland. But then…

What makes a poem cohere? How does it mean what it means?

It starts where the poem does: in the preverbal flex and coherence the words arise from. A poem tries to enact that wordless tumble and surge in its own medium – in line breaks and pauses, syntax and sound, the ripple and clarion strut of sense on the page. It tries to recreate the cadence of how things are, through the nitty gritty of craft.

I was hooked.

Because, I suppose, of my sensory oddities, I completely understood what he meant by “the preverbal flex and coherence.” The craft bit, well…that’s work.

The next bit of the essay – “But how do you get a handle on that? How can you understand technique as more than just a bag of tricks? As witness, and cosmology, and desire?”

What follows are moments like these:

– It starts with rhythm, that much I know.
– A poem thinks by the way it moves.
– What the poem mimes is not a static structure, but an active cohering. Kinetic rhythms of being. A cosmophony, more than a cosmology.
– Free prosody says, the world is coherent – but its coherence emerges in the interplay of variable systems of order. There is no absolute measure which antedates the poem. Coherence is local, provisional, contingent in the flux.
– For you are not just a self-contained subject /observer – you’re embedded in kinaesthetic space.

And that’s just the first essay.

I am Regina Waterhouse. And I have complete faith
that man will keep on going right to the end.

I am the queen here, but the people assure me,
gathered in the square, dust kicked up by their boots,
jacked by their power, that they know

what’s right and I am inclined to agree. All the women
here, crow clothes flapping in the hot wind, sing
free to be who they naturally are. And the men,
ordained by the river, to be more.

I am a Waterhouse and just a god here, but the people
assure me, gathered by their pillars and posts,

that eternity is theirs because I am here. And I –
I am assured — will maintain. And I expect I will,
right unto their end.

When I first read “Globe of Gneiss” my reaction was that I liked it but didn’t agree with it. I came to it with a strong positive attitude toward Penn Warren because of his book Democracy and Poetry. He is a thoughtful man, one who both writes and thinks well. There were a number of things I disagreed with in Democracy and Poetry but I liked it because its overall compassionate tone and lucid presentation. I require that in writing if I am going to put much stock in what the author is trying to tell me about what it means to be human.

I found Penn Warren’s poetry has just such a combination. Still, figuring out what a poem means requires (for me) a great deal of effort. My experience of it, my delight in the tension of his line breaks, and the wonderful phrase “night wind nightlong,” reaches into my own experience of the alternate jerkiness and grace of time passing but Penn Warren is very different from me so my experience alone cannot tell me what the poem “means” because meaning is a shared event.
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birch trees clamber
the hillside peer
down over the tracks
the western sun
has found a treeless gap
wriggles its way
down all the while staring
me right in the eye

02:55 May 1

This morning when I awoke
and opened the door
to let out the cats, in,
between their paws, rushed
the first warm air of summer.