lives of the heart

There are a few poets whose work is lodged in my mind for being good introduction-to-contemporary-poetry poets. Their work is undeniably "poetic" but it's still essentially easy to read and doesn't strand an unpracticed poetry reader out in the wilds of language experimentation or the ramparts of political unrest. Sometimes these poets lure their readers in with little lyrical punchlines or gracile phrasings or blatant sexual come-ons. Now that I've been reading really tricky, complex , challenging contemporary poetry for a number of years, I don't often return to these more accessible artists who initiated me into this love of verse when I was a mere fledgling word enthusiast-- a little narrowly-read undergraduate. Frankly, I find work by people like Sharon Olds and Tony Hoagland doesn't give me much to do as a reader. Sadly, much of it bores me now-- it's not that it's easy, it's just that it's easier than I want it to be.

But I do remember my first encounters with Mary Oliver, Jane Hirschfield, Margaret Atwood's poetry (as opposed to her novels, which floored me in high school)-- and even Billy Collins, of whom I rapidly wearied as his poetic practice is so predictable that I began to anticipate his formulae for arriving upon a punchline with something akin to dread. These poets' books were handed to me by professors who saw in me a hunger for poetry rather than a preference for prose based on the I-just-don't-GET-poetry attitudes that most of my 19-year-old classmates espoused. (I don't mean to sound superior here. I remain fully convinced that EVERYONE can GET poetry, if only they make a practice of reading it-- even the really tough stuff. It's just that it takes work that lots of people have no real desire to do. Some goes for the I-just-don't-GET-modern-art attitude.)

In reading my papers and having me blather on through their office hours, these beloved professors also ascertained that I was exasperated by reading so much stuff by dead people-- people who were not experiencing the fin de millénaire woes and worries as those of us currently alive were. I was questioning where my own world and frame of reference fit into the literary landscape. So, my professors started lending me books from their own monograph collections. And Amazon was brand new then, so I could search all the small-press work I wanted! Gloriously, with all the drama of thunderbolts, I realized, "OH! THIS is what it means to be a contemporary poet. Thank fucking god. I don't have to aspire to write like Keats. Or Donne. Or Tennyson."

And I thought maybe I had it in me to be a poet/writer after all. It was a big deal.

So, while I really only return to the works by these poets who first opened little blowholes in my mind when I need the poem for some work-related purpose now, I still read them with a memory of the little bubble of excitement I felt in my chest when I first epiphanized.

Below is a Jane Hirschfield poem that once filled the bowl of my mouth with the spit of wonderment:

The Lives of the Heart

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible;are glassy;are clay;blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle;snort;cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit. .
Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.

Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.,
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy's lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate --violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.

Now, there are lines in this poem that I still find remarkable in their exactitude-- "Can be skinned for garnets," "Go blind in the service of lace," "Are edible; are glassy; are clay; blue schist," and even that opening, "Are ligneous, muscular, chemical." But I also see plenty of flaws in it. It's a pretty poem. It moves with grace and precision. But it doesn't catch me unawares. It shows me something familiar and comfortable, rather than something new or dangerous or norm-defying. It's romantic. It's Romantic. It's even sentimental. I see none of these things in the poetry that excites me now.

When I was thinking about this poem again today, after having fallen so in love with it a hundred years ago, something funny occurred to me. You could remove the title and replace it with any of a number of other abstract concepts and you'd have poem that is just as complete-- just as polished. I'm not sure whether that's one of its virtues or one of its flaws. I mean, instead of "Lives of the Heart," you could call it "Ways People Fuck." It would still make sense (... are ligneous, muscular, chemical...). You could call it "Books in My Library." Hell, you could call it "Wine-Tastings" or "Other Peoples' Heavens." The poem would still be beautiful, graceful... but this idea of mine sure throws my previous assessment of "precision" into question, doesn't it?

In all honesty, this is a game you can play with a whole lot of poems. With anything really. It certainly doesn't make the poem BAD, by any means. It's just that it doesn't show all the cracks and warts of creation that make some of the stuff I prefer to read these days so interesting-- and so peculiar unto itself. It's almost like the poem is TOO smooth, TOO well-crafted. And that, in my mind, is what makes it a merely pretty poem, rather than a devastating one.

You wanna know what else happened when I re-read this poem today? I realized I TOTALLY aped its style in a poem I wrote years after I first encountered this one. This is a thing that happens to voracious readers who are also writers. It's not plagiarism, exactly, but rather like one's internal card catalog gets shuffled and one loses track of where one first heard a certain rhythm, a certain phrasing, a verb used in some novel manner.

I'm fully committed to the notion that you can never become an even passably good writer if you don't read. Read everything. Read all the time. Read a wide range of subjects and styles. If you don't read, you never really internalize the way written language works-- how it is big as oceans and changeable like amoebae. How it's rhythmic. When and where it can be static and why. How it's un-own-able and also completely yours. From reading, sure, you learn about different subjects, but your own sense of language changes, gets shaped. The method through which you order your thoughts takes on new aspects, deepens, becomes more informed, more precise, more -- dare I say-- accurate. And you just never get the same set of benefits from experiments with spoken language alone.

However, one can do so damn much reading that one somewhat gleefully loses track of one's source materials. This is what we like to call "being original." You buying this?

In any case, here's my poem from my graduate manuscript in which I unwittingly echoed one of Hirschfield's gestures (trust me, it was truly unwitting. I really only realized the similarity today-- 5 years after I wrote the thing.) As a point of reference, I should say that this poem was one of a series of formal experiments, using the subject of Southern Cuisine as a lens to discuss race relations-- or, rather, my own questions about what it means to be a white girl from the American south.

Creole

Is born in America or the West Indies of European ancestors, born of the verb criar to create, to be brought up, an African born in tropical countries (this use of the word was not tolerated in New Orleans), is like creole horses, creole chickens, creole figs, characterized by the use of rice; by okra, tomatoes, peppers; by high seasonings,

is born in the West Indies or Latin America, but of European, especially Spanish, descent, characterized by its abundance of sauces with habañeros or Scotch bonnets, is of French ancestry born in Louisiana, is the matrix of nueva cocina Latina, is a Sephardic Jew of the oldest New World congregation in Curaçao,

is of an excluded class of ill-bred blacks, uses nuts as thickeners, tastes as bright as tropical sunshine, is champagne flowing to the tune of accordion and clarinet, is a word used with pride by European colonists, is wherever okra points its green little tip--is where Africa has been,

seasons and colors her food with saffron, turmeric, palm oil, annatto, is of mixed Spanish and Negro ancestry, is of mixed French and Negro ancestry, flows with rum to the beat of steel drums, knows the tastes of the pig and all its parts, penned a recipe for homemade vanilla ice cream in Jefferson's own hand,

is an Alaskan of Russian and Eskimo blood, is a good Gullah mess of Hoppin' John--field peas, hog jowl and if the shrimp is good--is a native born Negro as distinguished from a Negro brought from Africa, is of a class embracing non-white persons of breeding,

is a Sephardic Passover cake made from indigenous peanuts and pecans, held together with molasses, is pudding made from African rice, Aztec vanilla and English method, is born of New World, especially Caribbean, family stock and breed, is a Daufuskie Island Geechee Girl, is Limpin' Susan with okra, bacon and long-grain rice,

is a slave born in his master's house, is the woman tempting you to buy one more praline, one more fish cake, one more fired chicken leg, the woman cooking for her own livelihood, is a word of status among blacks, locally born, and freed men, is born in the colonies of pure French or pure Spanish blood, a Caucasian,

is a word of African origin meaning born in the Indies, to differentiate between those born in Guinea and America, is pork rendered soft with papaya seeds, is a white person born in the colonies,

is English peas, field peas, black-eyed peas, cow peas, peas and rice, rice and peas, beans and rice, red rice, yellow rice, coconut rice, is black beans and white rice from Cuba, moros, y cristianos.

Ultimately, I think my poem suffers from one of the same problems that Hirschfield's does. It's too satisfied with its seemingly exhaustive definition. The lives of the heart do many many things beyond where we land at that poem's end. Same with the concept of Creole-ness. It's just plain not possible to use a poem to try to define a ginormous concept... and then have the poem NOT seem self-satisfied at its completion. However, there are still little bumps and bruises I accrue as I read through my own poem-- issues of class and race, my own conflicted love for the south alongside my gulping, gasping defensiveness with regard to all that's gone wrong in its history-- and what's still wrong with it today-- and how I can't deny any of that.

But, yes, absolutely. I pilfered a stylistic gesture with the amnesia of readerly overload. I then ran someplace quite other with it. Today, however, the reference is clear as an open window to me.

And that's probably why I consider myself much more of a consumer of poetry than a writer of it. And so I have been, even from the inception of my devotion to language in verse form. I can admit to that much.