I have been restless with reading poems lately. My dad was diagnosed with cancer a month ago (stage one renal cell carcinoma), and so many poems written in the detached, elliptical style now all the rage just haven't spoken to me from human voices*. But this isn't a complaint, really, just an observation I'm sounding out, however trite--a reminder of one of the reasons we, as readers of poems, dig into them in the first place.
Tonight I read these lines in a Neruda poem for the first time:
Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
--from "Nothing but Death"
I set the book down on the chair, shivered and understood the strange textures of these lines as if they had occurred to me that day back in July. When I heard Dad has cancer, it was as if someone had made an incision in the air. It was a bright, hot day, and more than the sunlight leaked through the cut. Everything around me filled with his voice, his whistle in the morning when he'd rise and dress for work, his laughter in the kitchen late at night when we all talked and joked. Something cut at the air and threatened the fact of him and all the nouns in his possession (thank you, Brenda Coultas), and it threatened me and my family because we love him. But this wasn't like the horrible moments (these came later)...this moment was radiant and filled with a beauty heavy as the sun.
My grandfather on Dad's side ran a commercial fishing boat on the Delaware Bay, and Dad was first mate during his high school years. One of Dad's most lyrical stories has him standing on the bow one morning, watching four hammerheads glide in sync a thin layer beneath the glassy water, and they were beautiful until he broke away from the trance of their power moved by grace, their embodiment of life by way of death. Tonight, Neruda's poem inhabited an ordinary moment and recollected for me the way death intrudes into whatever we're doing in the meantime. The way it will flood the day with the strangest, most familiar light. Thank you, Neruda.
*There are exceptions, of course--Mary Jo Bang's ellipticism is always from such a lived-in space of ordinarily unspeakable emotion. Alex Lemon has written fantastic associative poems. And there are so many others who have genuinely embraced this aesthetic...so you line scribblers out there will have to forgive this generality missing half its sequins.
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4 comments:
I think for some, the inability to write about such powerful things as death can be reduced to two reasons, maybe more that I can't think of currently. A poet may have lived through death and found it too painful to assert their thoughts about it onto the page. Conversely, they may not know the language because they haven't experienced such sorrow. They are content to keep their expressions light, airy, and intentionally abstract to avoid the oftentimes annoying event of "poetry interpretation".
As you've mentioned, there is merit to both forms of poetry. I feel the same way and look forward to reading more emotive, passionate works that I normally would overlook.
The Neruda excerpt is powerful and apt for the topic. He's never tugged anything within me, so it is good to find something that does, even if it is only an excerpt.
Keep bloggin' friend.
This is a powerful entry, one that, in many ways, mirrors my own experience (which has me moving across country to be closer to dad). I love how Neruda simultaneously walks an off-kilter line (pair of shoes, a suit walking around empty of body) and cuts to the heart of things.
I appreciate your line about how it was like somebody made an incision in the air when you found out about your dad's cancer.
My dad keeps leaking into my poems, even though I feel like I have no language to talk about his illness....
Thanks for this.
Jackie, I agree with the two reasons you give for poets finding themselves not up to the task of engaging serious topics. More and more, I appreciate the poem at once grounded in ordinary experience and charged with the strange energies of the imagination made kinetic with an awareness of the world's possibilities and limitations. My favorite poems make sense within one layer of meaning while making none (or half-sense) within another, regardless of the content. And I only interpret in a poem what I can't immediately understand, which is a sort of recalcitrance with the voice of the poem, which creates the pleasant tension of trying to empathize with the speaker.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
Alexis, you're welcome. I'm sorry to hear about your Dad. It's great that you're moving out to be with him.
You and Jackie are right: It's so hard to find a language to address something so bizarre to us. I'm just starting to look for such a language, too, and am finding it difficult not to recycle what others have said about illness. And you ask yourself (at least I do) at what point is writing about illness not helpful to our processing it? I read Sontag's Illness as Metaphor a couple of years ago. She views the system of metaphor built up around cancer as a way for the healthy to distance themselves from the taboo of illness, to affirm their continuity among the living. I'm not sure that I agree, but it's interesting.
Thanks for your comment. I hope your move goes well.
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