Lost Alphabet: Reader Response

There is much to admire and emulate in Olstein’s Lost Alphabet, including her sly use of symbolism and mastery of metaphor.  First, the unique, log-like structure of her book with its fictional lepidopterist located in a shack outside a village, places the poetry in a context that lends to the poet as observer with the omnipresent eye:

The eye—finger of the soul—responds with varying degrees of constriction, expansion, extending backwards to the brain.

My eyes have adjusted to looking more and more closely.

The true eyes pool behind a hood of pale feathers.

There seems to be a trend in contemporary poetry to reflect on oneself as poet and Olstein is no exception, for she scrutinizes not just moths and her environment, but poetry, itself: “The limitations are those of my imagination” and “I have imagined a new way of holding my instruments, more of a laying down in the fingers.”  Indeed, it seems that fingers represent Olstein’s writing process as in [the heart is always beyond the fingers] and throughout the book:

I learn more by hovering my fingers above their dark channels, but it remains difficult to trust this knowledge or give it a name.

Fingers are too blunt.

It is a strange gymnastics, their bodies, mine: what to grasp, when to release, the nature of a turn, the will of the whole channeled into the fingertips.

I like Olstein’s repeated, symbolic use of the image of animals in stalls or pens with a domesticity that I believe stands for a civilization that she misses.  We know that she sometimes feels isolated: “I admit to being lonely”:

Perhaps I stay because they are a horse people and I miss my stable.

They love to be led from their stalls.

I see them gaze longingly at the animals in their pens…

…animals quiet in their pens…

…tell stories of animals turning back into the burning stalls from which they were just released.

I am charmed and mystified by Olstein’s ability to marry image or sound with an idea in a way that transcends the ordinary thrust of meaning:

With the animals, the scrim of language is pulled back and I am fluent.

…the only sound is the low ticking of vegetables underground.

Olstein deftly captures and pins down that which seems too elusive to describe:

Slowly, the absence of pain arrives like snow falling.

I could only hope to distill language down to its purist form, as Olstein does.  The simplicity and specificity, here, reads like a haiku.  Anyone who has been in severe, chronic pain knows this almost imperceptible, gentle, unexpected lilting of relief you dare not disturb like a blessing.  Like snow falling.      

Writing Prompt: A Color

Spring
Green is the color of spring.  It is the air and the earth and what’s in between.  It is a nursery rhyme: a child sing-songing and dancing over the dead.  The ground groans and shifts and births the muck rot stench of skunk cabbage, a sachet of aching anticipation from hidden quagmires, shaded from the chartreuse sky whose blinding light and bruising breeze invade the flesh.  Dampness creeps in through the skin.  There is no inoculation--no shot against the pox of digesting stimuli in too great amounts, too quickly.  Night delayed, day prolonged, the trees grow big and round and smug in their soon-to-be viridian perfection.  The birds rise early to shriek with apprehension.

Some Haiku Poems

Our pale young bodies
the bluff with the tree and bird
warmed by the round sun


You walk down the path
a book conceals your coy smile
blossoms in your hair


Toiling through deep woods
taut with the tail lights of dawn
you reach for my hand


Oh how a willow
can show the westerly wind!
Angry long-haired girl


We reap our own way
with makeshift machetes 
whipped by thin branches


Sweet drop from the tip
of a honeysuckle wick
plays on my plump tongue


still I know the joy
of seizing on that red daub--
cardinal in the trees

Writing Prompt: Assumptions About a Place

The Pact

No cumulus clouds.

No harps.

No infinite green hills undulating their way through eternity. Just one big sprawling patch of park at the edge of an ocean and the forgotten splendor of a vast blue sky and one single day that never ends.

One perfect day that never ends. With you.

We are thankful that our dead relatives don’t come to greet us--we never liked them.

It rains, but only long enough to magnify the color of the leaves.

We stumble upon a small pond and see our reflections. Our eyes are angels falling from the sky.

Our favorite music accompanies our gestures. We hold hands to harpsichord music. The friction of our kisses produces Lou Reed’s lyrics: You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/someone good…


 We do not meet God, but there are other people. Only they are like colorful window dressing or cordial movie extras. They smile and nod, but never intrude upon us.

All the wild animals are friendly and have been liberated from the zoo which now serves as hell and houses the damned. We go there and toss popcorn to the lost souls from across a swollen stream.

We enter and tie for first place in a spontaneous hotdog eating contest.

Stuffed, we stroll down shady paths. We hold our head wounds and laugh because after all isn’t this just one big joke that only we are in on?

verses on bird: Reader Response

When reading Zhang Er’s verses on bird, I was, at first, distracted by her use of clichés, particularly around the common idea that words will always fall short of reality:

“the helplessness of language”

and

“Where can we find enough names to name all these things in front of our eyes?”

and

“All that ought to be said, they’ve said it already…”

I was similarly disappointed by phrases such as:

“jump out of your skin”

and

“strike a pose”

Er does, however, make exquisite use not only of birds, but bodies of water and flowers. The lotus appears again and again. As with Darwish, I like the repeated use of metaphors, and she does not exhaust the bird as I feared she might. What I would most like to emulate is Er’s immediacy. Everything takes place now, as she, herself, points to in her poetry: “This moment. Here.” This approach creates a compelling intimacy between the poet and reader. Furthermore, her writing is just matter-of-fact enough to let us in whereupon she spins into metaphor, as in the personification found in The Hardware Store:

“…knobs and handles covered with dust…
For the flood is coming, blue water marks
Painted above the roof: a mockery,
A grin, a pair of eyebrows forever knotted.

At the same time, I feel that Er is holding something back, and the reader does not like to feel cheated. Perhaps a photograph is not the best way for this poet to view the world. After all, it is a representation, a dilution, and the camera creates a distance between the photographer--or the poet--and the world. I cannot say that I culled a lot from her work in regards to influencing my own.

Response: A River Dies of Thirst

I found interpreting Darwish’s A River Dies of Thirst to be a fascinating challenge.  It seems to me that there are distinct patterns to be found in his collection, for he makes repeated use of particular metaphors throughout.  Take trees, for instance.  For Darwish, “the tree is forgiveness and vigilance.”  He depicts the tree as an ever present sentinel, as a witness to violence, even its own: “They [the soldiers] crush our grandmother, so that now her branches are in the earth and her roots in the air.”  I see Darwish’s thematic use of the sky as standing for indifference or a sort of absurd pointlessness.  It is fair or dark regardless of what takes place below: “No war there. And no peace, and the sky is clean and light above the place” and “The sky is not blue or white or grey, because the colours are points of view agreeing and disagreeing.”  I like the idea of using the same concept more than once, in an emblematic way.

Along with the sky, Darwish makes frequent cloud references which I believe stand for himself as a poet: “An apple fell on me from the clouds, and I knew my imagination was a faithful hunting dog” and “The poet becomes increasingly involved in describing the silk shawl, not noticing that it is a cloud that happens to be passing between the branches of the tree at sunset.”  In “The essence of the poem“: “A cloud in a poet’s imagination is an idea.”  I cannot fathom referencing myself as artist in my own poetry.  For me, this would require achieving a certain level of significance as a poet.  Darwish’s birds are beautiful and transcendent, flying up and above the signs of war as in “Doves.”

Finally, perhaps more than anything, A River Dies of Thirst is existential, including “What’s it all for?,” “A longing to forget,” “On nothingness,” and “Rustling.”  In “Life to the last drop,” Darwish responds humorously to the question of what would you do if you were to die tomorrow: “If I existed, as I do now, then I wouldn’t think about not existing.  If I didn’t exist, then the question wouldn’t bother me.”  In “I was not with me,” Darwish is “neither sad nor happy, for nothingness has no connection to emotion or to time.”  Darwish’s existentialism resonates with me only insofar as I’ve explored the self in some of my own writing, but certainly not in the kind of context he experienced.