How to reach across the irresolvable dark? I’ve seen so many readers become self-conscious as they read their poems, apologize for “depressing you all” and muddle and fiddle and seem to become aware for the first time that there is an accumulated effect on a stack of like-minded poems of difficult subjects. Yet others read only their light stuff for the social aspect of a reading then buyers find that the book has primarily emotionally difficult material and the reading misrepresented the general thrust of the collection. How to navigate the terrain of what feels like it needs to be said in earnest when it’s grim or grief or a vent of literary picking through disdain or rage?
Looking across a few things I’m reading and hearing and seeing what tacks people take.
a minute of two/without remembering by Claudia Coutu Radmore (Two Cultures Press, 2010) is a collection of poems of stories from the 1600s an 1700s in New France.
p. 13-14, 1696: In April Monsieur de Callière allows the torture of four Iroquois on the Place Royale, not too far from where the Cottu family resides. Louise Cottu speaks:
boiled eggs
first the bells then the robins woke us.
we filled the picnic basket, hurried
the children farther up the mountain
where apple trees are in bloom.
we are alone here. everyone else has gone
to la place royale for le grande spectacle.
we french so love a good show. up here
closer to the cross, our own spectacle.
petals fall. even the children see
the beauty, bury faces in the flowers.
the sky is blue; mosquitoes are
not yet buzzing. we have bread just out
of the oven. a pot of butter and
the last of the jam. eggs boiled and ready
to peel. a picnic cloth red and white.
milk and beer for everyone. the children
pick dents de lion. for the graves they say.
the graves of the indians. will there
be anything left to bury, maman?
we did not leave early enough after all.
they know what is happening, they
look at me, fists filled with yellow.
i peel the eggs. try not to think of
what fire does to muscle, to bone, to skin.
Walloped me with its truthiness. Even though the events and people lived over 300 years ago, the historical calm is disrupted by the universal grief of parent being helpless to completely protect and insulate their children. Against all good adult intentions, kids know. Kids deal. It’s adults with their concussive exhaustion that don’t deal as well and who may be losing resiliency. Kids are more matter of fact and the adults are trying to protect themselves as much as any. For all the light in the poem of manufacturing a happy ideal world, the gruesomeness creeps in.
The speaker tries to distance from the crowd that she identifies herself with, to get closer to god physically, as we with our computers think we are closer to the moon than someone without car or literacy in a desert, but realistically, neither is more likely to attain godhood. Not the lynching crowd, not the pious who try to pretend the violence away.
How do you deal or reconcile the impossible violence we do to one another?
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, (1931), chapter 9, p. 76-77 during a time of famine in China when the tree bark was eaten and the grasses, and cannibalism was beginning
Once he walked, dragging one foot after the other in his famished weakness, to the temple of the earth, and deliberately he spat upon the face of the small imperturbable god who sat there with his goddess. There were no sticks of incense now before this pair, nor had there been for many moons, and their paper clothes were tattered and showed their clay bodies through the rents. But they sat there unmoved by anything and Wang Lung gnashed his teeth at them and walked back to his house groaning and fell upon his bed.
They scarcely rose at all, any of them
Then when his family migrated from that dustbowl of Anhwei to Kiangsu 100 miles south, p. 110
Wang Lung and his family had come from a country where if men starve it is because there is no food, since the land cannot bear under a relentless heaven. Silver in the had was worth little because it could buy nothing where nothing was.
Here in the city the food was everywhere.
After a certain amount of hardship after Wang Lung cries, “what can happen to me worse than that which has happened”. It’s like a story of Job where the darkness comes not from mood or telling but the showing and implications and expectations the reader can draw.
It has such a detailed visual story, from the sound of wooden hinges to the stranger in the land working out what the system is for pricing. I can enter it without being jarred out partly because the culture shock is borne by the character who watches and is startled at this world around him changing, his wife’s knowledge never visible until it’s a need. He’s at a loss for how to make a hut, and she steps forward and ably picks up where she left off in childhood, living as a beggar in a squatter colony. He didn’t know what she’s lived and he finds out as we do. It has compassion and pathos, but not told with self-pity nor is it patronizing nor sentimental. It is level trudging ahead whether good times or bad, figuring out competences, building them.
fond, Kate Eichhorn (BookThug, 2008), two-thirds thru the book,
Inevitable consolidation of everyday life. Ritual
convenience. Choose a day weighted down in hu-
midity, the kind books resist. Something entirely
uncivil. Too many books on desks, in corners – too
many for shelves. Immanent threat. Forced radical
reconstructing in philosophy. Questioned division
of literature under post-national, post-analogue.
It is instead a butting a head against ideology, trying to think your way out of a box, a sorting a shifting, not a mapping of a narrative but a terrain, identifying what’s there, taking an inventory, labelling and acknowledging as an act of control of internal and external pressures.
Kenk: the world’s most prolific bicycle thief (Pop Sandbox, 2010), from p. 42 of the graphic novel/journalism biography,
So far as strategies for dealing with the uncomfortable, the panel of people who worked on the book were across the spectrum from hating the person to respecting and liking. When you’re trailing a life which is devoted to living on the margins of society for some gratification of identity, or what? Worldviews clash. The book is made structurally gritty, the film footage stabilized, cleaned up then the selections of clips made rough again by changing them into still frames that are antiqued, rubbed, folded, crumpled and cut with razors. The texture of the life is transferred to the panels of comic panels with footage from tv and newspapers. And yet the subject is someone eventually imprisoned for theft and drug offenses. How do the illustrators and short film makers balance their relationship to the story, to the person, to what to include or omit, to keep the balance of a person in the round, complex without oversimplifying the story.
Haiku Canada Review, October 2010, Vol 4, No. 2, p. 55, from the books in brief column, seed packets: an anthology of flower haiku, edited by Stanford M. Forrester (Bottle Rockets Press, 2009)
hospice room
we leave Dad’s poinsettia for
the next patient
John J. Dunphy
There is such a compressed pithiness. I was rather hesitant about the idea of an anthology of flower haiku but even the idea of flower and a short form allow a wide range of canvas on which to include complex and dark concepts with room for contrasting light and pivot. It does not seem easy, easily come by or pat. It doesn’t seem to be mining for a sexy-dark point of view to give a, pardon me, killer, bottom line of a poem. It seems fitting and necessary.
paper doors, edited by gerry shikitani and david alyward (Coach House, 1981), p. 117, “After a Reading of Islan”
laughing so hard, mind’s
eternal focus
then, a rim of silence.
steam rises
from a kettle of boiling water.
but I’m dogged
at the heels
by every kind of shit.
I try to look
for the end
of such self-made fire,
still must I
look, lust every opposite,
every manner of change
to penetrations?
perhaps, when cooking.
Buddha / God. whatever
I call you,
it’s never there,
Buddha, God
both shit.
Islan the Unitarian minister I wonder? It’s a good reminder that much is self-made. Epictetus said that, in other words, even death is a thing. It is the fear of the thing that is much larger. Poems of frustration and reconciliation of what to do when faith was a crutch thrown away but you still have the posture of leaning?
Humans need believe, no particular belief. Living beings need food, not a particular brand and batch run of a particular factory recipe, but sustenance. How to reconcile the idea of brand of belief with self-determining, critical thinking and the saving into trust the nature of belief is?
Back Off, Assassin: New and Selected Poems by Jim Smith (Mansfield Press, 2009), excerpted from “Indie Act”, p. 28
Long unhinged
From the machinations
Of the catholics
I announce to you right now, today:
I have my own faith.
It is a small, new country
That ends just past my nose.
This is one of the perks
of being 57
Striking out on one’s own, a coming of age at any age. It’s strange to be of generations where dominant faith culturally switches to agnostic or atheistic with no point of personal reference for religious matters. On one hand, we want to pass on cultural inherence. On the other, we don’t want to contaminate the next generation with the negative legacies. Their experience cannot be the one of devout who break off to non-believers. How to bridge self forward and self to others?
Dropping the unnecessary rules that want to self-perpetuate until the rule-system is the universe’s center, with the answer for any and all questions, extended past its natural use. Religions act like marketing. Absorbing competitors, a tendency to grow and centralize. At the same time humans want freedom to choose, but not too much freedom that an informed choice can’t be made. This tugging dynamic.
Gwendolyn Guth, George Murray, MT Kelly, Sandra Ridley and Peter Norman on panel for the Poetry Cabaret at the OIWF Oct 25.
In the panel Gwendolyn Guth asked the question, how do you know you haven’t depreciated the value of darkness by going into so often? Why do it?
Sandra Ridley, in her response said “if we’re surrounded by light and joy we have it more figured out.” She went on that darkness is complex and a challenge. She had a more pragmatic handle on it as well, if you can create a fight or flight response, you don’t bore the reader. It hooks readers. She also said that it is part of life and it would be a denial of part to skip it. “You can’t have love without also having loss.”
It is hard to do joy and light well without becomes shallow or cartoonish. It’s perhaps harder than darkness because joy and light are fleeting, whereas the grief entrenches, calls in for pizza using our credit card, and lets us know it’ll be bunking with us for weeks, or years.
Why is so much of poetry on about grief and loss? There isn’t a monolithic motivation anymore than there is a monolithic experience but there must be things in general that can be said about the positions and strategies to dealing with tough spots and then pillaging such times for art. To convert such emotions and stresses to something else is to assert a control over them, to go toe to toe and cuff the bogeymen.
Do we seek out a mental frame where we can preferentially see the difficult aspects? Do we choose for print dark subjects because of some image of what poetry should be?
Do we use darkness as a handy way to add depth by piling on weight?
Do we express it in poetry because socially there isn’t a route in conversation to complain and grieve without being chastised, cheered up, corrected, deflected, distracted, or otherwise shut down on the subjects too soon?
To speak of hard subject is to look after oneself and choose a recourse of monologue with the page.
Plutarch said, “To find a fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.” So how do we do our dark scenes better? And our light scenes better, adding nuances and perspective, without weakening the effect for the reader and cutting the feet out from under our own arguments?
Do we want to record the transitional states of muddle? Everything doesn’t have to be fully processed to the resolved end before it becomes poetry.
If we write from dark spots, do we examine the impacts on this choice for the writer or reader?
Writing is an act of brain-chemistry. We sustain a feeling and revisit it to make a reader get the transmission. If one makes an art out of “beautiful grief” and is rewarded for it, (and I am not saying any of these writers specialize in that narrow band of expressions), but theoretically, if one were to make a mental and literary practice out of sad poems or angry poems, is that an outlet, or does it reinforce, train neurons to perceive and close off options?
That would be like adding the kicker of any of my father’s story, which had to append that the person died and of what, regardless of the light nature of the story. Or sticking on a quick-fix happy ending to wrap-up made for tv movie. A poem can be a fragment of the immediate without any nod to the frustration moving on, or the joy folding in like an iris, or any longer life cycle of context.
Does it become a rule so that one cannot say, have extraneous details that disrupt the thru line of the text designed to elicit effect, or is it about sharing an idea?
If we write and say, that’s the way it was, freeze the wax, we can only have the words express this upshot, do we do a disservice to our own mental emotional flexibility? Is there a better route for resolving what we are trying to resolve in the poem to make the poem unnecessary? A poem may be effective for the ends of reader and writer but is a poem, in one given instance, a best practice for the writer?
Once a poem is done, and circulating, it can then help someone else by being half a step ahead in perspective, speed up the insight, make a person feel heard even if they tell no one.
I suppose I could continue these circles indefinitely.
From Seth Godin’s list of 20 motivations examining why I spread your ideas these apply:
3…because I care about the outcome and want you (the creator of the idea) to succeed.
14 …because your idea says something that I have trouble saying directly
20 … because I’m in awe of your art and the only way I can repay you is to share that art with others.