I was right. And nothing is changed because I still have other poems waiting in their queue and I almost certainly will check on them tomorrow. And I still have 3 or 4 unwritten poems circling the imagination and simultaneously trying to get written. Same. Same. Oh well.

Reproducing her work is next to impossible without putting up her pages as images, but this example should give you a taste. Even if you generally want poetry that is essentially a rhyming story, I encourage you to get a book of hers and have a look. They are little mixed-media packages of verbal/image art.

I mean doesn’t that just shake up your head?

Here’s one of her poems.

Tangling the Day

Tangle the day up
which is black
does not wish
you to shine
a yellow flower
on it, if it likes
butter -

That bee it composes -
daffodils, cyclamen,
a record going round, the sound
of Haydn's piano

& the car accidents
out on Broadway
so frequent now I rather like
the sound of a small collision
& don't bother
going out to see.

Such spare language. And the use of sound – like “a record going round, the sound” – I love it when poets do that, use long sounds together to exemplify the content. And the way “s” and “l” work in the line “the sound of a small collision”.  It’s music, of course, but not melodic exactly, but like the sounds air makes as it rushes through holes in rock. I rather like that power, and I like the sense of inhumanness it evokes. In that anyway, this poem reminds me a bit of Robinson Jeffers.

The successful scientist thinks like a poet but works like a bookkeeper.

heh

An interesting article about the capacity of abstraction we humans have.  I do think the author is correct in saying that to understand the arts, and generally the humanities, we need to come to some better understanding of the evolutionary and cognitive forces involved in our way of  ”minding” the world.

One interesting thing about the article is what it doesn’t say, or rather the roads glimpsed but untrodden. For example, he talks a great deal about our relative sensory deprivation as a species, but doesn’t connect that to the development of arts as a way of compensation for that lack.

I do wonder why not.

Here’s Chyrstos.

From Fire Power

Sometimes Sitting in the Airport

when the normal white women
in pretty summer dresses
laughing eyes
bows in their hair
float by
burbling inane remarks
playful comments
like a vast bouquet of flowers
lilies of the field so happy
I hate them fiercely
just for that

OK. Before I start I just want to say I actually love much of Chrystos’ poetry. It’s fierce, truthful, blunt, unforgiving. These are all traits I admire and respect.

But.

There’s always a but. And always the oblivious human being who walks right through misery, causes it, even preens in its heat, all without ever seeing the human being in the middle of the rage and pain.

That’s one of the things it means to be human. No changing that. Not without evolving the whole species. And maybe not even then.

Not that I think talking to those “normal” women is worth anything. I don’t. Actually I think it’s a waste of time. They are oblivious to anyone outside their immediate need and desire.

I know them. I’ve been trampled by them. But am I mad? At what? It’s like an ant being mad at the boulder tumbling down the hill. Or me being mad at the earthquake because it wrecked my yard. I mean what point is there in that.

The trick seems to me to learn to spot them and avoid the suckers. Get on with things that really matter, that you actually want to do.

So when I read Chrystos’ poetry I wonder about all that spinning rage. All that energy. I imagine it turned like steam into a potent force turning a wheel instead of just loose heat not moving anything or anyone.

But of course that’s not true exactly. It moves me, her other readers. But moves to what? I can’t help but wonder if it is an efficient use of the power that rage gives.  Actually wonder. I don’t have an answer.

You might want to read here and here if you like this.

THESE NEW DAYS

After the Massacre of Lost Objects
the sun went dead dark three days.
The sorrow in the orchard of orange trees
was ours, my family's. The zero fell off
the largest number in the world.
On my hand I wrote left and please return
to owner. The echo in my son's
skull was so loud we slept numb
in the living room. I walked
a mile to watch them tear off
the church bell like a pear
and throw it in the mud pit.
Sullage spilt out of the abattoir
where they were beheading
the cows with a buzz-saw
all summer. How soft the hay,
the uneaten grass. I found
my open wound and lay down
next to it in a field, my wound
the jellyfish. Each hour, halos of new colors,
phosphorescent, pulsed once, faded,
over the little earth. Little
explosions. Then a city of spires
bloomed in a full aurora
of my last hope, where, faraway,
I was wavinggoodbye, or was it hello,
from a future I no longer recall.

Here’s a poem from the “new” portion of the book.

In a tidal valley

flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not
one among many moodswung creatures
that have settled in this beautiful
Uncountry of an Estuary

swans pitching your wings
in the reedy layby of a vacancy
where the house of the sea
can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour

all you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
is both a barren mud-site and a speeded up garden
full of lake-offerings and slabs of light
which then unwills itself listen

all you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall
all you mudswarms ranging up and down
I notice you are very alert and worn out
skulking about and grabbing what you can

listen this is not the ordinary surface river
this is not river at all this is something
like a huge repeating mechanism
banging and banging the jetty

very hard to define, most close in kind
to the mighty angels of purgatory
who come solar-powered into darkness
using no other sails than their shining wings

yes this is the Moon this hurrying
muscular unsolid unstillness
this endless wavering in whose engine
I too am living

Frakkin brilliant. “Moodswung creatures”, the way she conflates identity with “all you flooded and stranded weeds” and my favourite – “where the house of the sea / can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour”.

That one kept me up for at least an additional hour. My mind would swim inside it, words came tumbling in on its waves, I had to get up and write them down to use later. It’s so simple really, fitting the metaphorical shift of what one can do in a human house to the non-human versions of living environments. Yet finding something like that connection that works as well as it does in Oswald’s poem is bloody difficult. I am delighted to have found her.

Last night I looked up at 9PM. I’d been working since I got up at 5AM. Before that I had crashed, but dreamt about one of the ideas I’d been thinking about, and the power of the dream was so strong it slapped me out of sleep. I stumbled to my computer so I could get down the dream, and most importantly, the dream word that held the whole dream in its pieces.

I did that. Started reading and next thing I needed more sleep and it was 9PM. And here I am the next morning at 7:30 having worked since 5 and realizing it is April 1. Last I knew it was the 29th.

Har.

The mind.

Oh, the new word from my dream is “diplumyin”. It means (according to the dream) “the flowering of a child.”

One of my sons died as an infant. The first “waters” poem I ever wrote looked at creation of what is now British Columbia, the waters that continually flow down from all the blocks of land being pushed in to create new mountains, new coast lands, and the death of a human infant.  How can one feel grief in the face of eons?

Anyway, I came across the poet Alice Oswald and her book length poem The Dart – about River Dart, if you didn’t know. Oh, such a poem!

The opening of the book reads:

This poem is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters – linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.

Fabulous idea because rivers, and their wide beds (otherwise known as the earth) do have local “voices”. The Snake, for example, is vastly different than the lower Columbia, even with the dams messing with the flow.  And the region around the origin of the Snake and the Columbia—different as well. And of course the Snake flows into the Columbia, while the Columbia flows into the sea.

Anyway .. I think a lot about the unwelt of the river, as compared to the people who live, use and think about the river. Then there are the animals and plant worlds. They all co-exist creating the entirety of the world, even if we can’t appreciate it all. That’s the thing about having an unwelt, that it is the world that we perceive, and not the world that is.

Here’s a piece at the end of Oswald’s poem.

But tell me another job where you can see the whole sunrise every morning. No clocking in, no time bell. In summer you can dive in, see whales jumping, catch turtles the size of a dory. You slap your hands on the boatside and tell me another job where a dolphin spooks you, looks you straight in the eye and lets you touch him You don’t know what you are till you’ve seen that

they start the boat, they climb
as if over the river's vertebrae
out of its body into the wings of the sea
rounding the Mew Stone, the last bone of the Dart
where the shag stands criticising the weather
and rolls of seals haul out and scrabble away
and the seal-watcher on his wave-ski
shouts and waves and slowly paddles out of sight. 

I steer my wave-ski into caves                                                          sealwatcher
horrible to enter alone
The fur, the hair, the fingernails, the bones. 

Flick out the torch, the only thread between down
   here and daylight
and count five while the sea suckles and settles.
Self-maker, speaking its meaning over mine. 

At low water
I swim up a dog-leg bend into the cliff,
the tide slooshes me almost to the roof 

and float inwards into the trembling sphere
of one freshwater drip drip drip
where my name disappears and the sea slides in to
   replace it. 

There the musky fishy genital smell
of things not yet actual: shivering impulses, shadows,
   propensities,
little amorous movements, quicksilver strainings and
   restrainings: 

each winter they gather here,
twenty seals in this room behind the sea, all swaddled
and tucked in fat, like the soul in its cylinder of flesh. 

With their grandmother mouths, with their dog-soft
   eyes, asking
who's this moving in the dark? Me.
This is me, anonymous, water's soliloquy, 

all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,
whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,
driving my many selves from cave to cave...

How awesome is that.

I’ve ordered another of her books (a new and collected). I do wonder what else she writes.

Here’s one from Merrybegot.

After All That

Gumption? It's clear he didn't
Have the sense God gave a kitten.
And it was after all that
He got in tack with the other one—
A real blatherskite
If ever I saw one,
Traipsing the beach all hours of the day,
Or caterwauling away to the hens.
Oh, she'd light up when she saw him,
But in the kitchen with her nose in a  book
She'd burn water in a pot.

Heh.

This one is from Red Leger.

Backhome Blues: Another Tune

So you sashayed down the road
that balmy summer night,
a jingling parade of one,
had a high-class tantrum
because you'd turned your back
and the scene shifted?
Who did you think you were?

You are just a blip, old trout.
A bit player.
It's as if a dust mote
stood on its hind legs
and howled at
the injustice of gravity.
The granite erratics are laughing.

Those fences you're shedding
your crocodile tears over—
a few sticks of wood.
Those sheep and those hens:
usurpers of the wolves' run.
Your pastoral tableau
a nanosecond in the long story.
Legions of ghosts crowd round these ponds.
Glaciers gouged out valleys and
D'Iberville's fires roared down these hills;
rogues roosted; rivers ran.

You're read
Gaff Topsails, yes? Then
open your eyes wider and
wise up.

I love the voice here. So far that last one is my favourite, but I’ve not quite finished the book. Of course I like the familiarity of the practical (rural? lower class?), but there is also the deep self-reflectiveness that chastises for the earlier sentimentality, sentimentality that very often is only possible by refusing to reference how that land came to be “owned” before it was “lost”.

History is hard to remember when it slashes away at privilege, so I do very much admire the capacity to remember when it is evident.