Jayne Marek’s In and Out of Rough Water

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Although Jayne Marek is a relative newcomer to the Pacific Northwest (transplanted from Indiana, where she taught at Franklin College), she is a fast learner. I imagine her striding about the landscape — trails, riversides, boggy acres — notebook, camera, and guidebook in hand — translating all of it into poems and photographs for an eager audience.

In addition to native flora and fauna, she has also made herself at home amid our regional poets. In this poem, she responds to William Stafford’s “Ask Me“:

 

 

 

To Ask Me 

–for William Stafford

I will listen to what he says
in the poem of water and winter,
the ice crust of his judgment.
Wet branches drag into the sweep
of drifts, skirting the oldest tree
in its heaviness of heart. What he meant
shifts all the land around me,
a cold blue wind.

But who can say that hate or love’s
what swings the ice-bound branches
overhead. Can I trust him? —
that secret-heart, that man
of miles of blank fields pressing snow-fences
as if to flatten them —
the truth’s what the black bird says

on its wire:
a path is itself and nowhere.
What our feet can grip,
we may not see. So move.

Jayne Marek, In and Out of Rough Water (Kelsay Books, 2017)

 

Cat Kigerl’s At the Town Cafe

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Having just spent four hours at Urgent Care with my daughter (whose sore knee checked out just fine, after all), and having read my book for today, how much work is it to type up a short poem and add a few links to a blogpost?

My main question with each of the books I have read this month has been, “What can I learn from this poet?” Some have been a stretch (all the more reason to take them on), while others, even while they affirm my own tendency toward place and narrative, show me something new about the line.

Cat Kigerl’s At the Town Cafe is published by Goldfish Press — which is publishing my forthcoming book — and for that reason alone I thought it was worthwhile to spend some time with her poems. Although she hails from northern California, and I have not met her, I knew her name from August postcards.

Kigerl’s first book of poems, Stirring Up the Water, won the Native Writers Circle of the America’s First Book Award. I’m finding a theme in that — and  I took note that one of her poems (“Upon a Farewell”), includes an epigraph from Sam Hamill: “Basho didn’t know a thing about water / until he heard that frog.” Throughout the book, Kigerl shows a willingness to dwell on the particular that reflects the whole.  Her final poem, the title poem, is long (6 sections; 4 pages), but unveils facet after facet (and cat after cat) visible from the town cafe. But here, a short poem, nicely capturing her own Basho-esque vision:

In the Teak-Tinted Light 

What is it about the constancy
of passing days, of each morning’s arrival
with its cloudy skies
its non-promise about tomorrow
in the teak-tinted light?

There is a tranquility
of the tree-shrouded shore
old fancies swaying in an imagined wind
the fluty chorus of morning birds
announcing a hidden sun
edging into the passing moments.

Cat Kigerl, At the Town Cafe (Goldfish Press, 2016)

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Late in the Day

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Although Ursula K. Le Guin died this past January, I would like to argue that we have not lost her voice, or her capacious and expansive soul.

I fell in love with this hardback book, Late in the Day (PM Press, 2016) and its gorgeous cover. Each time I saw it in the bookstore, I picked it up and reread the first poem, this one:

The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House

Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt
worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder
with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when
you feel the subtle central turn or curve
that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,
year after year after year, by women’s hands
that held it here, just where it must be held
to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl
and crush the seeds and rise and fall again
setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song
that worked itself at length into the stone,
so when I picked it up it told me how
to hold and heft it, put my fingers where
those fingers were that softly wore it down
to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,
this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.

Le Guin was best known as a writer of science fiction, but she was also an essayist and a teacher (read her Steering the Craft, for an excellent example). What I notice about this poem, “The Small Indian Pestle,”  is that it is a little craft lesson all on its own. Its 16 lines in iambic pentameter are also a single sentence (the : may be cheating). It doesn’t rhyme, but the words are so strong–“Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt”–and the repetitions are so well-executed that it’s music.

Elsewhere in the book, she plays very deliberately with form and rhyme (and writes about it in a closing essay). I’m going to break with my usual routine and share one more poem, a rhymed one, that touched me in a very deep place.

Between 

Between the acts, the interval.
The leaves were late to fall, this fall.

Between the verdict and the doom,
a whisper in the waiting-room.

A non-event between events
holding a secret and a sense.

A winter wind just whispers where
two winter trees stand tense and bare.

“Between” is deceptively simple. It shows us how one needn’t be showy and ostentatious in order to be profound.

Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes

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I had a lot of driving to do today, and fortunately I  remembered that I have this book, Li-Young Lee‘s Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008), which includes a CD of the poet reading 22 of the poems. So I listened (a lovely experience), and read, too, and eventually made it through the entire book — and it’s 10:30 in the evening (on the 12th, which I thought all day was the 11th) — and I’m exhausted, and I’m very happy to have this book to recommend to you.

This book was given me by a friend, and I swear, I have read it, or read around in it. But I had never sat down and read it all the way through. And I had never been deliberate enough to take the CD out to the car (where I do my book-listening) and actually play it.

I know Li-Young Lee’s work mostly from a “greatest hits” perspective. Reading an entire book of his poetry is a quite different experience. Some of the poems seem remarkably un-poetic, sort of colloquial and mundane. “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees,” for instance, ends with this stanza: “Alone in your favorite chair / with a book you enjoy / is fine. But spooning / is even better.” Had I read just this poem (or such lines), I would have set the book aside with a shrug. But, tasked to read on, I encountered many powerful lines.

Let me say, however, that I think I have a lot of nerve critiquing Lee’s work. He is a master.

And the effect of a book is partly cumulative, of course (as I hope I’ve noted in earlier posts this month). Imagine finding just one Emily Dickinson poem and trying to understand why other people spend their entire life studying her. Anyway, in Lee’s “My Favorite Kingdom,” I found this little sequence of images, which is both simply put and swoon-worthy:

My favorite color is
my father’s apple trees in the rain.

My favorite color
is my father’s pear trees
in a cloud of bees.

So, who really knows what makes one reader yawn, and another sit up straight and listen harder? One has to take the time to sit with a poet to begin to appreciate them properly.

Here is a short poem that — listening to the CD — I knew I had to see on the page. It (too) is deceptively simple, but evocative of so much more.

To Hold 

So we’re dust. In the meantime my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.