.

He conocido la inexorable tristeza de los lápices,
Primorosos en sus cajas, el dolor del bloc y del pisapapeles,
Toda la miseria de los sobres de manila y del mucílago,
La desolación en los inmaculados lugares públicos,
La solitaria sala de espera, el lavabo, el conmutador.
El inalterable pathos de la palangana y la jarra,
El ritual de la impresora, del sujetapapeles, la coma,
El infinito duplicado de vidas y objetos.
He visto el polvo de los muros de los establecimientos,
Más fino que la harina, vivo, más peligroso que la sílice,
Tamizado, casi invisible, a través de las largas tardes de tedio
Goteando una ligera película sobre las uñas y las delicadas pestañas,
Esmaltando los pálidos cabellos, los duplicados grises comunes rostros.

.
Theodore Roethke
Dolor
.

Trust
Liz Waldner

Paperback, 69 pages
Cleveland State University Poetry Center
ISBN 978-1880834848 

The title of this book is a good rule of thumb upon entry to Liz Waldner’s poetry:  Trust, welcome all your illusions, and be willing to be surprised. You’re not going to find out “what happened” in any ordinary sense, but you’ll emerge having burst the strongholds of language. Gaze at the small pieces and parts of these poems, turn them over and over.  Approach them from any angle, and you can see directly into the essential quality of mind that makes art. Witness these visions and you’re likely to emerge feeling newish, a little strange and quite possibly dazzled.

The poems in Liz Waldner’s Trust are extremely pleasing, formally speaking. The language keeps itself in containers that reassure the reader of their manageability, despite the title’s largesse and the mighty favor it asks in return.

Although these poems are arranged according to the sovereigns of the senses–eye, skin, mouth, nose and ear–the reader is alerted early that this body (of work and of ours) is both more and less than it seems: “like the eye/ Itself the sight/ We hope to see through (to)/Always.”  Our senses constantly call us into relationship with the manifest world, and yet we don’t trust it or our perceptions of it because we know, with other-sensory knowing, that it isn’t all there is. Waldner writes/jokes, “The baby maples hold out their hands : / ‘As you can see, there is nothing to see that you cannot see.’” 

Eyes and hands, seeing and holding, watching, giving, and taking by touching. Part by part this book is born, and its devices, which offer, Roethke-like, “a steady storm of correspondences,” insist on our trust. There is really no alternative in this poetry, with its extra-layered world of competing undercurrents: we are obliged to answer yes or go away. By animating these poems with our reading senses and sensibilities, we trust we will be breathed to life afresh within them.

To accomplish these feats, none mean and all entirely devoted to uncovering meaning, the mind of the poet is opened to full view. It is a desperate act of generosity, and it tries every latch. As if to indicate, within all this opening, some reliable point in space where we might rest, Waldner offers Euclid’s geometric definition: “A point is that which has no part.” Yet since this is a very poetry of parts intent on making things whole and coherent, we’re put on notice that, to meet and be met by these poems, we must transcend the typical arguments. This is no country of point-making.  In Trust, the usual rules do not apply in the usual ways.

Significance Gives Way to Meaning
Waldner assigns little, if any, significance to the narrative of ordinary life. In “Taking the Air,” for example, snippets of story dart about: “I almost died in a car crash here” gives way to “Like Marc Bolan who I used to love / Back when my father’s vein crashed in.” The poem, in three lines, proves that this narrative is so vast and incorrigible that it can only be examined little by little with great care and the patience of the Infinite. Bound to our senses along with the poet, we give it our best. Death-defyingly, we step out on faith. Inch by inch we collaborate to bring forth meaning in a third place–some point between ourselves and the page, as well as beyond it.

 Sharing this painstaking search, joining the voice of these poems, we are mysteriously met and understood.

For the reader with a thirst for meaning, these poems pour out many layers and levels. Habits of mind and language are held up and pressed hard until they extract a heady liquor. Now and then bits of myth, fairy tale and nursery song interject levity, as do Waldner’s titles (See “Persephone Tells About Some Goings Down” and “Present Company Occluded”). Such gifts lend humor to hard times, and earn our trust. Meanwhile the work we must do to meet the expectations inherent in this writing does more to reveal our like-mindedness  (ours with the poet’s, ours with all others’) than the most earnest rhetorical appeal could ever do. Thrust into proximity with scraps and allusions, we cannot help but fill gaps, constructing whole meanings from mere filaments. Making things up as we go, we are surprised to find, at the end of it all, a truth that serves.

If the reader assents to this meeting of minds, if we agree to welcome and trust these poems, we are taken into a linguistic vortex capable of pulling us through and beyond the senses, into a music that both deconstructs and unifies by disassembling its parts. We awaken through an intimacy of shared particulars – glass bird, doughnut hole, teacup, rhyme and reason. The making of meanings by these means is a healing act, an ablative alchemy capable of yielding actual, lasting delight.

A Voice We Trust with Questions
The voice of the poems in Trust, as in all of Liz Waldner’s books, is painfully honest. Like all true things, it calls our foundations into question. The reader is invited so close into the poet’s contemplative seeing that “I” quickly and almost imperceptibly becomes “me.” And before I know it, a line such as “May my life forgive me” is my lifeline and ours, the universal plight and wish. Encountered in “On the Way,” it is a line that gives me an opportunity to shudder in advance at the prospect of my unlived life. The line makes me vow, “Never will I need to say these words” and as well as ask myself, “Do I mean it? Am I living, truly, now?” and “What is my life asking of me?” This contemplative questioning in response to the poem’s implied self-inquiry, ups the ante on conscience, elevating it to higher consciousness.

In such a poetry nothing is accidental. The pairs of opposites collide, collude and confess in astonishing ways. Subject and object, poet and reader, taster and seer, are turned topside down and relentlessly re-examined to reveal new communicative properties. The title poem “Trust” is a series of twists and turns that begins postulating what “you told me to imagine” (who, me?) and ends by imagining its speaker saying, “‘Thank you, I have enjoyed imagining all this.’” In one fell swoop, I the reader am called out as co-creator of the poem, the poet, and the moment in which the imagining has just occurred.  “See what we can do together with a little love and attention?” the poem smiles. So genuine is the voice that we hardly mind being kidnapped into the vortex again and again, tricked into transcendence by the poet’s sleight of mind.

But as irresistibly charming as this voice can be, its methods intend no less than to usher us into a unity of self and Self, to wake us from the sleep of disownment.  Having adopted the poet’s “I” as “me” (and we do, we must, in order to stay afloat in these poems) we reclaim our lives through our linguistic power both to contain and dissolve the minutiae that seem to usurp and undermine them. Thus we are drawn into a state of gratitude: we are the one grateful to have been imagined and therefore met, as well as the one grateful to be imagining, empowered and enlivened. For the sake of such miracles (or magic, depending on your degree of trust) not only is a cup of tea made to serve as mirror, but also the poet’s face which we look into in “Trust” and which speaks directly to us, saying “Thank you.” As we gaze into this imagined face we find our own, thankful and open and yet every bit as illusory, “eclipsing the sky.” This poem, after all, is only a wisp of mind. Who, exactly, is this self, so interchangeable and fluid?

The Sacred Order of Things
Such a philosophical feast, of course, calls for a conjuring of every spiritual fish and loaf the poet has at hand. Waldner’s Trust is organized according to the parts of the body and the senses they command, but there is an overarching poetry evident in the progression of titles that speaks to the body’s resurrective, light-bearing possibilities. The book itself is a trust walk down the path of the “Novice,” illuminating a specialized kind of “Assumption” – “spinning the roots / of the possible, the centripetal /world?” — followed by “Annunciation” which ends asserting “all of the tombs are empty.” Just after we read “The Tongues of Angels” we receive the “Covenant.” And thus the book ends, embodying a world without end.

Throughout the work, undercurrents of biblical language bubble to the surface in syntactical flourishes so subtle one could miss them:

          A pheasant walks the edge of the little wood
          In the company of sparrows.
          She looks like the leaf-littered earth beneath the trees
          Heard a voice it loved, woke up and walked.

Lazarus-like, the pheasant rises from the earth, “picks up her bed and walks” in response to “a voice it loved.” And yet these poems are anything but evangelical. These biblical moments are merely snippets of mind, no more or less important than the pheasant’s stroll. And yet the beauty of this image, in which leaves come to life as a pheasant which comes to life as Lazarus–all born alive in the mind of the reader this very moment–is our own innate beauty, the beauty of our mind’s seeing of the three to be One, inseparable. This is the unifying miracle the poet would have us trust. If we do so, the result is a game-changing vision that reveals life and language, despite its confusions, to be wondrous just as it is: “The Lord hath shewn me a new heaven / and it has fallen into a new earth.”

These poems invite us to exercise faith in the transcendent quality of language, and thereby awaken to our full humanity. Trust calls us to rise up through this body of words in which we live and move and have our being, to pick up the shapes and voices that cling to us, and to build and claim a heavenly home within them. Doing so, we distinguish ourselves from mere earth. This, Liz Waldner reveals, is our secret, even sacred, wish: “This is the lived in prayer.”

________________________________________________

Ceci Miller is an author and book editor who holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Iowa Review, Helicon Nine, Carolina Quarterly, The Seattle Review, and Quarry West.

Necesitamos más gente que se especialice en lo imposible.

“Roethke was fond of quoting Rimbaud’s idea of the ’systematic derangement of the senses,’ but he always left off the ’systematic.’”

–Richard Hugo

 

There are plenty of spooky or creepy poems that give you goosebumps, Edgar Allan Poe, of course. But here is a more unusual one that you may not have heard before:

Night Crow

Theodore Roethke

When I saw that clumsy crow
Flap from a wasted tree
A shape in the mind rose up:
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

In Asian American discourse on contemporary Asian American poetry, Li-Young Lee is often situated in a middle ground between a poetic struggle for racial identity, and the avant-garde, both formally and topically . This means that Lee, while mostly interested in exploring form and content, never loses touch with his immigrant experience. As Victoria Chang writes in her anthology, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Li-Young Lee is part of the “first generation” of Asian American poets, along with Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Ai, and John Yau. This “first generation” dealt with “culture, identity, family, politics, ethnicity, and place.” However, the “next generation of poets” such as Suji Kwock Kim, Cathy Park Hong and Nick Carbo are more frank about sex and are more mainstream American.

Behind My Eyes, Lee’s fourth collection, has picked up some of the immigration narratives he seems to have left behind in his first book, Rose, published 22 years ago.

He has since become one of the most influential younger poets, and has won three Pushcart Prizes, the Lannan Literary Award, and the American Book Award. His new poems examine racial politics in a new light that old fans and new readers alike will find fresh and lyrically surprising. Consider the first 4 stanzas of “Immigrant Blues”–

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,

a man tells his son, trying to explain

the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

It’s an old story from the previous century

about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning

about me and my son.

It’s called “Survival Strategies

and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.”

It does not sound like a typical Li-Young Lee poem , full of pretty, symbolic images, except that there is a father and son .Relationships between fathers and sons figure prominently in Lee’s work, and the accustomed reader will be surprised to find poems about mothers in his new collection poems.  In “Persimmons,” from Lee’s first book, “Rose,” there is a marked difference in style and purpose. Using much more precious language than in “Immigrant Blues,” the speaker in the older poem writes about bi-lingual issues and compares language to soft persimmons. He asks his wife, to whom he is teaching Chinese: “what is the translation for dew, crickets, naked?”

Comparing the highly metaphoric language in “Persimmons” to the more straightforward rhetoric of “Immigrant Blues,” what I find most interesting is not the switch in metaphoric language, but the way he uses quotations to describe the experience of immigration and assimilation. It’s as if he can’t find words adequate to capture those experiences, as the predecessors to the “first generation” of poets strived so hard to do. “Survival Strategies and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation” sounds like a paper delivered at the Asian American Studies Association conference. It is an academic cliché, pit against the realities of second-language acquisition and the conflicts of assimilation. Lee pursues this trope throughout the poem.

In typical Li-Young Lee style, there is sex and the soul and a beloved, with some precious language about “the body and the heart.” But unlike his previous books, Lee subverts his own style by qualifying a kind of race-less, gentrified love and sex, with lines such as “’Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,’” and “’Loss of the Homeplace / and the Defilement of the Beloved.’” There is a new kind of humor for Lee as he conflates the high lyric study of love with an Ethnic Studies analysis of love. He makes fun of both, but his is not a smartass humor; Lee is always earnest.  He  seems to ask if people of color fall in love in a unique way, with the “flesh and the soul” and “the heart’s bewilderment” on the breath, and “Diaspora” and “Loss” on the mind.

Old fans of Li-Young Lee will appreciate the eclecticism of Behind My Eyes, and those who never really dug Li-Young Lee will find various new ways of writing that may appeal to them. For example, Lee’s playful “My Favorite Kingdom” could come out of an anthology of New York School poetry , with its’ playful, associative qualites:

My favorite day is Sunday.

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.

My favorite day is Tuesday.

Lee allows a new lightness to enter into his poems. They no longer have to be always deeply serious or heroic. While early comparisons have been made between Lee and Roethke and Rilke, no one has acknowledged his debt to Fred Wah, Jessica Hagedorn, Lawson Inada, Mitsuye Yamada and other poets who were pathfinders in the 1960s and ‘70s.

There are just as many poems about the mother in Behind My Eyes as in his earlier work. There are poems about apples eloping and a mock self-help guide for “Fellow Refugees.” There is also a new, deeper kind of seriousness that American poetry seems to have not yet carefully considered:

And if you meet someone

in your adopted country,

and think you see in the other’s face

an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,

it probably means you’re standing too far.

Later in the same poem, the speaker says, “Don’t lament not being beautiful.” To think about the parallels between this line and the stanza above, is to begin to appreciate Li-Young Lee’s project in Behind My Eyes . If you haven’t read a collection of Lee’s before, this would be a good one to get.

(W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008; $24.95)

My Papa’s Waltz

By Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt

I can remember the first time I read this poem back in my tenth grade English class. At first I absolutely loved it because it reminded me of my father and how he used to dance with me in the kitchen late at night when he came home from work. Then my teacher told us to look deeper into the poem and we may not see what is really there. my teacher explained to us that this poem can be a description of child abuse. A drunken father beating his child but the child still loving him because it’s his father of course.
The clues are right there to describe it “ we romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf” so there was a fight. The mother is frowning and the father’s ands are beat up as he grips his child’s wrist.. The buckle of the father’s belt is mentioned which a long time ago was a tool for hitting kids, and also the line “you beat time on my head” the father is hitting him. At first glance this poem is cute and everyone can remember those days dancing around with a loved one, but at closer look this is just another example of child abuse hidden by it’s wording but also revealed by it’s wording.

Song by Theodore Roethke

 
My wrath, where’s the edge
Of the find shapely thought
That I carried so long
When so young, when so young?

My rage, what’s to be
The soul’s privilege?
Will the heart eat the heart?
What’s to come?  What’s to come?

O love, you who hear
The slow tick of time
In your sea-buried ear,
Tell me now, tell me now.

My Heart asks Pleasure – first (536) by Emily Dickinson 

My Heart asks Pleasure – first

And then – excuse from pain -

And then – those little Adonynes

That deaden suffering -

And then – to go to sleep -

And then – if it should be

The will of its Inquisitor

The privilege to die - 

* * * * * 

I read two poems separately, however, arranged them together considering emotional stage.  There are certain curves of speaker’s status of mind.  Will ‘love’ tell ‘me’ what’s to come?  If the answer is given by E. Dickinson, the speaker of the poem Song would be very disappointed.  And I would not look forward to anything at all if the soul’s privilege is only to die.  I am very lucky since I read Emily Dickinson’s poem first and then Theodore Roethke’s one later. 

pleasure→pain→anodynes→sleep→the privilege to die→my wrath→my rage→o love

* * * * *

에밀리 디킨슨의 저 시는 읽을 때마다 슬퍼진다.  처음에는 기쁨을 갈구하던 마음이 고통이나 없었으면 한다.  그러나 살다보니 덜컥 고통 속에 처하게 마련이었고, ‘그래요-  그래야만 한다면 그 고통을 이겨낼 수 있게 진통제라도’ 달라고 한다.  고통을 좀 죽일 수 있을만한 뭐 어떤-  마음의 진정제 같은 것.

진통제도 없는 삶.  삶의 고통은 누그러들지 않았나보다.  ’휴, 그렇담 잠이나…’  하다가 드는 생각은, ‘자신의 고통 충만한 삶에 닥치는 것들이 어느 심판관의 뜻이라면 죽을 수 있는 특권을 부탁해야겠다’는 것이다.  The Heart asks Pleasure – first -  마지막에 붙은 저 ‘first’.  처음에나 기뻐할 희망이 있었던 것.  이건 안 슬플 수가 없다.   

The Waking
by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softgly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady.  I should know.
What falls away is always.  And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

–

From The Waking: Poems 1933-1953, reprinted in Selected Poems, (Library of America, 2005).

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine–
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she’d lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!–
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me–
And that was scary–
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

~T. Roethke