Just Before Dark

by Jim Harrison

  DAVID

  He is young. The father is dead.

  Outside, a cold November night,

  the mourner's cars are parked upon the lawn;

  beneath the porch light three

  brothers talk to three sons

  and shiver without knowing it.

  His mind's all black thickets

  and blood; he knows

  flesh slips quietly off the bone,

  he knows no last looks,

  that among the profusion of flowers

  the lid is closed to hide

  what no one could bear—

  that metal rends the flesh,

  he knows beneath the white pointed

  creatures, stars,

  that in the distant talk of brothers,

  the father is dead.

  “David” illustrates another aspect of the autobiographical poem; speaking through a “persona” to insure aesthetic distance. I was unable to say anything about the death of my father directly that wasn't benumbed, cloudy, constricted. When the poem finally began to “happen” it took shape through the eyes of my younger brother. Though this wasn't a conscious choice, it proved to handle the experience in a much more valid, less literary manner. This same process, even further removed, took place in the third part of “A Sequence of Women.”

  The girl who was once my mistress

  is dead now, I learn, in childbirth.

  I thought that long ago women ceased

  dying this way.

  To set records straight, our enmity

  relaxes, I wrote a verse for her—

  to dole her by pieces, ring finger

  and lock of hair.

  But I'm a poor Midas to turn her golden,

  make a Helen, grand whore, of this graceless

  girl; the sparrow that died was only

  a sparrow:

  Though in the dark, she doesn't sleep.

  On cushions, embraced by silk, no lover

  comes to her. In the first light when birds

  stir she does not stir or sing. O eyes can't

  focus to this dark.

  Here the “lie” was doubly removed, hiding behind the artifice of modified sapphics and a “mistress” while the true subject was the death of my sister. Though this poem required a great deal of care and close attention I didn't consciously realize it was about my sister until it was finished.

  While I realize that all of my poems are at least nominally autobiographical, containing events or visual images drawn from life, the above three poems show distinctly different aspects of the use of autobiography. The unanswered question is why a poet transforms experience, not so much to make it understandable, but to make it yield its aesthetic possibilities.

  "What is”

  hisses like a serpent

  and writhes

  to shed its skin.

  ROBERT DUNCAN

  A poet needs primarily an extreme vulnerability to his psychic moods—his trade is his “selfness.” I think that the dangerous aspects of this vulnerability quite clearly illustrate the basic steps of the creative process. Earlier in my life—between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four—I had a tendency to hallucinate during periods of stress. Though I recognized later that to hallucinate is at the very least clinical, I don't remember being disturbed at the time; I was interested in being a poet and anything my mind cared to do fascinated me, especially if it seemed gratuitous like a hallucination. Here are a few of them in capsule form:

  Everything is a perfect blackness. There is a small yellow dot in the lower left-hand corner. I move toward the yellow dot until it enlarges into a door. I pass through the door into a large bright yellow room and out through another door into a violently green landscape. Hundreds of animals are drinking milk from a great wooden bowl; wolves, snakes, lions, hyenas, cats, pigs, elephants. I see them individually, down to the small veins in their eyes and their milk-wet muzzles.

  I'm walking in a large city at night and it begins to rain. I hurry down a dark alley and into a door. I am in a dimly lighted room. A man stands in the corner holding a baby which he drops to the floor where it breaks like a melon. I look up but the man is gone, then back down but the baby is no longer there. I turn to leave but the door is gone and with it the room. I try to touch myself but I no longer seem to exist.

  I am walking toward a stone pile on which several huge snakes are sleeping. As I draw closer the snakes seem to shrink but then I realize I am growing larger. I kick the stone pile away and let myself down into a hole. I sink slowly, noticing the texture of earth on the way down. I pass through gradually lessening stages of red heat then descend from pink to a total whiteness.

  Of course even a neophyte Freudian understands the basic processes of fantasy. I don't pretend to be able to interpret the above and I am not interested in doing so. They always occurred in periods of unrest, anxiety, a feeling of being totally out of place; they are visual, metaphorical solutions to the stress. Immediately after any single one of them took place I felt at peace for days; the world became sweet and animate, everything was endowed with personality.

  The conception of a poem always has begun with a visual image during this time of unrest. The unrest may have covered a month or so or have been only an hour in duration. The first image is scarcely ever as involved or complete as those mentioned in the hallucinations, but then rarely is the stress ever as violent or clinical. For instance, the writing of this paper made me feel immoderately out of focus. At this juncture in the paper I wrote a brief, first draft of a poem, or what might become a poem after revision:

  too cold for late May, snow flurries,

  warblers tight in their trees, the air

  with winter's clearness, dull clear

  under clouds, clean clear bite

  of cold, silver maple flexing in wind,

  the sky a pale shell, luminous,

  wind rippling petals, ripped from

  flowering crab, pale pink against

  green firs, yellow green leaves,

  sky colorless, pearl cold,

  the body chilled, blood unstirred,

  blood thickened with frost. Body be snake,

  self equal self to ground heat,

  be wind cold, earth heat,

  bend with tree, whip with grass,

  move free clean and bright clear.

  The inception of a poem doesn't keep hours; there is always the element of surprise. For a period of time I seemed to get most of my “beginnings” while driving; when I began to carry a notebook in anticipation nothing happened. Then I left the notebook out of the car and pretended, to whom I don't know, that I had no writing materials. But then nothing happened, nor has it since in a car. These may seem like absurd lengths but I've never met a poet who wouldn't go at least this far to be ready for a poem.

  Usually I try to set aside a regular time each day for my work and part of this time is spent in “waiting.” Most often it is fruitless and I revise other work or write down what prove to be mildly silly notations on art or the world at large. Sometimes I am too frenetic and force the issue, creating a dead, futureless, prosy imitation of a poem, Just as often I generate an air of expectancy, and ideas seem to rush through my head but they are simply ideas. I have described this process in “Exercise” though at the time I failed to realize exactly what I was talking about; the poem was named months after the date of composition:

  EXERCISE

  Hear this touch: grass parts

  for the snake,

  in furrows

  soil curves around itself,

  a rock topples into a lake,

  roused organs,

  fur against cloth,

  arms unfold,

  at the edge of a clearing

  fire selects new wood.

  One's aesthetic convictions trap the poem. Rather than consciously and rhetorically describing the poem, the subject buried itself and came up in the guise of a snake, soil, splash, sex, rubbing, and then fire.
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  Another rather simple poem of mine, “Complaint,” expresses a different aspect of the process—that of being so weak-minded when the poem does come that you wish it would leave you alone and write itself:

  COMPLAINT

  Song, I am unused to you—

  when you come

  your voice is behind trees

  calling another by my name.

  So little of me comes out to you

  I cannot hold your weight—

  I bury you in sleep

  or pour more wine, or lost in another's

  music, I forget that you ever spoke.

  If you come again, come with

  Elias! Elias! Elias!

  If only once the summons were a roar,

  a pillar of light,

  I would not betray you.

  Often there are unpleasant qualities—your brain becomes peopled with the “a-zoological” beasts that Robert Graves spoke of in The White Goddess:

  SHE

  Who is this other

  without masks, pitiless?

  A bald eye in a dump,

  a third rail type who loves

  the touch of flesh,

  the bare thigh in a cafeteria

  crying mercy to the stone?

  Unlyric, she coils and strikes

  for the sake of striking.

  Or as in the last part of “Three Night Songs” there is nothing but the imagination gone amok, when the small god in you hee-haws and thumbs his nose:

  The mask riddles itself,

  there's heat through the eye slits,

  a noise of breathing,

  the plaster around the mouth is wet;

  and the dark takes no effort,

  dark against deeper dark,

  the mask dissembled,

  a music comes to the point of horror.

  The joy after the first draft is completed is very acute; there is mental exhaustion but it is similar at times to the suspended, relaxed state one feels after making love. A poem seems to condense the normal evolutionary process infinitely: There is the distressed, nonadaptive state; an unconscious moving into the darkness of the problem or irritant; a gradual surfacing, then immediate righting or balancing by metaphor, as if you tipped a buoy over by force then let it snap upwards; the sense of relief, and the casting and recasting the work into its final form. The last stage “calcifies” or kills the problem and you are open to a repetition of the process, though not necessarily willing. Though this is all rather simplified, it captures, I think, the essence of the process. There must be the understanding of time lapse though—the “gradual surfacing” may take months, the space between the first sketch and final form an even longer period of time.

  The most beautiful description of this process I am familiar with was written by Garcia Lorca in his “The Poetic Image in Don Luis de Góngora.”

  The poet who embarks on the creation of the poem (as I know by experience), begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests. Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart. To reassure himself—and it is well that he do so—he drinks a glass of clear water and inscribes senseless black flourishes with his pen point. I say black because—I say this in strictest confidence—I never use colored inks. Then the poet is off on the chase. Delicate breezes chill the lenses of his eyes. The moon, curved like a horn of soft metal, calls in the silence of the topmost branches. White stags appear in the clearing between the tree trunks. Absolute night withdraws in a curtain of whispers. Water flickers in the reeds, quiet and deep. . . . It is time to depart. It is the moment of risk for the poet. He must take out his map of the terrain into which he will move and remain calm in the presence of the thousand splendors and the thousand hideous masks of the splendid that pass before his eyes. He must stop up his ears like Ulysses before the Sirens and discharge all his arrows at living metaphors, avoiding all that is florid and false in their wake. The moment is hazardous if the poet at this point surrenders; should he do so, the poem would never emerge. The poet must press on to the hunt single-minded and serene, in virtual camouflage. He must stand firm in the presence of illusions and keep wary lookout for the quivering flesh of reality that accords with the shadowy map of the poem that he carries. At times, he will cry out loudly in the poem's solitude, to rout the evil spirits—facile ones who would betray us to popular adulation without order or beauty or aesthetic understanding. . . . It was Paul Valéry, the great French poet, who held that the state of inspiration is not the most advantageous one for the writing of poetry. As I believe in heaven-sent inspiration, I believe that Valéry is on the right track. The inspired state is a state of self-withdrawal, and not of creative dynamism. Conceptual vision must be calmed before it can be clarified. I cannot believe that any great artist works in a fever. Even mystics return to their tasks when the ineffable dove of the Holy Ghost departs from their cells and is lost in the clouds. One returns from the inspired state as one returns from a foreign country. The poem is the legend of the journey. Inspiration furnishes the image, but not the investiture. To clothe it, it is necessary to weigh the quality and sonority of each word, coolly, and without dangerous afflatus.

  Bad poets imitate; good poets steal.

  —T. S. ELIOT

  I think there are two rather definite kinds of influence, which in turn join to make a third: a direct technical influence, a professional process of acquiring skill by studying the skilled; the influence of the totality of another poet's way of seeing, a moral impression; the rare combination where the poet's content and way of saying both hold radical interest. In the first category—one must remember that there are gradations—I place poets such as Coleridge, Eliot, Pound, Hardy, Wallace Stevens, and to a lesser extent Robert Lowell; I've admired and taken advantage of their skill at using certain stratagems, though “what” they have to say holds little interest for me. At the other pole, artists like Christopher Smart, Blake, Whitman, Lawrence (the poetry), and among contemporaries, Patrick Kavanaugh and Robert Duncan, have had some effect on me in the moral sense though they lack technical interest. Of course some poets have seemed to me masters in both categories: Homer, Catullus, Chaucer, Villon, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, Yeats, and to a lesser extent, García Lorca, Neruda, Apollinaire, Char, Trakl, Pasternak, and Roethke.

  An influence may not be obvious in a poet's work—when it is of a moral nature it rarely is. Influence is like a bouquet garni in a stew—without it the flavor would be bland and probably boring, though it cannot be confused as the main substance of the dish. I've mentioned that the third part of my “Sequence of Women” was written in modified sapphics, an ancient meter essentially foreign to our language but possessing a bittersweet, dolorous, descending rhythm appropriate to the death of a young woman. In addition, the formalism of the meter enabled me to counter directly a difficult subject; good poems simply aren't written with heart in hand.

  REVERIE

  He thinks of the dead. But they

  appear as dead—beef-colored and torn.

  There is a great dull music

  in the ocean that lapses into seascape.

  The girl bends slowly

  from the waist. Then stoops.

  In high school Brutus

  died upon a rubber knife.

  Lift the smock. The sun

  light stripes her back. A “fado” wails.

  In an alley in Cambridge. Beneath

  a party's noise. Bottle caps stuck to them.

  I don't think “Reverie” is a particularly good poem but it marked a significant advance in technique for me. If a modern poet views the world as horribly rended, maniacal, frenzied, death-born, he can't simply say “the times are out of joint” and make it stick. The subject has been worked over countless times and orthodox treatments of it have become vapid and boring. I tried to express it dramatically, with rapid shifts, jerkily as if the world were being felt through a slide projector: the first couplet expresses
the usual theme of violent death, then moves on into the second where we have urban man's enervation with nature to which he brings only his fatigue—driving through it at top speed in a boat or car. I wrote the poem after reading two Spanish poets, Vallejo and Otero. Though I did not compose it with them in mind I saw afterwards that I had adapted their ability to treat boredom and death as sensual objects. In a recent poem I have carried the technique even further:

  NIGHT IN BOSTON

  From the roof the night's the color ‘

  of a mollusc, stained with teeth and oil—

  she wants to be rid of us and go to sea.

  And the soot is the odor of brine

  and imperishable sausages.

  Beneath me from a window I hear “Blue Hawaii.”

  On Pontchartrain the Rex Club

  dances on a houseboat in a storm—

  a sot calms the water without wetting a foot.

  I'd walk to Iceland, saluting trawlers.

  I won't sell the rights to this miracle.

  It was hot in Indiana.

  The lovers sat on a porch swing, laughing;

  a car passed on the gravel road,

  red taillights bobbing over the ruts,

  dust sweeping the house,

  the scent of vetch from the pasture.

  Out there the baleen nuzzles his iceberg,

  monuments drown in the lava of bird shit.

  I scuffle the cinders, the building doesn't shudder

  they've balanced it on rock.

  The Charles floats seaward, bored with history.

  Night, cutting you open

  I see you're full of sour air

  like any rubber ball.

  Here the influence, though not explicit, is a combination of technique and moral impact. I have long admired poets like Apollinaire, García Lorca and Iraki whose modernity rests in the colors of their metaphor, not stated rationally as with the poets of the academy, but a physical knowledge exuding from the emotional impact of their persons.