Through Dark and Deeper Dark

There’s Too Much And It Goes Too Fast

On the first day of the 2002 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey, I sat under the rough skin of a canvas tent and listened. “When I was three or four,” Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian-American poet said, “I used to sit on my stoop in St. Louis and watch the street. I remember thinking – there’s too much and it goes too fast. At three or four, I remember that.”

This year has overwhelmed us. Too many images, too much sound. I had come to the Dodge Festival to get a 4-day respite from the world of CNN and front-page headlines and the ominous feeling I’ve had stuck in my throat all summer. In previous years, the festival had grounded me and inspired me with the knowledge that there was a community of writers out there. For four days in September every two years, Waterloo Village provides a temporary home for everyone from high school sophomores to middle-aged legal secretaries to the Poets Laureate of the United States. For four days we are all in it together. I was hoping the festival would slow things down for me and allow me the space for reflection that has been in such short supply lately.

Coleman Barks is the pre-eminent translator and popularizer of the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi, a 12^th-century Persian mystic. He’s taught for 30 years at the University of Georgia and brings his soft, determined twang to the ecstatic poems of Rumi. In a discussion on “Spoken Poems and Silent Reading,” he stayed mostly silent through a barrage of argument between poets Robert Bly and Amiri Baraka. When challenged, he seemed to pick the words out of the air: “There is more than one way to read a poem. He (Baraka) tries to speed it up. I try to slow it down.” His heavy eyes dropped to his hands and he smiled, waiting for us to hear.

The young girl leapt up the last three steps up to the gazebo and grabbed the microphone stand. Her pale white hands turned paler with the pressure and her right leg began to shake. She closed her eyes and began to recite her poem. For several hours on the festival’s first day, Thursday, the gazebo is home to an open mike for the high school students who arrive in droves. They scramble over each other in an attempt to reach the microphone, to read their poems out into the quivering air. Cheering sections wave peacock feathers, girls sit in circles and flip through notebooks, a young man in a thin mustache mouths words silently, waiting his turn. Mary, in jeans, a black shirt, and red shoes, tripped through her poem in one breath, stumbling over words in her headlong, desperate dash to its conclusion. At the last word – “raped” – she released the microphone and stood still for a moment, washed by the small waves of applause lapping at her shoes. Then she left and another took her place. The voices, all different, calmed me. I closed my eyes and lay back upon the warm grass.

From Thursday to Sunday, the festival ran from the empty fields of dawn to the full moon of evening. Workshops, lectures, and readings followed so closely upon one another I found myself nearly running between the farmhouse tent and the gristmill; the church and the library tent. The tents were strung with lights, because cameras everywhere were recording this, as festival director Jim Haba said, “for everyone who can’t be here today.” I ended each day exhausted and full of words, the dappled light of northern New Jersey still playing against my closed eyelids as I tried to sleep. The world spun maddeningly under me and I wondered when I would have the time to be quiet and try to understand it all. I remember worrying that the festival had become too much a part of the world, but now I see it was different. There was still too much, but it was me who was moving too fast. I had to slow myself down. The elms shed their leaves gracefully. They drifted down like snow through the humid New Jersey air. When I concentrated, I could slow my breathing and quiet my heart.

Only A Wrong Turn Brings Me Here

I began the second day by calling in sick. The borrowed cell phone crackled guiltily as I grumbled over the pale morning birds calling softly to each other. By the time I hung up, I had convinced myself as well. I felt the scratch in my throat, the unbalance in my stomach. It was not until I found my first cup of hot coffee that I remembered nothing was wrong.

Grace Paley’s early morning talk about craft was crammed with people. When the diminutive writer, with her shock of white hair, finally climbed the two steps to the stage, there was an audible silence. She quoted a poem of Aga Shahid Ali: “Only a wrong turn brings me here.” And then she stood for a minute at the podium, blinking her eyes against the lights. I began to feel, too, as though I were coming from out of the dark into this persistent light that seemed strangely familiar. I sat in the yellow plastic chair, stared at my hands, and fought the urge to smile.

Heather McHugh, a poet from Washington, said, “I love the irreducibility of peoples’ experiences. It will be somehow always radiantly strange. I love poetry because it gives voice to the strangeness.” She told a personal story about a dinner she had attended in Virginia the previous week. She had begun crying as a piece of steak became lodged in her throat. The relief brought on by the man who gave her the Heimlich was almost overcome by embarrassment. She shook her head and laughed. We laughed with her and wondered what we would have done. Would we have remembered the universal sign for choking and wrapped our own hands around our throats? Or would we, as she did, simply begin to cry – not out of sadness, but because the body knows better than we do what to do?

The role of chance in poetry was the topic of a great many discussions at the festival. I talked with a man about forty who has been writing for nearly ten years. He told me the only way to write is with a clear mind, an empty head. It is only then that the words come. He brushed the wavy brown hair back from his forehead and took out a notebook. Would I like to hear some of his poetry? I would. It came out as unassociated words – things like “the electric shoe tree dreaming icicles and linoleum tires.” He told me it is all chance and that the words come out the way they should. The poem lies in the reader and the poet is just the transmitting wire.

In the church, Li-Young Lee stood in front of his sweating congregation – it was 85 degrees and almost five in the afternoon. This was the last talk before the dinner break and we shifted uncomfortably in the pews. As he began talking, though, everything changed. Perhaps it was because the fans started turning, almost agonizingly slowly, and there was suddenly air in the room. Li-Young told us about how a poem must balance chance and purpose and how he is constantly teetering on the point between boredom and nonsense. He said, “Differentiation is in inverse proportion to possibility. As the poem develops, less and less is possible.” Keeping chance in until the end is the way to keep things alive. We must negotiate between chaos and order, dream and communication.

In a poem called “Amanuensis,” from her book, Fortress, Brenda Hillman writes “I wasn’t meant to get there, but to understand the failure of the carriage.” We were in the church again and she was talking about self-hypnosis and how she counts down from ten to one each day and disappears inside herself. A man wondered if she found her poems down there, but she said no. There were images and sometimes she returned with something she couldn’t shake, but poems came later and with work. She writes fifty or a hundred drafts – everything’s included at first, but she soon begins to winnow and the wrong steps are discarded. She ended by saying: “The nexus of where you don’t get it is the magic of poetry. It’s so beautifully resonant you want to live with it even though you don’t understand it.” We filed out of the clean white church, our minds abuzz with possibilities. Whoever thought it would be true – you don’t have to understand it and in fact it’s better if you don’t. I came around the back way to this revelation. I hadn’t even meant to see Brenda Hillman – I just misread the program.

Praise the Mutilated World

In her poem “Acts of God,” Heather McHugh writes about a woman who survived a tornado. The first section ends with the line “It was over for maybe minutes then it was never over.” Nobody seemed surprised to see the twin towers of the World Trade Center projected in red and black against the background of the main stage on Friday and Saturday nights. Sheets of butcher paper had been filled with wishes for the future and it was as though the festival was straining toward something it had not had to imagine in the past. Of course, the eclecticism and the strangeness remained, but most people seemed to be struggling to feel what had been a rough organic unity in the past. On Saturday night we sat in the tent and listened to poems addressed to the future. I wondered whether this wasn’t a mistake, and whether the whole point was not to imagine some bright future, but to occupy ourselves with the complicated present.

The struggle between form and content, said former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, is the struggle between joy and tragedy. Current Laureate Billy Collins agreed. He claimed, “the reason that the content of most literature is misery is that form is happy. Form leads to happiness by transmuting pain into pleasure.” Most of the poets at the festival asked the same questions: How do we talk about what happened on September 11? How do we continue to write poetry? Many believed the answer to be located somewhere in the struggle for form. That power comes from fitting the words and the emotions into the requirements of form. It seemed to me that the festival, by bringing us all there, had transmuted the feelings of frustration and powerlessness into something that felt strongly like community. Mark Doty talked to us about that feeling. He said, “Here a certain kind of interior permanence is developed. This is a community that, once formed, does not go away.” It was something I believed – this was a special place – but it relieved me to hear him say it. Rigor gives rise to radiance.

Adam Zagajewski had come from Krakow to be at Waterloo. He told the story of having submitted some poems to The New Yorker the week before September 11^th. I was struck by how many stories we all told this long weekend, how many ways there were of remembering to pay attention to everything. I remember the feel of the firm chair under me and how the sheep nuzzled the fence behind the stage on which he read his poem, “Praise The Mutilated World.” It ended with the lines:

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

Zagajewski went on to say, “What’s most fascinating to me [about poetry] is the element of mystery, this question.” I found myself getting carried away by the details: the grain of the plywood in the stage, the bowing elms, the heavy clouds that seemed pinned to the low sky.

In a discussion about poetry as a disruptive seed and a centering force, Mark Doty claimed that real art arises from the dialectic between order and disorder, enchantment and disenchantment. Since language is an imperfect medium, we can never ultimately resolve the opposition. I sat sweating in the hot tent and scribbled furiously in my notebook. It seemed as though everything was getting away from me. The words came faster than I could write them down and when I looked back even minutes later, I couldn’t make out what I had written. The paper curled in the humidity and I couldn’t tell whether everything was falling apart or just about to come together. I tried to relax. “Living is complicated so the complicated poem feels real,” Doty said and we all nodded as though this were something everyone understood.

The days ran into each other like dreams you have just before waking up—so vivid, so transitory. Grace Paley said, “You begin where you know, but you write about what you don’t know about what you know. You invent and imagine. That’s how you do it.” She grinned and asked for questions. A girl raised her hand. She said that she was eleven and she wrote poems too. She said they were pretty good and her teacher wanted to send them off to a magazine. Another girl, 17, said she wrote a poem that changed her friend’s life. The consensus was that she had been very fortunate. We are all waiting to be given the poem that will change our lives. We are all waiting to write it ourselves.

The afternoon (is it Friday? Saturday?) churned on and I stumbled across a group of kids surrounding three boys playing guitars. I leaned against a tree and watched them, wondering whether I could make it to the concession area and buy a bottle of water before I passed out. The heat had gotten to me and I hadn’t been sleeping. Words danced drunkenly before my eyes and the dim sun bore a hole through my head. The boys were playing “Sweet Jane,” but couldn’t seem to stay in time with each other. After a few minutes the song began to sound like a round and one of the boys stopped and began to laugh. The others continued to play with their eyes closed, strumming faster and faster as though they were heralding the beginning of a new world.

They Will Bring The Singer To The Bungalow

The full moon rose as Brenda Hillman told us a story about her friend who broke her jaw. When it came time for the doctor to remove the wires that had held her for so long, he gave her a sentence to help her learn to talk again. He said if she repeated “They will bring the singer to the bungalow,” her muscles would soon remember how they used to talk. I sat holding my breath in the packed tent and wondered why I had chosen to sit on the side where I knew the acoustics weren’t so good. As she ran through her poems, I was barely breathing because the air rushing into and out of my lungs made too much noise. I wondered if we were all learning to talk again and whether these poems were our prescriptions.

The festival promotes not-knowing over comprehension. Everyone encourages you to reside in uncertainty. One of the first things I heard here was a quotation from the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of the Polish poet Wislawa Syzmborska. She said, “I value that little phrase ‘I don't know’ so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.” I knew this, though: many of us were walking around Waterloo Village with these strange confused smiles on our faces; we were all suspended in a kind of delirious feeling of well-being.

Stanley Kunitz is 97 years old. He is the only American poet to ever publish a book of new poems after the age of 90. On Saturday night, he read a stirring version of “God’s Grandeur,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, but on Sunday it was time for him to read his own poems. Stooped under the weight of age, he climbed the stairs to the stage under his own power, acknowledging the deafening applause with a wave. He shuffled his papers and began. For the next 45 minutes, we all sat barely breathing, struggling to hear every word. He read a poem called “The Testing Tree.” It ended with these lines:

In a murderous time

the heart breaks and breaks

and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

through dark and deeper dark

and not to turn.

The crowd became something other than what we had been. I understood that interior permanence Mark Doty had spoken about earlier in the festival. This community would not disappear. After all, there’s another festival two years from now. We will all descend upon Waterloo Village again in September 2004, when, perhaps, we will still be unsure of what to say. When the world may seem even more mutilated than it does today. When it will be difficult not to turn away and even more difficult to say anything about the thrush or the light. When there will be more of everything. I will come to Waterloo to remember how to speak again.

Published in the Winter 2003 issue of the Salt Hill Review.