My morning book (besides finishing a 1950s Dickson Carr Dr. Fell novel set in a theater) is let the heart hold down the breakage by Maureen Owen who is high in my pantheon of favorite poets. I picked this book up and a co-authored travel one in Seattle at Open Books, and some other tiny magazines, so pleased to riffle through the entire store in search of something I was not allergic too and didn’t already have.
let the heart has what I want, like a sort of guidepost, in the obvious life stage way and in its poetics – the floatiness I love in Owen’s poems and the feeling of freedom over the page – but anchored in daily life without a gimmick or any plonking.
If I can bitch for a minute about a thing I don’t like – I’ve written it up before in a tiny book of critical essays called Hot Air – it would be the plonk or the “hmmm” moment of a poem that says two obvious things and then wraps itself up in a smug little knot and then everyone in the room goes “mmmmMMMMMmmmm” and nods. Oh fuck I hate it! And even more when it’s like, “oh there’s some flowers on my living room table and then i thought about how my dad was emotionally repressed”. (Sorry not sorry) I think this catches people who are technically competent (D. would say “Workmanlike” ) and sit down to write a poem and are casting about for a subject or who have picked the subject like a class assignment and are trying to draw it and then add a title (the ending lines of the HmmMMMMmm poem) that baldly say the moral of the story, in case you missed it.
Anyway Owen avoids all that.
I also feel a skepticism of the tendency (including in myself) to write about beautiful things without being anchored in daily reality – like utopian communities and manifestoes where you know someone (not the author) is cooking scrambled eggs for 20 people and cleaning up afterwards, or like loving Walden without keeping the women in mind who supported Thoreau with domestic labor – Though we hardly know whether to deplore Thoreau’s lack of practical living skills, or debunk his debunkers I still can’t think of him without muttering “pies. laundry.” as grumpily as if texting it to someone complete with those grim full stops at end of line.
How do we write about giant feelings that trickle into every corner of ourselves, and seem indescribable? We know everyone can look at the clouds or trees and feel something and novels wind you up in the characters’ heads so that your own feelings are evoked, or you have the flash of empathy for the fantastical scenes & state of mind of the story. And in poetry my aim is to express something or describe something I can only express in this way, to evoke it in a reader or listener and also as a poet looking at the world I try to disrupt and expand my own consciousness, to open it to many things. And then I want to give other people a glimpse of that (or maybe at the core just be able to read it again myself and remember the intensity and complexity of feeling, or thought, I was mustering up.) If you are feeling, and also knowing things, and aware, and also doing things? That’s a lot to cram into a small space !
let the heart sets the scene of a diary and care work – big feelings, like, buckle up, we’re going in.
The poem early on titled “Mom” pitches me right into Owen-world, we are anchored in reality in the flip flops, the tender care as she shades her mom, the pines are maybe shading similarly but they are napping like Mom, they are carer and cared-for by the poet’s awareness.
Like, we have all stared at the beautiful motion of pine trees in the wind – at least I like to think we have – This admiration and wonder most lately expressed by the impulse to point your phone camera up and snap some photos, checking over them greedily to see if the magic has been caught in your representational net – Does it just look like a tree from below or is the feeling there, does it carry the contagion of art? I love people doing this and their aspirations and dreams and the attempt.
so we are in the moment expanding our minds not to encompass more (that is so possessive and presumptious) but to be aware of more. tuning into a wide channel. with the floating over the page language and spacing and lines that free my mind as the reader (and as a poet too) – the breaths –
I’m wishing Carmen weren’t dead so I could send her this poem and really the whole book.
When Michele was here and we talked so intensely about her mother and were writing snippets for her memorial and M saying , this is what my mother would like, but all her accomplishments are not my mother, really, to me – and I was thinking about what she was to me and knowing a lot of her harsher (cruel, damaged) aspects but also my deep impression of her as a brilliant person looking for that big pond & big scope wherever she could find it with fierce ambition – in science and computing and genetics and culture and music. i searched for poems that M might accept as having the feel of her and settled on this from Amelia Earhart,
At breakfast the question of nuclear weapons in space
Now the voices were faded they sang to her Her own
name in bits Underneath 2556 miles of water whistled
shore tunes it's soft clapping a comfort & a horror
The plane is the point at which the fog & the sea would meet.
A koan is a puzzle that cannot be answered in ordinary ways.
All my
Electrons Lord! all my protons neutrons leptons
mesons haryons all my Gravitons! "this will be
the secret of my disappearance A massless particle
is a particle of zero rest mass all of its energy is energy
of motion"
Then I was so pleased M. got it and agreed it was perfect, but we also then realized it was not right for a poem in a memorial booklet to be read aloud to a group of miscellaneous people in assisted living and that that memorial was for her dad and her and other family but in that setting was mostly for the other residents and a more understandable bit of poetry (Joyce Grenfell) would be best for the context.
Just as that crowd never knew V. as the complicated and beautiful high flyer she was, the poem would also fly over them and just be confusing. But to me and M. it was perfect, and comforting, and helped us feel seen and like V. was understood and seen.
The HmmmmmmMMMMmmmm of shared understanding, and songs and rituals, are useful and important for sure.
Grenfell’s poem, and I still want to slam it as a hallmark card of a “poem”, UGH SORRY, at least helps us all agree that yes, death sucks and we are sad, and yet sucky things are all the time, and we still should find happiness. Nothing to argue with there honestly. So I feel a tension between knowing what serves most people best and my own abstractions & kind of being up my own ass in an only liking the poet’s poets way, which I really can’t help. We can fly ambitiously like AE while knowing she also washes her dishes and makes coffee and is a real person, grounded.
What is a poem FOR – there can be many answers!
Back to let the heart hold down the breakage. The qualities of a diary are beautiful to me (the world split open, right?) Daily experience – physicality – the world of over the counter drugs, used kleenexes, bacon, while swooping back and forth in time and over lifetimes and having the holograph of the person you knew over time (and the imagined person they were before you knew them) build and build on itself till you want to explode.
What Owen is doing in her book is letting much more of the sadness in, acknowledging things that are hard, accepting the work in front of her (one of my main principles in life despite also being a sort of escape artist) whole heartedly. I see in my own life people who have done intense care work being more than a little traumatized by it and having difficulty thinking about it, sharing it, but then it spills over. I appreciate the work to hold it (the work and the trauma, or the feelings, and yes the beauty in it) and integrate it into the consciousness of everything ELSE. To me – this is a perfect example of the poet’s hunger for wisdom & the fruit it bears.
