A QUIET FROM THE CORE OF TIME: AN INTERVIEW WITH JEFF HARDIN BY LANA AUSTIN
Lana Austin: You write about a profusion of topics, but the natural world, and your sense of wonder about it, is a reoccurring motif. Do you think your family’s long history in bucolic Hardin County, Tennessee is a catalyst for that? What else continues to draw you to the natural world? Jeff Hardin: Much of my childhood was spent in the woods, sometimes for weeks at a time. Family friends owned 2000 acres, and we camped, hunted, fished, and walked all over that corner of southeast Hardin county. Being in nature—far removed from town—imprints upon the mind a deep silence as well as a sense of time as both passing and abiding. In Restoring the Narrative, I have a sonnet about riding an inner tube downstream. A few lines into the poem, I say, The moments felt like retrospect, and my form was fitted to the changing place I made of water heading someplace else. No voice to answer or to reckon with. A quiet from the core of time. And me. So when I speak, sometimes I speak from there, that sense of drifting through surrounded on all sides by wilderness and nothing said. That “quiet from the core of time” stays with me always. It haunts my words. It haunts my heart. What does the self mean? Or, for that matter, what does the mind mean? What does meaning mean? Why am I me, and for how long, and for what purpose? What is this vast quiet through which I drift and out of which I “speak”? If anything, the woods (we never called it “the natural world”) have always been a reminder of eternity eavesdropping on my passing through. Austin: Can you remember the first poem you fell in love with and why? Hardin: I can remember being in the sixth grade and standing on a ladder in my elementary school library, reading poems by William Wordsworth. I’ve returned many times to those opening lines of The Prelude, lines which talk about a breeze and about “blessing.” I grew up in church, so “blessing” was part of my vocabulary even if a lot of other words in Wordsworth’s poem were not. Early on these lines appear: the soft breeze can come To none more grateful than to me I sometimes tell my classes that we are descendants of language—that we issue out of specific words we have read or heard in our lives. Words take root in us. Their seeds bear fruit. I suspect that whoever I have grown to become is, at least in part, traceable to that word “grateful” in Wordsworth’s poem, an idea I later came to know as central to Lou Gehrig’s famous speech, and a word which—when I read it in Mark Jarman’s introductory description of my first book, Fall Sanctuary—literally brought me to tears. From Wordsworth we learn, too, that the child is father to the man, and I often think about how the child I once was, the child I still am, has become a kind of father figure in my life, teaching me how to exist in the world, impressing certain values upon my mind and heart that I am—in unfathomable, incalculable ways—still growing into. Austin: What other poets and poems have been the most influential? Hardin: While in high school, poems like “Fern Hill,” by Dylan Thomas, “Kubla Khan,” by Coleridge, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by cummings, and “The Road Not Taken” by Frost were among the poems that first mattered to me. Their music, I now see, was what held me in a trance. I think they offered me a different way to conceive of myself in the world, a different way to imagine what language could do or be. Once I went to college, though, I found so many poets whose presences of mind have become part of my own being. Among the first influences I found—through literary journals—were poets like Albert Goldbarth, William Kloefkorn, Dave Etter, Richard Jackson, William Stafford, James Wright, and Mary Oliver. Over time, I found poets like Tomas Transtromer, Wislawa Szymborska, Pablo Neruda, Wendell Berry, Gerald Stern, Carl Dennis, Dave Smith, Yannis Ritsos, and countless others. In graduate school in the early nineties, I read Czeslaw Milosz with great affection. In fact, my first book, Fall Sanctuary, begins with a poem that is a response to his poem “A Task.” He says, In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life Only if I brought myself to make a public confession Revealing a sham, my own and of my epoch: We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons But pure and generous words were forbidden Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one Considered himself as a lost man. My poem, “In Fear in Trembling,” (with echoes of Kierkegaard and the Bible) is a way of establishing, to one degree or another, part of what my own poetry hopes to be. I want to speak “pure and generous words,” even if they are “forbidden,” even if they are dismissed or ridiculed; and I refuse to consider myself “as a lost man” in doing so. I’ve written about the idea of joy in a previous interview, but maybe the idea bears repeating: in many ways I think that my own poetry, for almost thirty years now, has been a way to explore joy as if it were a philosophy, as if it were the deepest wisdom we finally reach. In fact, I wrote and then delivered an essay many years ago (at Hillsdale College) about joy as wisdom in literature. Frost says that poems should begin in delight and end as wisdom, but I think that, given the right circumstances, delight is wisdom. Joy is wisdom. Humility, empathy, forgiveness, tenderness—these, too, are wisdom, and sometimes poems can become a way to explore their dimensions. Looking back through my five collections, I might venture to say that joy is the sanctuary within the fall; joy is one of the notes I wish to emphasize within my praise book; joy is one of the ways to restore the narrative; and joy plays a central role in the small revolution I’ve been working to advance for three decades. In my most recent book, No Other Kind of World, why can’t joy be the substance of no other kind of world I can possibly imagine, if only as a way to push back against the world’s horrors, griefs, injustices, hypocrisies, diminishments, disappointments, and decay? When I was 14, my favorite song (“Scarlet” by U2), had only a single word: “rejoice.” I suppose so much of my mind’s structure has been shaped by that song’s arrangement of drums and piano around that defiant and illogical and holy and immense word. Austin: Another compelling facet of your poems is your references to a non-judgmental faith background. How has your faith influenced not only individual poems, but your aesthetic as a totality? Hardin: I’ve always thought that truth is an invitation, not a condemnation. Whatever I am about as a writer obviously has roots in my faith and in my life-long reading of the Bible. Philippians says to think on whatever is true, honest, just, pure, and lovely, and I like to think that anyone who studies my poetry might find evidence that I’ve taken up and meditated upon these words.I’ve done the opposite, of course, as everyone has, but overall poems are a form of prayer for me. The epigraph to Fall Sanctuary is a favorite passage from Luke 24, which states: And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad? This moment occurs on the road to Emmaus after Jesus has risen. In addition to the power of what occurs within the passage, I’ve always thought the language was particularly beautiful and haunting. I chose this passage as a way to frame the argument my poems hope to make—that our language, our communication with others, is incomplete and lacking intimacy because we don’t recognize that we walk in the presence of the divine. In the poem “Non-Person” (from Small Revolution), I state, “If I have set as my task/the overthrow/of a language…” I’ll admit those words sound grandiose, but I’ve always been drawn to the small and large ways that one person’s language can literally change another person’s language. There is a Bible story about how, after a period of time, once the church of Sardis moved in, the Lydians had all but forgotten their old language. That’s an interesting premise to consider. How can a people forget a language? Or does the story mean that they forgot a certain way of speaking, of approaching the world? In “Naysayers,” I say the following: I know we’re long past words like fulfillment, revelation, goodness, humility, but we could always revisit them to see what might have been overlooked. I like the idea of overthrowing a language, of finding a new way to speak to one another, of stepping closer and closer to a boldness about speaking “pure and generous” words within a shared intimacy. As the description on the back cover of Fall Sanctuary states, “These poems demand to know whether joy, reverence, gratitude, and empathy can exist with fullness in an age that privileges irony, suspicion, cynicism, and ridicule…Such is Hardin’s sanctuary, with hymns and prayers voiced unabashedly.” Unabashedly. Again, I refuse to consider myself “as a lost man.” Two decades ago, my wife returned from a conference and told me that one of her colleagues had said, after finding out that I was a poet, “Oh, how wonderful. He must write you love poems all the time.” My wife replied, “No, he doesn’t write love poems.” Of course, I objected and said that all of my poems were love poems! That conversation led to my writing a whole series of poems with titles like “Love Poem for the Absolute,” “Love Poem for the Beginning and End of It All,” “Love Poem for Moonlit Backyard,” “Love Poem for My Being Here at All,” and spacing these throughout Fall Sanctuary. I can’t believe almost two decades have passed since I began those poems, but in recent years, I’ve seen a lot of poets using similar titles with “Love Poem for…” as a stem. At least four books that I know about have featured them as a structuring device. Maybe, in some small way, I altered the language toward love! Austin: You have a recent book out, Small Revolution.Can you discuss the genesis of that book conceptually? How long did it take you to put the book together, from the first poem you wrote until the book came to fruition as a tangible finished product? Hardin: The earliest poems in this collection—several in fact—were written in 2000. The majority of the others were written between 2000 and 2005, with only a few coming along later. The ideas and poems in this collection always mattered to me, even when more than a decade passed and they remained unpublished. I referred affectionately to the book as my subversive naiveté book. I wanted to write poems that began with a small but ultimately complicated premise, a poem that sounded simplistic, even playful, while moving along through considerations and implications and then leaving an aftershock, a torque, an undercurrent. Of course, I tinkered with the book’s arrangement off and on. For years the first poem in the book was “To Fellow Poets” because I liked a particular question in the poem: “Are we burnt out yet on being burnt out?” The poem begins with the idea that “so many of us want despair,” as if out of pain and suffering, out of struggle, we find wisdom. In the poem (and in the book’s arc), I saw myself as a quiet voice asking if we could “be naïve enough/to be naïve again.” That was what I considered to be the “small revolution.” It would begin in being naïve—it would begin with a different language. It would begin with “Yes,” a word of affirmation, a word of agreement, a word of acceptance. Since it would be a “small revolution,” very likely it would go unnoticed. It would be subversive. It would, as I say in the poem “Non-Person,” be whispered, an “insinuation/set loose” and moving freely throughout the world. Somehow stillness would be rhymed “with every other word.” It would fall “in love/with everything/[we] couldn’t see.” It would belong to those who “read by lamplight,/fingers poised to turn a page, lingering there/in the premise-rich quiet between two worlds.” It would blow “seeds into everything” and alter how we live and move and have our being. Later, I liked the idea of beginning the book with “these hostile times” and moving through “the realm of the possible” with stops along the way to visit finches and Neruda’s questions and “so many plurals in a singular self” and all the things that might “aid in our beliefs.” Yes, I’m aware of “the obvious decline/of civilization toward malcontents,” but I still believe in hymn books and all the space inside a Hopper painting and “the hopeful care of others.” I still believe that the great fiction of our “true story” is that we are surrounded by serendipitous moments, which we tell no one about. Instead, we sit down in city diners and speak of sports, weather, and politics, but we don’t say “one word/about moonlight over cornfields/or that small bloom fish make/kissing the sky of their world.” We exist between this world and the next one, yet there is “a gladness” inside us only sometimes we listen toward. I may begin my book with an awareness of “these hostile times,” but I end with “a mouth full of syllables/endless as the leaves from which/I learned to hear applause.” I still believe there is “good news” as the book’s title poem says, and it, too, is part of the small revolution. Had I read only one poem—“From the Pulpit: For the Minister at My Memorial Service”—by Connie Jordan Green, I would consider myself fortunate. The fact that I read it in her presence as she (along with the forty or so fellow writers on the final morning of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival) sat under a tent and sang hymns together will always be a holy moment for me. I can still access the feeling I had as I read a few words, looked up to see her smiling, singing face, looked down to read a few more words, looked up again, on and on until I finished the poem and the song continued. Among such friends, I don’t think anyone noticed my misty eyes or, if they did, there was nothing out of the ordinary about such emotion. Some groups of writers are more like far-flung congregations who gather back together once a year, and Mountain Heritage Literary Festival has its share of “evangelists.” Connie Jordan Green is one of its most important.
FROM THE PULPIT: FOR THE MINISTER AT MY MEMORIAL SERVICE Say here lies someone who was ordinary as maple trees, who went out and came in all the days of her life glorying in the repetitive, hoping for the unexpected, who loved a summer storm rippling the pond’s surface, who sought refuge in the garden, weeds and vegetables numbered as companions, one to test her soul, the other a gift that deceived with joy, wearied with its exuberance. Say she had a spiritual side hidden from the overly religious, her prayers a dirty floor and a stiff, soapy brush, her hymns the daily laundry lifting its arms to the wind. Say she is grateful for earth’s brief sharing, less than a wave against the endless yaw of ages, the wearing down of mountains, rush and toil of oceans. Say finally that she died praising the power of breath, the endless stretch of conscious into unconscious, of making into being into merging into rising. In this poem and others in her collection Household Inventory, her “spiritual side” goes about its business of learning how to “step softly on earth’s bed,” as she says in “Winter Rides the Mountains.” She writes of everyday things like apples, reeds, poppies, tomatoes, blackberries, cicadas, deer tracks, corn stalks, and potatoes. These manifold things of the earth form the grounding of her vocabulary, but she also writes of abundance, memory, beneficence, lost hope, and hallelujahs. The “mutability of season/into season” brings her to a gladness, even if “[i]n another week,/the garden will stand desolate.” In fact, the garden as metaphor is present throughout her work, perhaps harkening back to the garden of Eden, which she imagines “two figures” leaving: LEAVING EDEN Perhaps it happened in September, here-- the two figures, back to the green garden, stumbling over rocks-- the hillsides suddenly wounded with the bruised hues of all-- the two awake for the first time to the fierce beauty of decay. Green’s poems enact again and again this feeling of being “awake for the first time” even though, in many ways, we still move through our lives in a kind of unknowing, unsure if the soul is “a mockingbird/singing from the deck chair” or “breath flowering/in our lungs, blossoming/into the morning air.” Nevertheless, there is a celebratory tone to Green’s voice—pastoral, close to rain and steep hills, steeped in family lore but also in what’s just outside the window, along the next trail, or “beneath/the sky’s/blue tent.” Like Han Shan who “wakes delighted,” so does Green, “grateful for earth’s/brief sharing.” “I want to find/joy in change, to build a house of fallen/leaves, to burrow in the dry/odor of all that was once alive,/to know the mutability of season/into season, and be glad,” she says in “November Again.” Like the cicadas she describes as “armored warriors,” she signals her gladness to the rest of us, continually bringing our minds to how brief our days are, how alive we have all been in the presence—the miraculous presence—of each other. The last three participles of her imagined pulpit memorial—being, merging, rising—seem like the perfect and holy rendering of what this living truly feels like: we exist, we join with others, we rise in togetherness. The congregation praises, clutches at the passing years, endures, mourns, shines and withers, “glorying in the repetitive,/hoping for the unexpected.” In Green’s inventory, each of us is invited in, wonderfully becoming part of her household, and suddenly “a multitude of voices have only just begun/their blending, their notes ascending.” Susan O’Dell Underwood is one of Tennessee’s finest poets and one of my personal favorites. I blurbed her chapbook, Love and Other Hungers, a beautiful and astute series of poems about birds that I read all the time. This little book has a magical wholeness to it that few books do—thirty-eight sections detailing sparrows, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, robins, ravens, hawks, woodpeckers, and others. "All these words, unrequited little black scratches/on a white page, making meaning/only for a moment's moment, lost before the next," she begins, signaling an idea that runs throughout her body of work. Her poems are, in essence, scratches upon what sometimes feels like a void, an emptiness. “So enamored with the sound/of your own voice,/you never listen,” she says, and maybe one of her projects as a poet is to encourage us, to exhort us, to listen beyond our own voices to what exists outside ourselves, to be “enamored” by voices not our own. In fact, what should it mean that we exist inside ourselves, trapped as we are, yet we also long to get outside of our own experience, to experience meaning in a way that sustains us and that lasts longer than a moment’s moment?
In her first full-length collection, The Book of Awe, she begins with a word--poiesis—a word that means “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before,” a word “turned over and over within its power,/untouched by power outside itself.” A poem, of course, brings into being what didn’t exist before and thus, in turn, becomes a form of “making and unmaking” our orientation to each other, to our inner and outer lives, and especially to our thinking about what meaning might possibly mean. Each poem in this book, each titled by a singular word—dominion, sanctified, charity, exile, guilt, mercy, et al—brings us to a new awareness of what our sentience must mean, if not the “awe” that forms and reforms us. The poems in this book are dense and worth living inside for long stretches of time. They are worthy of thinking on, meditating upon, in all seriousness. Poems like "Guilt" or "Theodicy" deserve long explications in order to tease out their implications. There is a philosophical enquiry at work in Underwood's approach—investigations, parsings, interrogations pitted against the “well-arranged life” most of us have, desire, envy, or, at a minimum, believe in. Underwood—I’m never quite sure—gives us very few places to stand with certainty. Like the rainbow trout in “Transubstantiation,” maybe there is “no way to know/how many days or what kinds of skies” we’ll see or understand before we, too, are jerked up out of this “steadfast world” we have come to believe is our own or believe we deserve. How much of “awe” is actually composed of “guilt,” “humility,” “grace,” “mercy,” grief,” or “empathy”? How much of “awe” requires “communion” or “discipline”? “I can’t give you everything I know,” Underwood says in “Gnosis,” though she calls attention to “the days our grandmothers lived/…their children coming to early harm” and to the memories grandfathers never speak out loud. We live in a world where a child dies of starvation one winter and where “the least of these” Jesus told us to care for “might hold a knife to your throat.” What, fundamentally, is awe? What kind of knowing, or gnosis, does it embrace, contain, question, or subvert? What unknowns must it allow, accept, celebrate, or grieve? “Empathy,” a later poem in the collection, provides a moving distillation of the kind of mind at work in Underwood’s best poems, although, in truth, one could open this book to any page and find compelling, thoughtful engagements with complex, unanswerable questions and situations. EMPATHY If you look, the lost and found will glitter all their lessons. In subtropical sun, lift up a cellophane of snake skin sloughed off near the sand-pile hills of ants. And shudder—not afraid of venom or insects feasting on dead skin-- but to think about the itch in molting such a fragile shrug. Touch the diamond pattern and you touch the freedom of those born-again new scales. Flame tree bean pods clatter in the wind and scatter where they’ve fallen, two-feet-long and hard as bark. You squat and gather the ones that litter up the yard like harmless wooden swords, amazed by tooth- and beak-marks squirrels and birds have chewed for meager seeds. They must have flown away with aching, giddy jaws. The only other person in your view, the next yard over, is a young girl on a swing. Above the fence her blond head shows at the apex lift of every rise she makes to break through gravity. After school for hours every day, she swings, silent under the jacaranda tree. There’s something about her not quite right, her parents and teachers and the neighbors know, not seeing through their worry to what’s naturally her. This afternoon, for once, infused yourself beyond the logic of adults imagining the prison of her flesh and mind, wishing for what we’d wish to be normal. Feel the pulsing shove and plunge she feels, her hair like light around her face and skin, the wind she flings herself into, lurching and falling back into, that same wind touching her which touches snakes and bugs and calling birds, the same sunlight on every bougainvillea bloom, on leaf and limb and vine, each sundered and apart, yet all together rapt with every reaching toward immensity. Underwood’s voice tries but never quite gets past “the logic of adults.” In “Theodicy,” for instance, against the knowledge of “the Gulf’s floor bloodletting/a mile down in freezing, pressurized black,” she admits, exhausted by futility, “One foolish human at a time/will wash one gull at a time, one heron,/cradle and redeem some big-winged creature.” Even so, “Every last one is sent back to be sullied all over again,” and the cycle continues—such small, minor gestures combatting an endless and steady pouring-forth of desecration we may, in the end, be hopeless to affect in any meaningful way. Like the young girl in “Empathy,” though we “shove and plunge,” trying to reach farther up and into the sky’s immensity, into our explanations and justifications for God’s providence in the face of evil, there may be something “not quite right” with us. Throughout these poems, Underwood can be found “seeking again the ken/between what is made and unmade.” Ken: one’s range of knowledge or insight. Therein lies the central problem. We can never quite get beyond the limited minds we turn toward dusk or debris, toward prayer or classroom window, toward sorrow or answer or praise or thanksgiving. In our finitude, in our limited ken, we can only stand before the everlasting—before the aionios—mouths agape, hushed, one moment full of shame, more “trespass than [we’ll] be able to amend,” and in the next moment full of gratitude, then humility, then joy, then this illogical, boundless, wonder-deep, long-suffering awe. The poems in Amy Glynn’s A Modern Herbal are abundant, full of “hedonistic languor,” and elegant in design. They are voluptuous and fecund, hungry and elaborate. Readers can choose any title—“Foxglove,” “Sword Lily,” “Lotus,” “Sunflower,” among others—and settle in for a lush, even educational, experience. So many of the poems in this collection are not merely encounters but are, in fact, experiences, returned to again and again for their richness of detail and for how, under Glynn’s studious eye, ordinary plants and trees become not just interesting again, but archetypal. In “European Grape,” for instance, Glynn posits that “scripture’s an attempt to wring/Essential meanings from the panoply/Of earthly possibilities.” Her poems certainly acknowledge the panoply, the rife possibilities; in fact, throughout this collection Glynn notes the abundance of the natural world, its gaudiness and flamboyance, its “multi-directional” and vivid plenitude. Like the lexicographer in “Coast Redwood,” she attempts to take “everything into the lexicon” in an effort to “[b]ring/the whole world into wholeness.” The difficulty in such an undertaking, though, lies in the infinite interrelatedness of all things, “a system that the mind/enacts at any scale.” Each thing she turns her eye toward ultimately is rooted to something else, just as each word in the lexicon is somehow tangled up in all the others. Glynn reads the scripture of the natural world. She reads it in the night-blooming evening primrose, “sticky with longing,” and in the “Jacob’s Ladder, helix-twisted, climbing” morning glory that “bursts open at dawn.” In poem after poem, she “wring[s]/Essential meanings” from every twist and curve of leaf, from every loop and pith, finding that “there is nothing/Random in the way a space is filled.” “Nothing ever doesn’t make sense,” she asserts, a claim made convincing by virtue of a mind that searches and searches even while realizing that “blossoms always were/a smokescreen for//a darker, truer, more/essential form.” Glynn cultivates these poems, nurturing them, trimming them, finding through sound, meter, and rhyme ways to meditate upon “the finely wrought/detail that captivates us.” From the “tight-wrapped, cryptic/onion of a bulb” in “Narcissus” to “the burst fruit’s scarlet pulp and rind” in “Pomegranate,” she takes readers into the presence of each thing-of-the-world’s luxuriance as if, by seeing clearly, the mind’s reach for meaning will inevitably transform detail into “something shocking just glimpsed underneath.” This desire to see past the surface—to see past “the tropes/we’ve tripped on,” and thus to establish new ones—figures heavily in Glynn’s thinking. After all, “clarity hides/things,” she says, and in the end, all that we may clearly see is how we see, not what we see. The book’s first poem, “Coffee,” announces, “Wake up, you, and appreciate…,” and one hears in this assertion several of the book’s central ideas. Waking, awakening, enlightenment, illumination, realization—Glynn aches to move beyond what she knows, knowing that “[e]very meaning has its double” and that in the “transit from sui generis//to archetype, there is much to misconstrue.” Perhaps this reality is why she needs (or enlists) a “you,” a double, an intimate. “You,” as opposed to “I,” helps to make the search more than a personal quest—it makes it communal, participatory. Perhaps having an ally will keep her focused, probing onward in her attempts to name all the permutations of our shared wilderness. There may be countless opportunities to misconstrue understanding, but in the process, there is still so much to “appreciate,” so much reverence to embody. Such reverence is on display in “Sunflower,” which Glynn addresses as “you flaming thing”: Irrational you may be, in the way That mathematicians mean it. But you’re all About efficiencies, optimizations. From apex to primordia, you spiral Into control, girasole, you flower Of the golden mean, the gyre, the twist, the curve. Triumph of coincidence, master of packing Density, attentiveness to detail. And all this from a flower no one planted, Arisen from last year’s spillage from the birdhouse, Two thousand seeds for the one that engendered you. Weary of time? I think not. Object lesson For adepts of the trigonometries Of Fibonacci—you are time, a living Sundial, tireless tracker of the light’s Trajectory. You know, you flaming thing, You august standard-bearer for the skies In their last and greatest clarity before The cloudy season, you know there is nothing Random in the way a space is filled. Nothing ever doesn’t make sense. We Can do the math: each thing will always be The sum of things that came before it. Write This message in the borders of the garden: ɸ, the symbol of the mean you mean, The disc atop the slim stalk. Yes, and fie, By the way, on any and all who’d think to call You weary of time, who’d wrongly reify Those bending rays, that reverent chin-to-chest Kowtow. You know of mortal gravity, Sun-worshipper, you pythia of pith And oil, you oracle of harmony, Order and reason. Of course you bow to it. In many ways this flower serves as a “living sermon,” yet the message Glynn derives is that meaning itself may be only a “mean,” an average of all things added together. The poems in this marvelous collection, added together, relish the richness of how words become a form of worship: of harmony, reason, disorder, order, connections found and connections yet discovered, knowing, and mystery. Each poem seeds down. Expect a few of these poems to reconstitute the landscape. Originally published in Poetry Northwest, October 24, 2014.
One book I return to again and again is Karen Craigo’s Passing through Humansville (Sundress Publications, 2018). On almost every page I stumble onto lines that stop me for a while and remind me of why I read poetry. In one poem Craigo says, “Somewhere right now a man/steeples his fingers beneath his chin,” while in another poem she says that “there is nothing more convincing than/the whispered swallows I hear behind me/as my son works his bottle in his sleep.” Her poems are plain in the best ways and mysterious in the better ways and wise—or at least “empty-/but-waiting-to-be-/filled—in the unfathomable ways poems usher us into a sense of what’s holy but also ordinary. The book begins with a kind of still-life, a meditation, a reluctance, an uncertainty, a breathing: Meditation with Cat and Toddler And here I sit with a body reluctant to bend, a brain that won’t still, a cat that bumps me for attention, and a toddler who will come, who has punched me in the eye for pure love. I’m not sure how to start, but the cat knows. He suggests compassion, to life against the dear one, and if she gets too still, to bite her hand because there is no virtue in denying your nature. You offer a constant rumble of om. You are conscious of her breath, of the small one who approaches, then sits down silent by her side. That toddler punching her in the eye “for pure love” provides a way to consider what many of this collection’s poems do. They punch. They love. They alter how we see. They bring us to compassion. They remind us of “small” things like one’s name, written in Arabic by a student “wield[ing]/the chalk sideways for softness,” or how “tendrils of fog span the road.” She can share coffee with a toddler, the two of them staring into a cup suddenly become a “vessel,” the two of them “close enough/to smell each other’s breath.” There is a nurturing going on in Craigo’s poems. She nurtures babies, immigrants, even language itself. She understands how everyone is essentially situated between “two independent clauses,” two realities—perilous, “exposed,” sometimes forsaken, entirely human. Such awareness gives us a tenderness toward others, especially “those who have been misunderstood.” How else move through the world except through the lens of fragility, knowing that at any moment one may have already “stepped on the ground/where [one’s] ashes will alight.” Craigo’s poems ask how we should look upon the world. One answer appears in her poem “Mary of Bethany”: In church today a woman rubbed the bald spot of the man she loved, and did it all the way through the message, the offering and meditation. I know. I opened my eyes to check. And isn’t that God, touching us where we’re most exposed, loving even our emptiness, those places soft with down. Maybe Craigo feels comfortable opening her eyes during prayer because, in a way, her eyes are always open anyway, her gaze always prayerful, loving, and kind. She, too, sees us where we are exposed, where we are empty, where we are occasionally “sick in the heart.” As she says in one poem, “In this moment/everything is in abeyance,/stuck between one place/and another.” Perhaps that knowledge informs her “rhetoric,” the arguments her poems make. “We fold and unfold into the other,” she says in “Total Knee Replacement,” and in “Chalkboard Mandala” she is persuaded “to see how all things/are connected by barely a breath.” Isn’t that the “message” we most need to be reminded of by sermons, by poems, by words arranged in syntaxes teaching us again and again where to place the “emphasis”? In one of my favorite poems in Passing through Humansville, we join Craigo as she chaperones a field trip. Field Trip Today the butterfly house releases monarchs, tags affixed like tiny suitcases for their flight south. I’m here to keep everyone together, to make sure the bus leaves no lighter than when it came. One of the children has stolen the wing of a sulfur. It was dead anyway, so she palmed it, and now, fingers flaked in gold, she tries to work off its color. A docent points out a mourning cloak, faded and ripped, three weeks old and probably still laying eggs. She keeps going till she dies, he tells me, and at forty-five, with a baby, I relate. Certain fall days the sun can surprise us with its insistence, can pin us to the chair, and we picture those migrating butterflies, gold, gold, gold, gold, gone. Yes, Craigo is “here to keep everyone/together.” That’s her “insistence” as we all migrate from one day to the next, from one word to another, from “message” to “offering” to “meditation,” from this life to the next one. As we pass through this being human, may all of our voices meet in our vulnerabilities so that we may be “brave, so brave together.” Henry David Thoreau begins his essay “Walking” with the following words: I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that. I’ve often thought of revising his words, applying his “extreme statement” to the contemporary poetry scene. I might begin as follows: I wish to speak a word for X poet’s work, for its absolute tenderness or beauty or genius or insightfulness, as contrasted with the fads and hype merely boring—to regard X poet as a central part of my life as a reader, rather than what the poetry scene says I should pay attention to. I, too, wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make a risky one, for there are enough champions of the celebrated poets: the critics and prize committees and every one pulling from a limited pool of presses will take care of that. And so I shall begin considering some of the books I adore, setting out on a sort of crusade, "preached by some Peter the Hermit" in me, "to go forth and reconquer" my reading life from the hands of those continually trying to tell me what poetry I should value. |
Jeff Hardin is professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including Fall Sanctuary (Nicholas Roerich Prize, 2004), Notes for a Praise Book (Jacar Press, 2013), Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Poetry Prize, 2015), Small Revolution, No Other Kind of World (X. J. Kennedy Prize, 2017), and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being.Categories
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