Crysta Casey (1952-2008)

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GREEN CAMMIE, Crysta Casey. Floating Bridge Press, 909 NE 43rd St, #205, Seattle, WA 98105, 2010. 47 pages, $12 paper, www.floatingbridgepress.org.

Many years ago now, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, I enrolled in an evening class to study the writing of poetry with Professor Nelson Bentley. It was not the usual sort of class. Beginning, intermediate, and advanced poets were all thrown in together, along with a few graduate students. And there were some former students who wandered in and out. Crysta Casey was among this latter group. An unforgettable human being. Poetry, she said, was saving her. Reading her book today took me back.

The Sane and the Insane 

My thoughts are more exciting
when I’m not on meds.
On medication, I think
of vacuuming the carpet
to get rid of any bugs
Bonnie may have left
when she curled into a fetal position
on the rug last Sunday.
At three a.m., she lit
three cigarettes at the same time,
put them in the ashtray
and watched them burn,
said, “Kaw, globble,”
so I called 911. The medics were nice
when they took her to the hospital.
She put on her boots
without socks, did not lace them–
I had to give a poetry reading
the next night. “Don’t rock,”
I reminded myself, “that’s a dead giveaway.”
I think it was Robert Graves who wrote
in The White Goddess, “The difference
between the insane and poets,
is that poets write it down.”

 

Sierra Nelson

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THE LACHRYMOSE REPORT, Sierra Nelson. Poetry Northwest Editions, 2000 Tower St., Everett, WA 98201, 2018, $29, https://www.poetrynw.org/.

Here’s another northwest native, but with an entirely different aesthetic than yesterday’s poet. Elizabeth Bradfield describes the sensibility behind The Lachrymose Report as a “bright, bird-mind” that “sees the world and its questions in the best kind of strange light.” Reading it again today, I felt I was hanging out with a mind at play in the fields–and deep in the mucky ponds–of language itself.

Here’s a sample:

Pilgrimage

Pilgrim–
Awake to bells with no melody or reason.
You were given this tongue and body
and all day long your life rings you,
rings you for what you are worth,
but you can’t hear it amidst the pound
of traffic, heat, and senseless shouting.

Sit down by the fountain
outside the closed church
and listen to water
diffusing into light.

All pilgrims’ feet are painted black.
It is good if you’ve lost something–
your map, your luggage, your companions,
your favorite ring, your last coin,
your metal heart, your language.

Go to the marketplace.
Touch everything, pilgrim.
Let every cloth remind you
that you have hands.

Let your eyes go blind
on their clever toys and cheap purses.
Pay the toll to the King of Fleas,
his plastic cane rapping
on the world’s refuse.

In the heap, find a book of poems
written as if in your heart’s own tongue.
Did you know you were hungry as this, pilgrim,

here by the clamor of handmade wind chimes
and songbirds for a penny? Happy
as you are, despite everything,
cracking open a seed.

 

John L. Wright

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THE LOVELINESS OF THIS WORLD, John L. Wright. Finishing Line Press, PO Box 1626, Georgetown KY 40324, 2020, 36 pages, $13.00 paper, https://www.finishinglinepress.com/.

It is always a pleasure to recommend a local poet. Wright lives in Edmonds and until 1988 was a physician at Swedish Medical Center. I’m so glad he made his way in retirement to poetry, or that poetry made its way to him.

Among many poems taking a fond look at people and dogs he has known  (and many, lost), The Loveliness of this World also catalogs Wright’s walks through a northwest landscape. After I walked at Japanese Gulch in Mukilteo this afternoon, I sat in my car and read this prose poem:

Walking in the Woods without an iPhone

–the red crest of pileated woodpeckers their drumming the whinnying flight of the flicker its white rump the call of the owl the eagle and the quail the basket bark of cedar the insipid taste of salmonberries the wild huckleberry’s tartness licorice fern rooted in the bark of big-leaf maple the purplish blush of alder its hanging catkins the Indian plum its white blossoms the leathery leaves of salal the yellow flowers of Oregon grape the fragrance of evergreen after rain.

Yes, I thought, exactly so. 

Let me add that this poem is not representative of the collection–many beautiful, more conventional poems I could have chosen–but I love the joyful and playful compression of this.

 

Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015)

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THE HALF-FINISHED HEAVEN: SELECTED POEMS, Tomas Tranströmer. Trans. Robert Bly. Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401, 2001, 2017, 118 pages, $16 paper, https://www.graywolfpress.org/.

Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011, and his influence is pervasive. But he is not merely a serious and learned poet, he is also wry and funny and readable. In his 2017 introduction, Robert Bly writes of Tranströmer:

“…he was a genius–for things in human communication that are half-sensed, half-understood, only partially risen into consciousness, liable, like a fish, to disappear into the lake a moment later. If you are addicted to certainty, there’s no point in going toward his poems–they’ll just lead you into islands that disappear a moment later.” (xxiv)

I purchased my copy of this expanded edition of his selected poems when I was in San Francisco last fall, at City Lights Booksellers. I’ve wrestled with what to include here, and have decided on one of the longer poems.

Out in the Open 

I.

Late autumn labyrinth.
At the entry to the woods a thrown-away bottle.
Go in. Woods are silent abandoned houses this time of year.
Just a few sounds now: as if someone were moving twigs around carefully with pincers
or as if an iron hinge were whining feebly inside a thick trunk.
Frost has breathed on the mushrooms and they have shriveled up.
They look like objects and clothing left behind by people who’ve disappeared.
It will be dark soon. The thing to do now is to get out
and find the landmarks again: the rusty machine out in the field
and the house on the other side of the lake, a reddish square intense as a bouillon cube.

II.

A letter from America drove me out again, started me walking
through the luminous June night in the empty suburban streets
among newborn districts without memories, cool as blueprints.

Letter in my pocket. Half-mad, lost walking, it is a kind of prayer.
Over there evil and good actually have faces.
For the most part with us it’s a fight between roots, numbers, shades of light.

The people who run death’s errands for him don’t shy from daylight.
They rule from glass offices. They mill about in the bright sun.
They lean forward over a desk, and throw a look to the side.

Far off I found myself standing in front of the new buildings.
Many windows flowed together there into a single window.
In it the luminous night sky was caught, and the walking trees.
It was a mirrorlike lake with no waves, turned on edge in the summer night.

Violence seemed unreal
for a few moments.

III.

Sun burning. The plane comes in low
throwing a shadow shaped like a giant cross that rushes over the ground.
A man is sitting the the field poking at something.
The shadow arrives.
For a fraction of a second he is right in the center of the cross.

I have seen the cross hanging in the cool church vaults.
At times it resembles a split-second snapshot of something
moving at tremendous speed.