Poems I’ve Loved: May 2019

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
—Faulkner, Light in August

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“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine, from her collection Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press.

“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine is a poet whose work I came to (and who I had the good fortune of meeting) in grad school; but I was younger then, and silence outside my own bothered me more. As I age, I’m finding I’m more comfortable with less said, and though I sometimes lean toward (or on) her more traditional (narrative, explicable, punctuated) poems, I’ve come to love her work. It’s an earned love, entered into with mutual respect and trust over time; to leave so much to the imagination, so much possibility, for the reader, so much space for our subconsciouses to fill in and potentially drown her sharp-quiet thoughts on the page, is certainly an act of respect and trust.

But this isn’t to say these poems are without a dramatic pulse. To the contrary. In a world of jeering, a whisper can be twice as terrifying as a scream, and there is much more in less but an honest-less than in confident hyperbole.

This poem is a little bit more “accessible” than the typical Valentine, even in Shirt in Heaven, a book about memory and grief, and how we never really leave either, but maybe it’s because there’s a comfort in the company.

This elegy doesn’t reveal itself as an elegy until the last stanza. Before, it’s about mis-belonging, about trying to figure out or locate the parts of the self (the parts “like dogs,” “like trains leaving,” “like a gun”). What is a self, a person, made of? And if we’re made of all these parts that only appear at night, or that leave, or that threaten or protect (or both), all these parts that change, how do we keep a hold on ourselves? How do we keep it together?

This poem begins with questions, maybe rhetorical, maybe wanting affirmation from this person who, we later learn, has died. “Am I this? Am I that? Aren’t I like this and this and part that?” The speaker using “Isn’t” instead of “Is” makes for leading questions; a belief that there is indeed something in her like a gun. (It’s the difference between someone asking you “Do you think it’s rude to …?” and “Don’t you think it’s rude to … ?” The “not” implies that the person asking expects you to agree.)

At any rate, the speaker’s sure what kind of person she wants to be but isn’t: the loud squirrel that begs at the porch. And I wonder, what is it about that squirrel’s existence that’s desirable? That its desire is so out-in-the-open?

And here, where she might lose me (and also maybe because I tire of repeated words joined by an ampersand, which seems a little Literary for me), she does the oddest, most beautiful thing. It’s not just us creatures (the speaker, the dogs, the squirrel, bees) who want something (wanting having a double meaning of desiring and lacking); even the inanimate objects might: “wooden planks, / wanting something.” But what could wooden planks want? “To go back into / a tree?”

These two lines contain all the magical thinking of a great grief or great children’s book–a depth and humor and achy longing that have kept me renewing this book to re-read this poem. Here is where the speaker reveals herself and the poem turns: It’s about wanting to return to a place and time that are gone, about being without a path back.

Except in art, where we can hold on, keep the dead living. In this way, the poem is an ars poetica (a poem about poetry), which I usually despise, because they’re often highfalutin and either don’t make much sense to me or, conversely, they oversimplistically overstate how poetry changes the world. Yet, I like Valentine’s message here because it isn’t so hopeful as resurrection. It’s sad, like being the last customer to leave the bar is sad, like waiting for a phone call is sad; an unwillingness to say goodbye. But every miracle is part sad. And yes, this is miraculous, too, that there’s a place available to meet our dead, to grow our planks back into trees that the hungry dogs of us can look to or lie under.

Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats^

This one’s also a poem about memory saves us or about how the false stories we tell ourselves about future possibility save us from the “pavements grey.” I’ve been reading it often to my belly button/kiddo in utero, in hopes they’ll like it when they move out (of my uterus). It feels good to read out loud, especially the part about “the bee-loud glade.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite songs, “Tall Pines,” a bluegrass tune about the memory of home, leaving it, and returning to die, which also is bucolic and recalls the sound of bees, almost as though written from the perspective of Yeats’ speaker if he did return as an older man: “I’ll never forget the morning I left / The hum of the bees in the hay: / The farther I walked, the louder they talked— / How silent it seems here today.” The bee sounds aren’t there; the trees are taller; there’s a gravestone meant for the singer.

Valentine and Yeats don’t attempt what the bluegrass musicians do, or not quite as fully. They aren’t ready for death themselves, despite what they might imply; or ready or not, they go on living. They don’t return to their Lake Isles; they can’t return to their person yet except for in poetry, the writing of which is an embrace of life. (In something as musical as “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the repetition of the poem aloud does this, underscores its vivacity.)

Yeats doesn’t attempt to force the plank into tree; rather, he remains on the pavement, the musicality what allows the memory to dwell so that he can “hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Still, the poet behind the speaker hints to us that this place isn’t real, or isn’t real in the way memory or hope presents it: at noon, the sky is purple, for instance.

Valentine is more outwardly self-aware, she knows she’s clinging, but in her acknowledgement of clinging of distance, isn’t she closer to obtaining the object of her affection, this lost person, through that person’s own words?

Yeats’ speaker embraces memory (and its sister nostalgia) without questioning its illogic; Valentine’s embraces memory despite its illogic, as a means to an end.

And what is it about loss and bees?* Isn’t there something?

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^Hear Yeats read it himself here. (And you can listen to scholars talk about the poem, and “kill it” to understand it, which, sigh, scholarship.)

*Coincidental: Plath wanted her bee poems to be the last in Ariel, though they’re realer (less bucolic) than the bees of the others here; her hives having swarms and stings, unlike Yeats’.

 

Misaphonia and the Needs of an Imperfect Artist

Recently, I discovered a writer I admire (who happens to be a friend) cannot stand mouth noises. For the uninitiated, mouth noises are those ones people make while eating. They include but are not limited to vocalized swallowing, an exhalation of “ahh” after sipping from a Coke, clacking a spoon around in a jaw, or scraping the tines of a fork against a ceramic bowl. When I found out, I howled. Another person on the good side of misaphonia. I also cannot stand mouth noises. Even when my dog makes them. I love dogs with abandon, but no infatuation can overcome this defect. Ask my husband.

When my sister and I want to get on each other’s nerves, we text videos of ourselves, internet animals, or our pets making mouth noises. (Lil Bub is particularly good for this.)

To concentrate, I require silence. Much like the fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock in The Phantom Thread, merely buttering one’s toast too loudly can ruin my whole morning:

“Please don’t move too much.”

“I’m just buttering my toast. I’m not moving too much.”

“You are. Don’t move too much.”

“Maybe you’re paying too much attention.”

“It’s like you just rode a horse across the room!”

(You can read an interview with the sound designer here that is fascinating. Apparently white toast and sourdough are the most annoying.)

I do not want to be this way and work hard not to be, but I cannot deny that my husband has eaten breakfast in the bedroom instead of the dining room for fear of interrupting my writing with crunching or clinking. (And it is hard work.)

In the movie, when Reynolds is hard at work on a wedding dress for the princess, closed in a room by himself for hours on end, Alma, Reynolds’ live-in girlfriend/model/sewist, makes the mistake of bringing him a tray with tea. What would be a kind act for a high percentage of humans is, in fact, an unkind one to someone in a flow-state. Or, as Reynolds says less politely but more succinctly:

“The tea is leaving, but the interruption is staying right here with me.”

Confessing that I relate is embarrassing but also a fact. People who are trained to be sensitive their whole lives (and who often enter creative professions because of this sensitivity) have a tendency to be, well, sensitive.* My sensitivity, which I regarded for most of my life as the worst part about me, is the part that poems and songs and empathy come from. It’s not good or bad. It calls me to who I am. I’m called to observe, so it’s difficult when the task is to ignore or let go.

I think of vocation, which we often call “a calling.” In the South, people often say “God called” them to do a thing, to stop doing a thing. It’s the best shorthand for what’s inexplicable but necessary. What calls you? When that calling is a siren song, the work can be done most intensely, and it’s absorbing but fatal. I once stayed up for three days seaming and rearranging quilt squares and writing poems. I felt satisfied and also like hell afterward. The come down is intense. Still, I miss that feeling. Alma loves Reynolds best in this mode, or maybe better put, is able to love him best then—caring for him, nursing him, snuggling him, being still. When he will not cease, she poisons him with mushrooms. Not enough to kill. She makes him sick so she can make him well. Maybe she makes him sick so he can be well:

“I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open with only me to help. And then I want you strong again. You’re not going to die. You might wish you’re going to die, but you’re not going to. You need to settle down a little.”

It’s in sickness he sees how ugly the dress he’s made for the princess is. It’s in sickness he’s reunited (through hallucination) with his dead mother, whom he’s missed desperately for decades, whom his work honors. Of course, lovesickness is equally torturous and transformative. Figuratively speaking. I don’t plan on eating any questionable fungi.

Our work calls to us, and we need something (or someone) to call us from it.^

It isn’t easy to make space for another love in a life. In mine that’s a husband, a dog, a home. The work—doing it and thinking of doing it and preparing for it and reading for it and finding what belongs in it—can take up ceaseless days. It can take up all the flat surfaces in a house. It can invade meal times and the will to exercise and conversational skills beyond enthusiastic monologues and grunts. The work is selfish; it may be made for consumption but it consumes.

Still, the work, the part of the artist that needs to create, needs a protector. Cyril, Reynolds’ sister, protects his creative space and his time, eating silently, arranging his schedule, and breaking up with girlfriends once he’s through with them. Of course, I don’t mean a woman to deal with all the details; a protector could be a person in your life, or it could be an autoresponder on your emails. It could be Saturdays you’re unreachable. Un. Reachable. It could be as simple as a closed door. But the protector doesn’t suffer the artist’s complaints. The protector wears blood-red nail polish and, just like Alma, will knock the artist out when he tries to argue with her, “Don’t pick a fight with me, you certainly won’t come out alive. I’ll go right through you and it’ll be you who ends up on the floor.” It’s worth noting that Cyril is protecting Alma, not Reynolds, in this conversation.

Cyril likes Alma, in spite of their disagreements; however, Cyril can enter breezily and slam doors, seen as a necessity, while Alma, even tiptoeing or seductive, is seen as interruption. For artists, maybe, or at least for me, the protective part is like a sister, a relative, blood of my blood. We share DNA. The love that interrupts, however, is foreign, my cells don’t recognize it. It’s bewildering and requires attention, attention to its oddity at the very least. Not a muse. A necessary distraction. Or maybe, the work is the necessary distraction.

One kind of love draws us closer to the work, the other away from it. Both knock us out cold when we cross them.

Romantic love, other interests, responsibilities take time from the work, and they may not make the work better. But love demands we rest “open and tender.” It clacks its spoon in its teeth and goes dancing without us if we sketch dresses on New Year’s Eve. And love does respect the work; Alma rescues one dress from a ruinous end.

Rather than a New Year’s resolution centered on productivity, this year, I am wondering how to eat the poison mushroom delightfully and to appease the person who makes my omelet.

Work can draw us inward to the deepest place, protected and dangerous like a fable forest; but something (or someone) else must draw us out—call us out—homeward—serve us a dish we won’t forget.

A garment, a painting, a book; none of it is because of one person’s genius. It’s because of a genius spirit that dead mothers, lovers with toast, sisters with teacups, teams of women in white jackets with pockets for shears, and whole houses foster. In this way, I believe the film can be seen in a feminist light—showing the difficult work many women do to help a man create a single dress (though I’m interested to read more on gender roles in the movie).

Sometimes the myth of the artist, particularly maybe the writer, is one of loneliness. Sometimes I like to buy into this myth. It helps me to believe I’m so good or so rotten, as is my work. But of course a truly lonely person would be unable to write. Literacy necessitates a someone else and a before; it presupposes an after. Sometimes our friends are our sisters, sometimes our lovers, sometimes models or muses or ghosts we can’t conjure. They’re all here. To quote Oprah paraphrasing Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as ten thousand.”

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*This predisposition isn’t an inevitability, however. Sarah Bakewell notes in her biography of Montaigne, How to Live, for instance, “Even when Montaigne went off to his tower to write, he rarely worked alone or in silence. People talked and worked around him; outside his window horses would have been led back and forth from the stables, while hens clucked and dogs barked. In the wine-making season, the air would be filled with the sound of clanking presses.” (173) Terrible. Terrible.

^My husband read this statement and asked, “Why?” I do not know why; I only know this statement to be true. It isn’t as a muse, really, or for amusement—though I’m sure it can be either. I guess maybe to live a life?