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Prosimetrum Excerpt

Prose on Poetry, from Tim’s Prosimetrum in Progress, Requited

(From XIV:  The Powow Poets)

Rhina Espaillat was seven when her parents moved from the Dominican Republic to New York City. Raised bilingually, she learned to write with equal fluency in Spanish and English. As a New York schoolteacher, Rhina was never seduced by the sirens of linguistic separatism. She always asserted the necessity of English for children growing up in the United States. Marrying another schoolteacher, she also balanced career and family with a rare ease. After retirement, Rhina and her husband relocated to Newburyport Massachusetts. There a small stream fortuitously called the Powow joins the Merrimac near its estuary, and there Rhina has gathered round her the Powow River Poets — a most remarkable group of people. Among its best poets are David Berman, Alfred Nicol, Len Krisak, Bob Crawford, Michael Cantor, Bill Coyle, and Mike Juster.  

I can’t remember who said “Ireland maintains a standing army of 3000 poets,” but I can attest that the small town of Newburyport boasts no less than 60, many of whom are publishing first or second collections. “We all dance round in a ring and suppose,/But the secret sits in the center and knows.” So Frost told us long ago. In Newburyport the secret is Rhina. She has mastered (mistressed?) every form known to English: heroic couplet, heroic quatrain, free verse, rondeau, ovillejo, sestina, villanelle, and above all the sonnet. She uses those forms so effortlessly that unless you’re an obsessive like me, you don’t even notice how intricate a set of rules she fulfills in each of them. Instead you are smitten by the sensibility.

Well, not everyone is smitten. Joseph Salemi wrote a hostile review of one of Rhina’s books, calling it “The Poetry of  Nicey-Nice.” Perhaps he took his inspiration from critics who have dismissed Dick Wilbur for his civility — for his not being a brooding, suicidal maniac like Lowell, Berryman, or Schwartz. Unlike her own famously self-destructive contemporaries, Plath and Sexton, Rhina is quiet and affirmative. She writes about squirrels, dogs, songbirds and family because these are objects of her daily attention, but loss is a recurring topic in her poetry. Even a marriage can occasion sad reflections which require conscious transmutation into joy.

For My Son on His Wedding Day

In your fisherman’s room, becalmed by loss,
I sit, thinking Yes hard while the heart cries No
whose love you landed, unfished-for, long ago.
Mother, pet nag, Blue Fairy, and albatross,
truer than any compass, stubborn as whale,
I cursed you with gloves and lunches and beliefs,
harpooned you with Don’ts, dragged anchor to your sail,
and, whether wrong or unforgivably right,
sighted everywhere storms and secret reefs.
Now, beached as the tide goes out that bears away
both the man and the boy you were, what can I say?
That fear is the fare we pay to all delight;
that none steer blithely with so much to lose;
that if I doled out like rations your right to choose,
I flung out by prodigal handfuls joy to your joy,
balm to your grief; that, proud of my tall, fair boy,
I wish you, too, beautiful sons and daughters,
and long miraculous fishing in quiet waters.

One of my favorite wedding poems is Wilbur’s “A Wedding Toast,” which reflects on the turning of water to wine at Cana and expresses forthright best wishes to his son and the bride in perfectly straightforward accentual syllabic stanzas. Rhina’s poem by contrast is haunted by parental concern over rearing her boy, regret for the discipline she had to dish out, foreboding of loss. She employs what Frost called “loose iambics” to express her unease over the celebratory occasion, giving us lines with varying numbers of accents and syllables. There is a nervousness, a hesitancy to this pentameter that mirrors the mixed feelings of the mother. It can be usefully compared with the stricter meter of “Here, Here!” from her last collection, Rehearsing Absence (University of Evansville Press.)

“Here! Here!”

What bird are you, repeating “Here! Here! Here!”
and later, “What to do!” as if distraught,
and “What to do!” again? And yet it’s clear
you’re neither calling me nor overwrought,
but occupied, and singing quite by chance.
Almost unseen, your feathered self, aware
of nothing but each pressing circumstance —
each straw for your light carpentry midair —
tosses out songs in passing, line by line
not consciously, but idly thrown away
on strangers’ ears as ignorant as mine.
And still I hear you say the things you say,
swear I could almost knock on your green door,
as if you meant it and I knew what for.

Although she is perfectly capable of bloodying the nose of the God in whom she does not quite believe, Rhina’s program is minute and accurate observation of her surroundings, both outward and inward. There are more birds in Espaillat than in any poet I know except Murphy (although most of my birds get massacred by the final line.) Despite her domesticity, she is, like her beloved Robert Frost, “one who has been acquainted with the night” — uprooted from homeland and extended family, bereaved of her father as a young woman, employed for many years in difficult urban schools. From all this she makes her “light carpentry midair.” Miraculously, she has achieved this state of grace without the aid of religion.

Last year Joseph Bottum commissioned her to translate three of the great poems of San Juan de la Cruz for First Things. Let me quote my favorite of these. It has been what the Anglicans call “a very near and present comfort” to me. For years I have adored the John Frederick Nims translation, which he revised for three decades. Immersed from childhood on in St. John (her late father’s favorite poet), at ease with his archaic Spanish, Rhina offers us an English poem so true to its great original, so graceful in its stanzaic execution, the performance appears to be effortless.

The Dark Night of the Soul
(Cancion de la subida del Monte Carmel, de San Juan de la Cruz, 1542–1591)

One darkest night I went,
aflame with love’s devouring eager burning —
O delirious event! —
no witnesses discerning,
the house now still from which my steps were turning.
Hidden by darkness, bent
on flight, disguised, down secret steps sojourning —
O delirious event! —
Hidden by dark, and yearning,
the house now still from which my steps were turning;

In that most blissful night,
in secrecy, since none had seen my going,
nor did I pause for sight,
nor had I light, for showing
the route, but that which in my heart was glowing.

This only did the guiding,
surer than the blaze when noonday shone,
to where he was abiding —
who was to me well known —
where we would be together and alone.

O night that led me true,
O night more fair than morning’s earliest shining,
O night that wrought from two —
lover, beloved entwining —
beloved and lover one in their combining!

On my new-flowered breast,
to him alone and wholly sanctified,
he leaned and lay at rest;
his pleasure was my guide,
and cedars to the wind their scent supplied.

Down from the tower, breezes
came, while soft fingers winnowed through his hair;
a touch that wounds and pleases
caressed my throat with air,leaving every sense suspended there. I stayed, all else forgetting,
inclined toward the beloved, face to face;
all motion halted, letting
care vanish with no trace,
forgotten in the lilies of that place.

Twice in my peregrinations as performing poet, I have driven from Amherst to Newburyport. I began those journeys a stone’s throw from Emily Dickinson’s house and ended two miles from the Atlantic, dining on lamb shanks with Rhina, whose hospitality surpasses Ms. D’s reclusiveness. If you should pass that way, don’t make for the turnpike. Take US 202. Northeast of Amherst, this shoulderless two-lane road meanders amid forested hills and rounds reservoirs. Mind the “Moose Crossings.” On the other side of the continent, my friends the Millers once had a 54 car unitrain derailed near the continental divide. A bull moose charged a locomotive and spilled 10 million pounds of number 2 yellow corn some 17000 miles short of the intended destination in China. Cleanup was complicated when a grizzly took possession of what was left of the moose.

American poetry is largely the possession of New Englanders. We have Dickinson, Robinson, Frost, Stevens, Francis and Wilbur, just to name my six favorite American poets in the order of their births. To this day, it seems that half of the country’s emerging poetic talent is locatable in a sixty mile radius of Newburyport, Massachusetts. One of the most accomplished Powows is Deborah Warren. To place her in context, consider E.A. Robinson.

New England

Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.
Passion is here a soilure of the wits,
We’re told, and Love a cross for them to bear;
Joy shivers in the corner where she knits
And Conscience always has the rocking-chair,
Cheerful as when she tortured into fits
The first cat that was ever killed by Care.

Robinson is toying with us all the way through this poem, beginning with a weather quip — though he never felt the nip of North Dakota’s north-northwest — and concluding with a killer sestet that slinks sinuously toward its close, then pounces. He chooses a form notorious for its constriction, the Italian sonnet, but we laugh with him as those limitations liberate his imagination.

Limitation comes very naturally to the New England mind. Hoping to farm, the settlers of New England cleared forests only to find soil so stony that they had no choice but to build (and mend) walls. They also found growing seasons so short that only the most vigilant and vigorous sower could hope for a crop. Harsh life and harsh religion marked the people who lived there. They made virtue of their necessities — a virtue Warren celebrates in “Thrift Shop,” where she delightedly discovers “seven nightgowns with their nap/ still blooming on the flannel.”

“Thrift Shop” makes me think of Thoreau, and of the poet Robert Francis, who incorporated account books in his memoir, to celebrate his poverty precisely. Even when New Englanders escaped the exigencies of life on land or at sea, poverty’s mark remained for generations — narrowing the lives and minds of those Beacon Hill ladies in the Robinson poem. But life is less harsh in Howard Dean’s New England. Deborah Warren’s dairy operation is a labor of love, not the sole source of sustenence for her large family. In the title poem of her first book, The Size of Happiness, she dreams of running a 150 cow dairy, of buying up and plowing the surrounding mountains, but as a farmer she has the wisdom to concentrate on what is rewarding — and profitable — breeding stock.

The Heifers

The three-week heifers straggle down
the ramp this April Saturday,
out to a small enclosure where
they won’t get very far away.

On Thursday — even Wednesday — though,
we’ll wander over here again;
their bellies will be deeper,
and their faces will be longer then.
A different slant of haunch or brow:
They won’t still be these heifers, who
will get away from us inside
the small space of a day or two.

Eastern North Dakota is cropland too fine for pasture. I have only one friend in the dairy business, only a few in cattle-rearing. However I have been privileged to watch new-born calves, and I envy the precision of observation Deborah brings to this poem. “A different slant” tips her invisible hat to Ms. D. But bellies deeper, faces longer? Dickinson couldn’t have conjured those images. It is the work of a woman who has mastered mothering, and who knows the changes that come over calves and children. She also knows that plowing a mountain slope is masculine folly, and she tells us so in one of my favorite poems from her second book, Zero Meridian.

Hay Field on Methodist Hill

From the time we cleared it, all it’s been is trouble,
stubborn and recalcitrant and proud;
every winter, fractious and uncowed,
throwing up new rocks and glacier-rubble:
It’s clear it never wanted to be plowed.

And once we got the stones out, it was trees
behaving as if they had the right of way:
Every March the maples have a field day —
don’t expect them to give you a year of peace —
shoving, off-side, elbowing out the hay.
When the saplings get above themselves, it’s over.
Let them grow a foot or so too high
and-teen-age trees? You might as well go try
and sow the sea with rocks and hope for clover,
or, if you want less trouble, plow the sky.

There is much to be admired in these pentameter cinquains which borrow the rhyme scheme of “The Road Not Taken.” Though the colloquiality of the speech is one hundred years more current, the poem has much the same wry, edgy spirit as the Robinson I quoted above. I’ve cleared slopes of scrub aspen to plant red and white pine, and I’ve wielded the brush cutter to keep weed trees down — a far easier task than keeping newly-planted clover fit for mowing and baling. I could imagine writing a poem something like this, but I’m not a family man, and I could not have come up with “teen-age trees.” Deborah is both mother and teacher. Her experience with young people has instilled an instinct for setting serious thoughts in colloquial, playful language.

In August 2005 Alan and I visited that picture postcard of a farm. Deborah’s husband George had sold the heifers and leased out the land, but at least those transactions cash flowed the farm. George and I discussed the vicissitudes of agriculture. He was an admirer of Set the Ploughshare Deep, my prior prosimetrum in which I chronicled the building and collapse of my first farming venture. Deborah and George had suffered a tragedy last year when their son Nicholas fell from a tree in New Zealand. He suffered a serious head injury and was in a coma for six months. That he is now in rehab back in Boston is something of a miracle. I wrote him this poem:

The Bowline

For Nicholas

A young sailor plummeted from a tree.
Stunned as though a spreader had cracked his head,
he lay six months unmoving, nearly dead.
To rouse him from insensibility
a wise doctor gave him a length of rope,
said “Bowline.”  The rabbit popped up the hole,
and hopped counter-clockwise around the bole.
Prayers had been heard, a mooring made for hope.