by Jim Harrison
Oddly enough, it is only in poems
wherein we forget that our feelings
have been deliberately evoked that
poetry as an art justifies itself.
—JAMES DICKEY
FEBRUARY SUITE
Song,
angry bush
with the thrust of your roots
deep in this icy ground,
is there a polar sun?
. . . . . . .
Month of the frozen
goat—
La Roberta says cultivate
new friends,
profit will
be yours with patience.
Not that stars are crossed
or light to be restored—
we die from want of velocity.
And you, longest of months
with your false springs,
you don't help or care about helping,
so splendidly ignorant of us.
Today icicles fell
but they will build downwards again.
. . . . . . .
Who has a “fate"?
this fig tree
talks
about bad weather.
. . . . . . .
Here is man drunk—
in the glass
his blurred innocence renewed.
. . . . . . .
The Great Leitzel
before falling to her death
did 249 flanges on the Roman rings—
her wrist was often raw
and bloody
but she kept it hidden.
. . . . . . .
He remembers Memorial Day—
the mother's hymn to Generals.
The American Legion fires blanks
out over the lassitude of the cemetery
in memory of sons who broke
like lightbulbs in a hoarse cry
of dust.
. . . . . . .
Now
behind bone
in the perfect dark
the dreams of animals.
. . . . . . .
To remember
the soft bellies of fish
the furred animals that were part of your youth
not for their novelty
but as fellow creatures.
. . . . . . .
I look at the rifles
in their rack upon the wall:
though I know the Wars
only as history
some cellar in Europe might still
owe some of its moistness to blood.
. . . . . . .
With my head on the table
I write,
my arm outstretched, in another field,
of richer grain.
. . . . . . .
A red-haired doll stares
at me from a highchair,
her small pink limbs twisted about
her neck.
I salute the postures of women.
. . . . . . .
This hammer of joy,
this is no fist
but a wonderment got by cunning.
SUITE TO FATHERS
For D.L.
I
I think that night's our balance,
our counterweight—a blind woman
we turn to for nothing but dark.
. . . . . . .
In Val-Mont I see a slab of parchment
a black quill pen in stone.
In a sculptor's garden
there was a head made from stone,
large as a room, the eyes neatly hooded
staring out with a crazed somnolence
fond of walled gardens.
. . . . . . .
The countesses arch like cats in chiteaux.
They wake up as countesses and usually sleep with counts.
Nevertheless he writes them painful letters,
thinking of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Gaspara Stampa.
With Kappus he calls forth the stone in the rose.
. . . . . . .
In Egypt the dhows sweep the Nile
with ancient sails. I am in Egypt,
he thinks, this Baltic Jew—It is hot,
how can I make bricks with no straw?
His own country rich with her food and slaughter,
fit only for sheep and generals.
. . . . . . .
He thinks of the coffin of the East,
of the tiers of dead in Venice,
those countless singulars.
At lunch, the baked apple too sweet with Kirsch
becomes the tongues of convent girls at gossip,
under the drum and shadow of pigeons
the girl at promenade has almond in her hair.
. . . . . . .
From Duino, beneath the mist,
the green is so dark and green it cannot bear itself.
In the night, from black paper
I cut the silhouette of this exiled god,
finding him as the bones of a fish in stone.
II
In the cemetery the grass is pale,
fake green as if dumped from Easter baskets,
from overturned clay and the deeper marl
which sits in wet gray heaps by the creek.
There are no frogs, death drains there.
Landscape of glass, perhaps Christ
will quarry you after the worms.
The newspaper says caskets float in leaky vaults.
Above me, I feel paper birds.
The sun is a brass bell.
This is not earth I walk across
but the pages of some giant magazine.
. . . . . . .
Come song,
allow me some eloquence,
good people die.
. . . . . . .
The June after you died
I dove down into a lake,
the water turned to cold, then colder,
and ached against my ears.
I swam under a sunken log then paused,
letting my back rub against it,
like some huge fish with rib cage
and soft belly open to the bottom.
I saw the light shimmering far above
but I did not want to rise.
. . . . . . .
It was so far up from the dark—
once it was night three days,
after that four, then six and over again.
The nest was torn from the tree,
the tree from the ground,
the ground itself sinking torn.
I envied the dead their sleep of rot.
I was a fable to myself,
a speech to become meat.
III
Once in Nevada I sat on a boulder at twilight—
I had no ride and wanted to avoid the snakes.
I watched the full moon rise a fleshy red
out of the mountains, out of a distant sandstorm.
I thought then if I might travel deep enough
I might embrace the dead as equals,
not in their separate stillnesses as dead, but in music
one with another's harmonies.
The moon became paler,
rising, floating upwards in her arc
and I with her, intermingled in her whiteness,
until at dawn again she bloodied
herself with earth.
. . . . . . .
In the beginning I trusted in spirits,
slight things, those of the dead in procession,
the household gods in mild delirium
with their sweet round music and modest feasts.
Now I listen only to that hard black core,
a ball harsh as coal, rending for light
far back in my own sour brain.
. . . . . . .
The tongue knots itself
a cramped fist of music,
the oracle a white-walled room of bone
which darkens now with a greater dark;
and
the brain a glacier of blood,
inching forward, sliding, the bottom
silt covered but sweet,
becoming a river now
laving the skull with coolness—
the leaves on her surface
dipping against the bone.
. . . . . . .
Voyager, the self the voyage—
dark let me open your lids.
Night stares down with her great bruised eye.
I take poetics to be the totality of the principles that guide the content and form of a poem. In the course of a poet's life these principles never cease evolving—their health and usefulness, in fact, depend on their ability to respond to change in his sensibilities. It is absurd to speak of poetics as a fixed thing when it is nearly a daily “add four take away three” process. The first poem in my book was a confession of uneasiness over the volatile nature of poetics:
Form is the woods: the beast,
a bobcat padding through red sumac,
the pheasant in brake or goldenrod
that he stalks—both rise to the flush.
the brief low flutter and catch in air;
and trees, rich green, the moving of boughs
and the separate leaf, yield
to conclusions they do not care about
or watch—the dead, frayed bird,
the beautiful plumage,
the spoor of feathers
and slight, pink bones.
That is, form is a dynamic, alive vehicle within which the poem inseparably occurs and lives, “alive” things which happen and are given shape within the natural ecology of the poet's brain. “Form is never more than an extension or revelation of content.” The dynamic quality of poetics itself comes from the idea that every poet worth the name wishes to forge a “key to a style"—a way of expressing himself equal to his vision.
When I wrote “February Suite” I was searching for a way to handle a larger body of experience without losing the intensity of the short lyric. Rilke discusses a number of times in his prose the necessity of working in forms and with subjects appropriate to the condition or degree of one's talent—no one “begins” a career with a Duino Elegies. I had also been impressed with the contention of the late T'ang poets that most things worth saying could be said within eight lines. But my mind had begun working in a new way and the ideas and images that presented themselves could not be expressed within the confines of a short lyric. Quite by accident I came upon the idea of a “suite” in the work of William Carlos Williams; I immediately recognized this form as a probable solution to my dilemma, though it took a number of months to become fully accustomed to its subtleties.
The impulse behind “February Suite” was that I am a seasonal creature—a characteristic I'm sure I share with others. Certain states of mind have always been peculiar to certain months with me; the month of February and at least the first half of March have always been absolute losses as far as any new work is concerned. I wanted to create this total mood, rather, make a mood insist upon itself. Each part of the poem was intended to serve as a wedge, suggesting directly the entire texture of the month—the damp, cold melancholy, the general inactiveness, the sense of being mentally impacted, each day becoming only vaguely lighter, the false starts.
After the poem was finished I returned to shorter lyrics. When the book manuscript was accepted by the publisher and I was deliberating my next move, ideas again began coming that demanded a longer form, often beginnings of poems that I had rejected in the past for lack of a proper vessel. I worked on “Suite to Fathers” over a period of five months; when it was finally finished, rather, abandoned to be published in its present form, I conceived of five more in a single evening, blocking them out as best I could in so short a time. My excitement was so intense that I later had difficulty deciphering my normally orderly handwriting.
“Suite to Fathers” seems by far my most complicated, perhaps sophisticated, poem to date. The idea that something exists which we name a father, or more exactly, the quality of “fatherness,” has always troubled me. I suppose this might be psychologically transparent; it is, in fact, difficult to write such a poem being even mildly conversant with Freud. But such knowledge colors the treatment rather than paralyzes the subject; it was so urgent to me that any block was burned away in the process of composition.
In the first section I attempted to focus on the presence of Rilke and somehow dispel the power he seemed to have over me; much of what I feel about the writing of poetry had been fathered by him and this had become disturbing to me. I wanted literally to “kill him off” and gain my freedom from his powerful temperament. When I finished the section I noticed that though I had been laconic and generally sarcastic about his weaknesses, the whole thing had a Rilkean aura to it, of surfaces vaguely disturbed covering a pitchy darkness. The second part deals with the temporary insanity I felt after the death of my father; the terrible sense of freedom and loss of comfort and advice. The third part deals with the gradual sense of the self becoming its own father, of the poet as some sort of androgynous beast, constantly making his mind over in new images in order to insure his fertility as a poet.
The poem has the natural organization offered by the unity of content, assuming of course that I have forced the reader to follow me. This is a primary nightmare only removed by the sense of having done one's best, of having exhausted the equipment to make the poem work. The first two sections contain thirty-three lines, and the last, thirty-four. I set this arbitrary limit for no reason I can think of, not certainly for the trinity or in favor of any grand design.
As a poet I am conscious that I work within the skeleton of a myth for which there is no public celebration. If a poet has no particular current public importance it is because he has lost or given up his secondary or peripheral occupations—those of priest, buffoon, praiser of kings and governments and noble ladies. But he has not given up what runs through all great and good poems, his fundamental “humanness” which he holds like a public charge though with little public, his will to catch, focus and make song out of man and nature.
It is usual for the critic to worry about the continued health of the poet and poetry—somewhat in the manner that the ornithologist worries about the strange, rare ivory-billed woodpecker that has doomed itself by limiting its diet to a particular grub which in turn is being gradually destroyed by insecticides. But the act of poetry depends on what Freud called the “primary process"—I think—and is too basic to be removed by any imagined or increased neglect, much less an adverse environment. It is beefsteak, not caviar, both a way of being and a way of doing, a religious and a natural act.
The sense of play that a poet needs to make language an ally—often thought of as congenital insincerity by the public—provides the at least momentary pleasure of creation; the sense of having a foothold, if not full membership, in a guild as old as man. The child who carves a tombstone or rock out of a bar of soap knows some of this pleasure. In that language is the most commonly used medium, it is the most whorish and unyielding, the most difficult to make memorable. When we attempt to explain the processes and origins of poetry, we trip on our circular logic, on causality—if we are thus sure why can't we proceed and create at will? It is because poetry is both a dialectic and a rite, a living metaphor of the hunt, not to kill but to hold and caress. Each creature requires a new stratagem, though the stalk remains a constant. This small portion of mystery is disturbing. There is in the poet something of the magician, the arcane. He even suspects the goose might cease laying the golden eggs if he is watched, or watches himself too closely.
I have included a few selections from my notebooks to give a larger sense of background, to hint at the often vague sort of mulling that occurs before a poem is conceived. The selections are from notebooks concurrent with the writing of the poems in this paper. The notebooks, naturally, are vastly greater in size than the poems.
The fear of being left permanently in a mental state whe
re art means nothing.
You ripen despite history, indifferent to it. The cursed fig tree, the cruelty of the Gospels. My boring Protestant guilt about naps.
Writing letters as a way of getting ready, calisthenics, or more accurately, foreplay: still the poems must be dragged reluctantly out of silence. Char says “to be there when the bread comes fresh from the oven.”
The question of what is classic is not to be solved metrically.
Remy de Gourmont says that “All birth pangs are painful, especially those of intelligence. Nevertheless the creative gives transports of enthusiasm and divine inebriations.”
To pass your time in the highest appreciable form for saying anything, over that of music, paint, architecture, film—but also the most corroded since the medium is so basic, open to all the corruption of humanness but also more directly attuned to human possibilities.
The poem that began to come—that you weren't ready for, that you didn't listen to, that you rendered dishonestly—probably won’t repeat itself.
Carolers with cold hymnals, words of glass and snow.
He has a lead, a trite clue which he follows out of curiosity, a chore that becomes sacred.
The depth of Rilke—"Consider, the Hero continues, even his fall was a pretext for further existence.”
Purl sweet, dulcet sounded milk of names. Shawnee. Arapaho.
Li Po a ruthless drunk, brown teeth and saggy eyelids, his western laughter a Dog Star not to steer by but to glitter distant as a god.
To scorn intervals.
The voice must become prodigal, mangled, intolerable.
Lorca—"I am neither all poet, all man or all leaf, but only the pulse of a wound that probes to the opposite side.”
I am no more than an apprentice but at last I have accepted it.
To catch the moment when the thorn enters the skin.
The economy of a rock, holding water beyond its use.
The arrogance of the solitary waits upon the sublime—she must be stalked with cunning.
He wants to build but has not time to lay the individual brick—to cover oneself with the skins of animals, guises, in order to leap, fly, not walk.
Josephson says that Rimbaud is avoided because he made the writing of poetry too dangerous.
The lesson of imprecision: the poet has to be a butcher, a hunter, a soldier, a baker, a candlestick maker—in other words an artisan of dough and wax, death and frosting.