W. S. Merwin, 1927-2019

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GARDEN TIME, W. S. Merwin. Copper Canyon Press, Post Office Box 271, Port Townsend, Washington, 98368, 2016, 78 pages, $16 paper, www.coppercanyongpress.org.

When I was in the MFA program at the University of Washington, I helped to bring W. S. Merwin to read as part of our Watermark Series, and I was one of a handful of students to be granted a one-on-one tutorial with him. Born the same year as my father, he wore a logger’s hickory stripe shirt that day, and he had intense blue eyes, like my logger father. I could hardly speak, I was so in awe of him.

I stumbled across this book recently while browsing a small bookstore, and, surprised I hadn’t seen it when it was first published, I grabbed it up. Garden Time, which is time outside of our usual everyday time, is a perfect title. Merwin wrote it—dictating the poems to his wife, Paula—when he was losing his eyesight. Among the 62 short, contemplative poems I could pick out any number of “favorites.” It’s hard not to choose “Pianist in the Dark,” which opens with these lines: “The music is not in the keys / it has never been seen / the notes set out to find / each other / listening for their way.” And these notes:

Rain at Daybreak

One at a time the drops find their own leaves
then others follow as the story spreads
they arrive unseen among the waking doves
who answer from the sleep of the valley
there is no other voice or other time

—W. S. Merwin

An Irish Times reviewer described the poems as “graceful, often stunning,” and, “Focused brilliantly on what we see and how we are seen.” I couldn’t agree more.

Not Early or Late

Is it I who have come to this age
or is it the age that has come to me
which one has brought along all these
silent images on their shadowy river
appearing and going away as the river does
all without a word though they all know me
I can see that they always knew where to find me
bringing me what they know I will recognize
what they know only I will recognize
to show me what I could not have seen before
then leave me to make sense of my own questions
going away making no promises

—W. S. Merwin

Merwin was elected U. S. Poet Laureate in 2010, and was the recipient of two Pulitzers for Poetry as well as many other awards over his long life of writing. Here’s the book page at Copper Canyon, and you can learn much more about his spiritual practices, and gardening practices in this profile at Poetry Foundation.

Maggie Smith, Goldenrod

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GOLDENROD: POEMS, Maggie Smith. One Signal Publishers / Atria (an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.), 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, 2021, 116 pages, $20 hardcover. https://www.simonandschuster.com.

I discovered Maggie Smith through her poetry, so I was surprised when a friend recommended the audio of Smith’s new memoir, You Could Make this Place Beautiful; and, when another friend—hearing that I was writing a blogpost—said, “Maggie Smith, the memoirist?”

Yes, as I’m finding out, but she’s also an award-winning, acclaimed poet.

This month, I have found myself categorizing my favorite poets into groups:

1. The sort of poet who makes me want to hang up my writing cape.

2. The sort of poet whose poems I wish I had written.

3. The sort of poet who makes me race to my desk and begin writing a poem.

Smith is in the last category. She writes about children, about relationships, about living in Ohio (in the U. S., on earth), about aging (though she’s only 46!), and about animals (see “During Lockdown, I Let the Dog Sleep in My Bed Again”). Always with a light, deft touch, always laced with humor, if also regret. So human.

So this morning I wrote one of her poems into my journal, then listed five possible poems I might write. You can join me, your assignment: to write a poem revealing the underside of a clichéd expression.

In the Grand Scheme of Things

It sounds like someone wound up the wrens
and let them go, let them chatter across your lawn

like cheap toys, and from here an airplane
seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely

chalking a line between them. We say the naked eye
as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn’t the world

that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs.
It shows us what it chooses, nothing more,

and it’s not waxing pastoral. There is too much
now at stake. The skeletal rattle you hear

at the window could be only the hellion roses
in the wind, their thorns etching the glass,

but it could be bones. The country we call ours
isn’t, and it’s full of them. Every year you dig

that goddamn rose bush from the bed, spoon it
from soil like a tumor, and every year it grows back

thick and wild. We say in the grand scheme of things
as if there were one. We say that’s not how

the world works as if the world works.

—Maggie Smith

If only I could make it look so simple.

And, by the way, Maggie Smith is an award-winning, brilliant memoirist as well as a poet. Read more at https://maggiesmithpoet.com, and all over the place.

Mark Strand (1934-2014), Dark Harbor: A Poem

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DARK HARBOR: A POEM, Mark Strand. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994, 54 pages, $11 paper.

I forget who told me that I must read this book. I had, previously, read only a handful of anthologized poems by Mark Strand, and decided it was time. And then the book sat on my shelf. Until this morning. Well, until Sunday, when I began it, and Monday, when I utterly failed to “get” it, until this morning when I decided to sit quietly and ask nothing of myself except to reread the book all the way through.

Dark Harbor: A Poem consists of a proem and 45 numbered sections. I knew, from quickly browsing the internet, that it was about death, about loss. I recoiled from it, feeling “the emperor has no clothes.” But rereading it helped me to see the arc of the narrative, how Strand turns aging and death into a journey, escorting us through a geography that is both surreal and familiar. “I would like to step out of my heart’s door,” begins section XVIII, a quotation from Rilke, and continues:

I would like to step out
And be on the other side, and be part of all

That surrounds me. I would like to be
In that solitude of soundless things, in the random
Company of the wind.

On my second, more patient reading, when I reached the last poem—“I am sure you would find it misty here, / With lots of stone cottages badly needing repair. / Groups of souls, wrapped in cloaks, sit in the fields // Or stroll the winding unpaved roads”—I knew this geography, and could feel my own feet on the path.

Strand takes us both forward, into death itself, and backward along corridors of memory opening into the rooms of mature life (sex, wine, music, books), and all the way to childhood, where, frightened, the poet runs from the roar of the ocean into his mother’s arms. In XL, these lines: “And after I go, as I must / And come back through the hourglass, will I have proved / That I live against time, that the silk of the songs // I sang is not lost?” There’s melancholy here, but also a playfulness, poet as astronaut/time-traveler.

Dark Harbor challenged me, made me feel as though I was in graduate school again. At the same time, knowing I would have to write about it made me stretch myself to find a place to stand. I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit this over-the-top review by David St. John, in the Los Angeles Times. Noticing, or letting myself notice, Strand’s poetry—for instance, his use of meter and anaphora (repetition at the beginnings of line or phrases)—also helped.

When I came (again) to part XVIII, with its quote from Rilke, I suddenly knew what was going on (so much so that I turned back to the beginning and began yet again). Yes, this is Earth, perhaps, but brooded over by angels, “Flightless… / Down by the bus terminal, hanging out, / Showing their legs, hiding their wings…” like in the film, Wings of Desire, directed by Wim Wenders…, but, I digress.

Here is one section, from early in the book:

II

I am writing from a place you have never been,
Where the trains don’t run, and planes
Don’t land, a place to the west,

Where heavy hedges of snow surround each house,
Where the wind screams at the moon’s blank face,
Where the people are plain, and fashions,

If they come, come late and are seen
As forms of oppression, sources of sorrow.
This is a place that sparkles a bit at 7 p.m.,

Then goes out, and slides into the funeral home
Of the stars, and everyone dreams of floating
Like angels in sweet-smelling habits,

Of being released from sundry services
Into the round of pleasures there for the asking—
Days like pages torn from a family album,

Endless reunions, the heavenly choir at the barbecue
Adjusting its tone to serve the occasion,
And everyone staring, stunned into magnitude.

—Mark Strand, from “Dark Harbor”

I learned on Saturday that a former colleague of mine, younger than I, and also a poet, a woman I greatly admired, has died. Standing back from this book, I see in retrospect that the news of her death made me reluctant to embrace this poem. She had worked at the college as an adjunct for several years, and I’m proud that I served on the hiring committee that chose her for a full-time position; I remember running poems past each other, back when her office was on the hallway near mine; I regret that I so profoundly lost touch with her. Life is a journey, and our choices can narrow our passage, or expand it.

Mark Strand was one of the greats, with many books, and was elected Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990. His 1999 book, Blizzard of One, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. You can find out more at Poetry Foundation.

 

Monica Sok, A Nail the Evening Hangs On

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A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON, Monica Sok. Copper Canyon Press, Post Office Box 271, Port Townsend, Washington, 2020, 64 pages, $16 paper, www.coppercanyongpress.org.

You know those poems you write into your commonplace book or send to friends when they go through a hard time? The poems in A Nail the Evening Hangs On are not those poems.

“A daughter of survivors” (“Self-Portrait as War Museum Captions”), Monica Sok acts as witness for the Cambodian diaspora. Although she was born in 1990, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and now teaches in California, Sok’s relationship to America feels tenuous, on trial, as she retells, re-imagines, and brings to vivid life the 1970s genocide previous Cambodian generations escaped, and the trauma they brought with them and handed down.

Words such as “unflinching,” “powerful,” and “loss” abound in the reviews. From the cover:

“Embracing collective memory, both real and imagined, these poems traverse time to break familial silence. Through persona, myth, and invention, Sok joins voices and fragments in a transformative work that builds toward wholeness.”

The book is arranged in three sections: the first section is set in Cambodia; the third in the poet’s contemporary life (riddled by memory); the second section is one poem in parts about a visit with a six-year-old to a war museum, Tuol Sleng:

A boy runs through the halls of Tuol Sleng,
his narrow footsteps turn it back into a school.
He checks every classroom for the other kids.
He sits in a chair and waits. When I walk in,
he whispers, ghost.

In short, these poems struck me as both haunted and necessary. By the time I reached the final poem, “Here Is Your Name,” I, too, felt transformed by the poet’s memory, by her powerful witness of war’s legacy.

Windfall

The fishermen, desperate, poisoned them with a cloudy gasoline
so they dropped like apples to the ground underneath a tree.

Except these were birds out of water, the conservationist said.
Sarus cranes, their long legs still wet, were sold for $200 each

at the border market, where Thais bought them and turned around.
After the war, that was how the local villagers made money.

The cranes, near extinction, migrated to waters near a Khmer Rouge holding,
where no one dared go, not that a mandate said keep out, no sign written

in blood. They rationed their food, knowing the pendulum of war
could swing anytime, and they’d need something to eat before evacuating.

They were sure it wasn’t over. Invisible the egrets and ibises, invisible
the forests of the eastern border to the one they shared with Laos.

This is why the wind blows a drought hard across the land, tonnage of life
destroyed in the invisible, invisible land.

—Monica Sok

So there is beauty in this book, but it breaks your heart.

To find more poems by Monica Sok, visit her webpage: http://www.monicasok.com/, or The Poetry Foundation.