Where I live, branches are still bare, but when the light hits them you can see that the tips are just now tinged with red, yellow, and new green ??? before the first thought of spring, the feeling. Meanwhile, the brain of the landscape remains steeped in winter ??? the same evergreen ideas, the rest grey matter.
It’s about to become more difficult, or more interesting, and more birds are starting to sing. (Even the chickadees have a new spring song — foregoing their namesake call for the plaintively whistled “Swee-tee.” If you don’t have a chickadee nearby, visit the chickadee dictionary for a listen.)
The other week I heard the poet Galway Kinnell give a reading for the Athenaeum series in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Standing in front of a silver pipe organ beneath the warm light of a church chandelier, he read “St. Francis and the Sow,” which begins:
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within“.
As Kinnell described in a recent interview on Vermont Public Radio, the “announcement of a poetry reading” is “like a selective magnet,” drawing out “a selected kind of people who love words, the music of words flowing through them from another’s mouth.” So retold to ourselves, in words and the touch of words, we sat in pews, a small but felt number of hushed listeners.
Among other “old chestnuts” read (as he called them, with a chuckle): “Everyone Was In Love” —
One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus
appeared in the doorway, naked and mirthful,
with a dozen long garter snakes draped over
each of them like brand-new clothes.
Snake tails dangled down their backs,
and snake foreparts in various lengths
fell over their fronts, heads raised
and swaying, alert as cobras.
……………………………………………………….
Maud and Fergus were deliciously pleased with themselves.
The snakes seemed to be tickled too.
We were enchanted. Everyone was in love….
As this poem writhed its way, we were (of course!) enchanted too — and in turn pulled in farther, like the frog seen inside one snake’s mouth: “green / webbed hind feet were being drawn, / like a diver’s, very slowly as if into deepest waters.” But Kinnell’s poem is no ominous trick of earthly joy blindsided by death. More like blindsighted — the ability of a blind person to accurately sense a light source they cannot consciously see. The astute Rosanna Warren called Kinnell a “poet seer of the real” — not unlike Maud in the poem, who cautions her father not to try to rescue the frog in the last line: “Don’t. Frog is already elsewhere.”
Kinnell has said, “What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what’s to come” (Poetryarchive.org). Does this ominous quote mean that when we lose the canary (poetry), our own demise is sure to follow? Please take care of that canary! (And why was the canary the preferred protection for miners, risking its small life for theirs? Wasn’t it also because it could sing, showing not only that it was alive, but also telling the workers toiling in darkness that they were alive as well? Reminding them in song what light is, what it means to be aboveground, lest you start to think your life no more than a coal mine shaft.)
A canary or poem is a reminder of the particular, and the particular reminds us why its worth returning ourselves and our attention to the world — even after heartbreak, numbness, or devastation. As in Kinnell’s poem, “Wait,” written for a former student considering suicide:
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands….
Just as the repetition of the word “interesting” would begin to lull or sound dull to our ears, the next line lengthens into a more detailed and emotionally complex image (the “buds that open out of season”), with the added surprise of “lovely” just as we are expecting “interesting” — and then the repetition of “lovely” to describe something so ordinary and particular it startles us into new clarity. We see both the second-hand gloves and ourselves anew — so everyday that we are worn out and tired, yet suddenly lovely again because of our losses, and loss’s ability to remind us of our need for other hands.
In Jane Lindholm’s VPR interview with Kinnell, she confesses to him that she sometimes feels “Tricked into a sense of happiness or a contentment in one stanza, and then heartbreak in the next,” for which she feels “unprepared.” To which Kinnell affably replies, “If I had known that had happened to you I would certainly have deleted that 3rd stanza.” But he goes on to explain that in a poem like “The River That Is East,” which begins with images of idyllic happiness in boyhood but ends with a heavily sorrowed man, the poem is not meant as a trick but “is really written for that man” — for the poet Hart Crane who inspired it, and perhaps for any of us who have felt “no flowering but our own strange lives.”
In lighter moments, we all enjoyed eating a bowl of oatmeal with Kinnell and John Keats in “Oatmeal,” and his tender and humorous new discourse on the human nose proferred such observational delights as: “The nose is the bay window of the face,” the nose is the “13th lunar mansion,” and “It is usually the first part of us to go into the future.”
He ended the reading with the first poem he ever wrote – “First Song” – followed by the stunning images of “Lastness” (the second section of the final chapter in The Book of Nightmares):
And when he came wholly forth
I took him up in my hands and bent
over and smelled
the black, glistening fur
of his head, as empty space
must have bent
over the newborn planet
and smelled the grasslands and the ferns.
Applause was long and amplified the room. We followed our noses into the future. Everyone was in love. Down the church stairs, one exiting patron stepped carefully backwards, smiling to herself, feet like reverse antennae tapping the way.
* * * * *
Galway Kinnell will be reading this Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at the Vermont Studio Center, starting at 6:30 p.m. in the Lowe Lecture Hall (located on the south side of Johnson’s Main Street/Route 15). Renowned puppeteer Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet will also be performing as part of the celebration.
