Eleanor Wilner was named the recipient of the Poetry
Society of America ‘s 2019 the Frost Medal.
The award is given for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. Quite some number of years ago I had the
pleasure of reviewing her volume The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper
Canyon Press). I reprint it occasionally
because I believe it touches on some difficult issues. Regardless, it is every bit as exceptional a
volume as I have indicated.
Eleanor Wilner's poem "Theory and Practice in
Poetry" is as good as any in her recent volume. Nine lines into the poem
she describes a place:
where, among a thickness of flowers
so redolent and sweet as to dizzy
even the bees, summer slides in
It is a nice image. Because it does not strive for effect,
it may be necessary for readers to clear their palates of all the strident
imagery they have become used to in order to fully savor it.
But, like so many of the images in The Girl with Bees in Her
Hair, it does not stop there. There is so much more to a summer day:
bringing a haze of heat like the skin
shed by a river when a mist rises
from its indolent wet back
The mist on a river is like a snake shedding its skin. No
need even to mention the snake. The river is, after all, long, thin, undulant.
Less is more here, metaphor is more. The blink of recognition is a quiet
pleasure both author and reader know.
This is image enough for most poets. The thing would seem to
be said. But, then, most poets say less:
droplets
of water (each carrying a world)
that traveled on the back of a sequined
wind
The poem is beginning to be as busy as summer is and as
languorous. It would seem to think it is about the theory and practice of
poetry. The reader, though, could be pleased to forget all about theory and
practice and to just enjoy the beautiful summer day where the aforementioned
wind goes:
to that meadow woven of
grass, flowers and guesswork — so
intricate a tapestry of greens
that in all that steam, and heat, and
growing matter
Even the lines meander unhurriedly on the page, themselves a
kind of river. Or a kind of thought process, perhaps. This is the theory and
practice of poetry, not of botany, and thoughts flow rather than march; the
meadow is a tapestry of flora we do not strain to make out, to give names,
though we do apparently guess at one or two.
This day is such a pleasure, in fact, that the idea of water
droplets carrying worlds — something of a poetic commonplace — cannot provoke the
least complaint; the random line-endings necessary in order to achieve the
meandering effect — more than we might generally approve of — all but go
unnoticed. Her effects quietly accumulating, until we've delightfully lost our
way, the poet must bring us back:
the ideal of a poet
finding her poetics is lost like
a ball in tall weeds
Yet nothing has been gratuitous. We were finding our way to
this ball. To find a ball in another, more direct way, is to find a different
ball. We first had to do the work of getting lost in a summer day.
Not that the image has ended here. There are still some
thirty lines of it left. Nor that the reader will even know what the actual
image is at this point in the poem: what this traveling from image to image in
pursuit of an inclusive metaphor, so much the trademark of Wilner's poetry,
will add up to.
Eleanor Wilner's poems are themselves a tapestry. They have
a woof and warp, a texture, a unity that comes together a thread at a time.
Because the reader watches it woven, rather than standing before a finished
work of visual art, the weaving itself is a part of the experience together
with the patience that the shuttle requires. To read these poems quickly is to
miss too much of what they are about.
The Girl with Bees in Her Hair is an unbrowsable book. The
individually quotable lines are there. There is the shock of concision:
smart clay, our thumb opposed, we
work
There is knowing:
Whatever we name, we exceed.
But such lines are difficult to single out in poems in which
each image is so carefully interwoven, each line so carefully in place.
All of this said, like any tapestry, one of the joys of it
is coming upon surprising details that add to its intricacies. Even the
epigraph of the poem "Just-So Story" is a small delight:
Do not make treaties with these people.
TRANSLATION OF NAVAHO MESSAGE INSCRIBED
ON THE DISK
LEFT ON THE MOON BY NASA
Wilner's beloved world of nature and strange and common
things is no Eden. After "Theory and Practice in Poetry," the
politics of the world begin overtly to leak in and soon the meadows are
overwhelmed with it. In the poem "Don't look so scared. You're
alive!" the Muses, "their once-firm breasts old dugs sagging,"
have been replaced by "Clear Channel." The implications inspire a
simple but powerful line break:
Truth
lies
choking in a shuttered room;
We are reminded of "the slow brown wash of tides"
and "the dust and shit/of the road." The poet suggests that the world
would be much improved if the wounded past rose up, in the form of the great
statutes of the Vatican and Rome collectively rising up off their pedestals,
and rejoined the mountains from which it was hewn.
It is puzzling, however, that so good a poet can indulge in
such naive simplifications, and, in several of the more overtly political
poems, language must be separated from idea. In "Be Careful What You
Remember," when the statues return, "like salmon returning to the
waters/that spawned them…":
the mountain is whole again, the
great rift closed,
and young trees grow thick again
on the slopes.
The sense of healing is palpable. But the statues neither
can nor should return to the quarry. Arm lopped off by time, or genitalia
covered by the church, at worst they are now a marvelous object lesson. At
best, they are rungs on the unsteady ladder that connects the degradation of
late paganism to constitutional rights, amniocentesis and ultrasound testing
for pregnant mothers, computers, and much more. They are threads in another
tapestry even more inextricably interwoven than Eleanor Wilner's own.
Still, who can help but appreciate the world of The Girl
with Bees in Her Hair, a refreshing palimpsest of the stories of Demeter,
Semele, Sappho, Aphrodite and their graceful Attic sisters played out in vaster
galaxies? A world in which the tables have at long last been turned against the
kings of the past?
In the poem "Orpheus on Sappho's Shore"
(originally a libretto), Orpheus' spirit, wafting (perhaps a little
conveniently) past Lesbos, calls upon the gods to set him free from his endless
existence as "a mind awake inside a jar." Sappho sets him free and is
left his lyre. The song passes on to Wilner and her sisters. While a reviewer
is required by the ethics of the trade to withhold judgment, in this
particular, until Sappho has played a concert locked in the lion's cage of the
nearest zoo, more mortal accolades are certainly in order for this fine volume.
- The American Garden. January 16, 2019. “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
- Blank Verse Now and Then. January 1, 2019. “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.”
- The Elegy and the Internet. July 1, 2005. ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
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