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Elizabeth Austen, The Girl Who Goes Alone

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THE GIRL WHO GOES ALONE, Elizabeth Austen. Floating Bridge Press, 909 NE 43rd St, #205, Seattle, WA 98105, 2010, 40 pages, $12 paper, www.floatingbridgepress.org.

I was excavating shelves, looking for a more recent Floating Bridge chapbook—which I know I purchased last year—and I turned up this one. Yes, I read it a long time back, with pleasure, but it hasn’t ever made it onto the blog. So, here we are, another book about a poet, walking.

The Girl Who Goes Alone won the Floating Bridge chapbook award and was Elizabeth Austen’s poetry debut. Since 2010 she has gone on to write several books, including the full-length Every Dress a Decision (2011). She served as Poet Laureate of Washington State from 2014-2016. She is an acclaimed teacher and speaker. Her poems capture the “trance-like tidal pull / of sweat and flesh” (“For Lost Sainthood”), while at the same time eluding any grasp. Dave Meckleburg described The Girl Who Goes Alone as “an excellent feminist manifesto,” that “becomes a guidebook through the wilderness of being human that anyone can use.” Exactly.

In the title poem, warnings abound, “girls outside aren’t safe,” “Girls must be chaperoned”:

Tell someone you’re going into the woods alone
and they’ll fill your ears with every story they’ve ever heard
about trailside cougar attacks, cave-dwelling misogynists
lightning strikes, forest fires, flash floods
and psychopaths with a sixth sense of a woman alone in a tent.

But, this girl? She goes everywhere. (You can hear Austen read this poem at her website.)

Consequence

In case the river calls me, I carry
two stones. But this is a lie, Virginia.
I have only enough courage to carry on.
These stones are nothing more
than pocketed threats. I am not
anyone I expected to be.
Give me some message, dreamer
or give me back my sleep. Are we here
by grace? Virginia, you knew
the consequence of silence.
This page is the only prayer I know, the line
I follow into darkness. Is there anything
the body, the breakable body
can say or save?

—Elizabeth Austen

Learn more about Austen’s awesomeness at Pictures of Poets, https://wapoetlaureate.org, or her website. Be sure to check out some of her videos!

Harryette Mullen, Urban Tumbleweed

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URBAN TUMBLEWEED: NOTES FROM A TANKA DIARY, Harryette Mullen. Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, MN 55401, 2013, 127 pages, $15 paper, www.graywolfpress.org.

In 2020 I mentioned to a friend that I had been writing poems about my daily walks, and she dug around in her bookbag, pulled out Urban Tumbleweed, and gave it to me on the spot. At home, I read a page or two, here and there, and then put it away “for later.” I am really, really glad that I took it down this morning. Although individual tankas can delight—

The determination of a turtle
clambering out of a pond, up the slippery
side of a rock to rest in the sun. (p. 18)

—I discovered further pleasures by reading it all the way through at one go.

At the entrance to the botanical garden,
a sign hung on the gate forewarns: “Slow down.
Watch for turtles on the roads and paths.” (p. 47)

Mullen explains her project in the foreword:

My tanka diary began with a desire to strengthen a sensible habit by linking it to a pleasurable activity. I wanted to incorporate into my life a daily practice of walking and writing poetry. As committed as I am to writing, I needed a break in my routine, so I determined to alter my sedentary, unconsciously cramped posture as a writer habitually working indoors despite living here in “sunny California.” (p. vii)

A professor of creative writing and African American literature at UCLA and the author of seven more conventional poetry books (notably, Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was a finalist for the National Book Award), Mullen adapts the traditional form of the Japanese verse of thirty-one syllables (originally printed as a single line of text, in English generally broken into five lines of 5-7-5-7-7) to suit herself. Each of her tankas is close to 31 syllables, but rendered in three lines. The main point was to walk, pen and notebook in her pocket, each day writing a single observation:

Another goal was to address the question, “What is natural about being human?” While Mullen’s observations are often about the natural world, they don’t stray far from newspaper stories, bus riders, and trash.

Along the roadside, someone has spilled
pink Styrofoam peanuts. They add color
to the grassy green, but I still prefer flowers. (p. 13)

Ha-ha-haw-haw, the dark bird’s rowdy laughter
as it flew over the heads of earthbound
pedestrians who didn’t get the joke. (p. 115)

In The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice, Tony Hoagland asks a question I’ve been pondering this month:

What do we want from a contemporary poetic voice? One good answer to that question is that we want to feel that we are encountering a speaker “in person,” a speaker who presents a convincingly complex version of the world and of human nature. When we commence reading a poem, we are starting a relationship, and we want that relationship to be with an interesting, resourceful companion. (p. 5)

I find that this is also true with an entire book of poetry. And even when I start out with some reluctance, I find that if I keep going I inevitably begin hearing the poet’s voice, maybe trusting it, definitely glimpsing the world through new eyes. At least, that’s how I felt this morning, reading Harryette Mullen’s 366 tankas. I have a feeling that her journey, in writing the poems, was much the same.

Although I don’t expect that I will soon burst into a book-length experiment with the tanka, I have decided to start carrying a notebook on my walks.

To read more about Harryette Mullen, follow this link.

Lorna Goodison, Turn Thanks

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TURN THANKS, Lorna Goodison. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1999, 95 pages, $15.95 paper, https://www.press.uillinois.edu.

The first two sections here (of four) are stories set into lines—stories of her family and gratitude, too. You kind of have to enter them with an open mind. And when you do, the wealth of images and playfulness of the language begin to find you.

Several poems celebrate place rather than ancestry. A poem ultimately about Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean begins: “There is a perfume rising off the sea today. / A scent of almond top notes and base notes of ambergris”; and culminates:

I think about Columbus and how he thought at first

these islands would be a source of gold,
of cotton and mastic, aloes, wood, and things invaluable

to him, poor thing. That sweet smell rising off the sea today.
May the perfumed tides wash my people now bright berries.

It’s clear what the better bounty is—a landscape and seascape rich in sights and scents, plenty, for those able to value it.

And then there’s the section, “The Mango of Poetry,” which addresses a number of poets, including Yeats and Akhmatova, and artists, too. Another sort of ancestry. (My attempts to categorize this book keep falling apart.) In the last section, “God a Me,” lyrical poems abound.

The poem I’m sharing is my favorite in the collection, the first in the book, and the first in an unnumbered sequence of three poems for her mother.

After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down

August, her large heart slows down then stops.
Fall now, and trees flame, catch a fire and riot

last leaves in scarlet and gold fever burning.
Remember when you heard Bob Marley hymn

“Redemption Song,” and from his tone and timbre
you sensed him traveling? He had sent the band home

and was just keeping himself company, cooling star,
sad rudeboy fretting on cowboy box guitar

in a studio with stray echo and wailing sound
lost singing scatting through the door of no return.

When the green goes, beloved, the secret is opened.
The breath falls still, the life covenant is broken.

Dress my mother’s cold body in a deep green gown.
Catch a fire and let fall and flame time come

after the green gown of my mother gone down.

—Lorna Goodison

Turn Thanks returns gratitude even for hatred and ill-use. These poems reminded me to be grateful for the wild woman who shows up, uninvited, “disheveled and weeping.” Who knows from where the next line will come?

To read more about Goodison, see my previous post, or go to Poetry Foundation.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

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THEN COME BACK: THE LOST NERUDA POEMS, Pablo Neruda, trans. Forrest Gander. Copper Canyon Press, PO Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368, 2016, 163 pages, $23 ($17 paper), www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Well. What does one say about Pablo Neruda? Lauded as the greatest poet of the Americas, the greatest poet of the 20th century, influencer of all subsequent generations of … Nobelist … etc. I can’t imagine what I might add.

All I will say is that I attended the Seattle Arts and Lectures presentation of this book — back in those lovely old pre-Pandemic days, and heard a number of the poems, first in Spanish (which was like listening to music), then read by Forrest Gander (a remarkable poet in his own right), the translator. The book is part poetry collection, part artifact, with color plates. It’s funny, and loving, and generally just worth the trip.

I’m compelled to share a scrap from poem #20. Although Neruda died well before our current age of iPhones, it so anticipates our enslavement: “raising my arms as though before / a pointed gun, I gave in / to the degradations of the telephone.” “I came to be a telefiend, a telephony, / a sacred elephant, / I prostrated myself whenever the ringing / of that horrid despot demanded” — and so on (pp. 60-61).

The Prologue, by Gander, is worth reading (and rereading). He tells about how these poems overcame his reluctance to do the translation (“The last thing we need is another Neruda translation.”) And he shares the process with us — not only his encounter with the locked vault of the Neruda archives, but with his own journey through the poems, often hand-written on menus and placemats.

Once I moved through the introductory material and into the poems, it was all over….When the glowing screen revealed the lost poems, hours suddenly clipped by in minutes. I neglected to come in for dinner. The windows opaqued with night. The world hushed as I translated the first three poems. The truth is that I disappeared from myself. I was concentrated entirely into the durable moment of translation — which begins in humility, a sublimation of the self so extreme that the music of someone else’s mind might be heard. And for a while, no remnant of me existed outside of that moment.

— Forrest Gander, “The Prologue”

“For a while, no remnant of me existed outside of that moment.” I can think of no better reason to come to poetry.

17.

I bid the sky good day.
There is no land. It slipped away
from the boat yesterday and last night.
Chile’s been left behind, just
a few wild birds
follow us drifting and raising up
the dark cold name of my homeland.
Accustomed as I am to goodbyes
I didn’t strain my eyes: where
are my tears bottled up?
Blood rises from my feet
and roves the galleries
of my body painting its flame.
But how do you stanch the moaning?
When it comes, heartache tags along.
But I was talking about something else.
I stood up and beyond the boat
saw nothing but sky and more sky,
blue ensured in
a web of tranquil clouds
innocent as oblivion.
The boat is a cloud on the sea
and I’ve lost track of my destination,
I’ve forgotten prow and moon,
I don’t remember where the waves go
or where the boat carries me.
There’s no room in the day for earth or sea.

— Pablo Neruda

Click on the links above to read more about Neruda and Gander. Also, you can find a description of the project and links to the paperback edition at Copper Canyon: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/then-come-back-the-lost-neruda-by-pablo-neruda-forrest-gander/.

Forrest Gander