News

This blog has been active for a year, and I’ve published 25 essays on 25 different poems. I’m very proud of it, and hope it’s giving you readers some pleasure. Now it’s time for this project to migrate into another medium.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve just finalized a contract with ECW Press to publish How a Poem Moves in book form.

The book will contain some of the essays you’ve found here, as well as new work and an introduction that I’ve been promising for a while but thus far have not delivered. Needless to say, I’m very excited, and want to thank Michael Holmes at ECW for helping me gestate the idea. The plan is for the book to come out in the spring of 2019.

This means that this site will go quiet for a while. I have to write some essays that will be exclusive to the book, and I need time to sort through what’s here, to re-organize, and to re-imagine the project for its new manifestation.

It’s likely that I will return to writing individual essays for this blog once the book is up and away, but for now, I want to thank all of you for your enthusiasm, your encouragement, and your input. More to come!

 

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Richard Siken, “Dots Everywhere”

 

An ekphrastic poem responds to a work of art in some way. Often, as in W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” there is a description of the piece (usually a painting) that puts its images into some other context. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes the painting is a jumping off point for the poem, or a point of contention.

A lot of poems in Richard Siken’s War of the Foxes could be called ekphrastic. But Siken is a painter himself (as you can see on his website here) and often his subject seems as much about the creation of an image or painting as it is about our response to viewing it.         I know of other poets who were also visual artists (William Blake first and foremost) but Siken is the first poet-painter I’m aware of who delves so deeply into the problems of creation, whether that creation is on paper, canvas, or in the imagination itself.

Before I go too far down this road, here’s the poem:

 

Dots Everywhere
I erased my legs and forgot to draw in the stilts.

It looks like I’m floating but I’m not floating.

Sometimes I draw you with fangs. I tell you these

things because I love you. Some people paint

with whiskey and call it social drinking. Some people

paint drunk and put dots of color everywhere.

In the morning the dots make them happy. I am

putting dots of color everywhere and you are sleeping.

Something has happened in the paint tonight and

it is worth keeping. It’s nothing like I thought it

would be and closer to what I meant. None of it is

real, darling. I say it to you. Maybe we will wake up

singing. Maybe we will wake up to the silence

of shoes at the foot of the bed not going anywhere.

 

— from War of the Foxes, ©2015 by Richard Siken, published by Copper Canyon Press, used by permission

 

 

The first thing I respond to is the unsettling emotional context. Our speaker admits to occasionally imagining his loved one “with fangs.” I imagine the image is probably not one the lover would find flattering. On the other hand, our speaker claims that he’s reporting this vision “because I love you.” I suppose that in some ways honestly divulging one’s nightmares about one’s partner is a good thing? If the poet-artist has also severed his own legs, and wants to tell his partner about that as well, perhaps this sort of dark sharing is a regular part of their relationship?

There’s some fun to be had projecting this couple’s regular dinner-table conversations (“How did you imagine me today, darling?” “With porcupine quills.”), but for me there are important questions about the creative mind that are involved in this exchange. Can our imagination incriminate us somehow, especially as it’s expressed in art? How much of what’s churning in our brains do we need to take responsibility for? Is altering the way we experience reality damaging to the reality we are portraying?

Before a simple answer comes too quickly, the poem proceeds with a clever counter-argument: the speaker reminds us that “Some people paint / with whiskey and call it social drinking.” The deadpan tone sounds like social commentary but is really an idea about perception – that some of us, by applying alcohol to our body chemistry, deliberately alter our perception of the people and situations around us. We think of this as “social drinking,” and it doesn’t seem like such a great sin. So what about changing our perception of others using color, as art often tries to do?

A brief aside about the “dots of color” that are referred to a few times in the next lines, as well in the title. It’s hard not to think of Georges Seurat, the French post-Impressionist painter who developed pointillism and is best known for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

Siken’s description of the speaker’s works in progress – with erased legs, people with fangs, etc – makes them much more surreal than anything Seurat conceived. And it’s unlikely Seurat painted much while drunk. So I doubt Siken is referring directly to Seurat here as a subject, but Seurat’s development of pointillism was based on contemporary scientific ideas about color perception. That is, he was very conscious of creating a vivid deception for the eye to enjoy. And whether or not those principles still hold true, the painting still makes most of us happy.

There’s a point, then, in lines 6-11, where the poet-painter-lover seems to be content riding his distorted inspiration, applied while his lover is sleeping, whatever the implications. As he reports it, “Something has happened in the paint tonight and / it is worth keeping. It is nothing like I thought it / would be and closer to what I meant.” These lines will sound familiar to any artist, poet, or musician who has been happily led to new territory by an inspired mistake or tangent. Of course, the line is also somewhat deceptive – how can something happen “in the paint”? And how can the speaker know what he “meant” to accomplish if the painting that fulfills that intention is also “nothing like I thought it / would be”? The misperception of the paint moving the creative process forward – or the alcohol, or the romantic tension, or whatever – is part of how this painter convinces himself to move forward with his art. Misunderstanding seems crucial to the endeavour.

By the time we get to “None of it is / real, darling,” I sense that Siken is talking not only about the painting, and not only about the poem itself, but also about the whole nature of perception. The sentence sounds partly like a Katherine Hepburn quip and partly like Caliban from The Tempest (“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”) The idea seems to be that we can make ourselves crazy trying to discover what is “real,” but we’re much better off being content with the misperceptions that delight us.

Of course, our painter’s creative success won’t necessarily solve the romantic tension in his house. “Maybe we will wake up singing” feels promising, if unlikely. But “Maybe we will wake up to … shoes … not going anywhere” immediately summons the counter-image of the shoes going somewhere, leaving, stomping off, whatever. Maybe, maybe not. Love sits uncomfortably with creative inspiration: on the one hand, the artist’s multi-coloured visions of his lover are partly what fuels his desire and creativity. But his pursuit of those visions, and their occasional brutality, also seem to have widened a gap that the poem struggles to bridge. Embracing the strange and surreal may help in the pursuit of art, but that doesn’t make an artist easy to live with. This poem seems to acknowledge that problem with a wry grin, showing a bit of fang.

 

Tiphanie Yanique, “My brother comes to me”

 

My brother comes to me

 

 

They are at the red gate

of my grandmother’s white house

The gate is taller than them both

The mother, who is my mother, is holding her son’s hand

The boy, who is my brother, is only four years old

She, our mother, is going crazy

She wants to take him with her

A blood stain has spread permanently on my brother’s white shirt

I am at the steps of the house, like a bride

I am fifteen and calling to my brother, “Come to me”

Her teeth are bared They are not pearls

“I am your mother,” she shouts

We are all crying and all our tears are all different

Our mother’s hair is a flame above us

 

          — from Wife, © Tiphanie Yanique 2015, published by Peepal Tree Press, used by permission

 

This poem moves very fast to describe a moment of such power and desperation that it seemed to me on first reading that I had missed something. At the center of it all is a boy with “A blood stain” on his shirt. We don’t know how it got there, and we don’t exactly know why the women around him are acting the way they are. There’s a power struggle between the speaker and her mother, and the conflict hinges upon a choice the bleeding brother must make between them.

Of course, we know already what the boy chooses, because of the title. And because it’s the counter-intuitive choice (wouldn’t a bleeding child usually go to his mother before anyone else?) we search through the poem for clues as to why, what in the situation makes the boy’s choice different from what we’d expect.

A couple of things about language to get us there. First there are no periods but there are commas, quotation marks, and standard capitalization. To me, the missing periods make the sentences fall over on themselves, increasing the speed of the reading, especially when the sentence breaks happen in the middle of the line (“Her teeth are bared They are not pearls”) but the commas and other punctuation make sure that there is no misunderstanding, that everything, while moving very fast, is also perfectly clear.

This is reinforced by the matter-of-fact tone. Mostly the speaker relates the events in straightforward subject-verb sentences without a lot of complicated line breaks or excess detail. The gate is red, the house is white, the boy is four years old. She sees the gate and measures it against the height of the boy and his mother. She sees the shirt and knows the stain won’t come out. What’s emerging is a speaker who, in her memory at least, looks back with a ruthless, pained clarity on events that changed her life and the life of her family.

Then there’s what’s not being said, really the two most important things. First, what actually has happened to the brother? A blood stain on his white shirt could be from a nose bleed or a gunshot wound. We wonder, how desperate is this moment? A few lines later the two women are each trying to convince the boy to come to them, and if the choice is really his, then the blood must be from a wound less life-threatening than a gunshot. Still, the question hangs in our minds: how did it get there? Was it the mother? Someone else who is not in the scene? By cutting out the explanation and only providing the physical fact of the red stain on his shirt, Yanique leaves us off-balance and on edge.

One quick thing about “permanently”: it’s the only four-syllable word in the whole poem, a jarring bit of over-explanation. Of course the word literally refers to the bloodstain on the boy’s shirt that will probably not come out in the wash. But the word also reminds us that the scene itself, the terrible choice the brother has to make, will leave a permanent mark, both on him and on the woman recounting the story.

The second unanswered question concerns the mother “going crazy.” The proximity of this line to the brother’s blood at first made me think she is reacting to her son’s injury, the way many mothers would if their child were bleeding. But when we see her teeth bared and that they “are not pearls,” we start to wonder if the speaker means “crazy” literally. That would of course explain why the sister has, from the steps of the house, compelled the boy to leave his mother behind. The sneaky little pun on “going” works here because it seems that, wherever the mother is planning to take her son, it’s clear they’re also going to be going to “crazy.”

But the sister, our speaker, is now daring to replace that mother: “Come to me” is not just a suggestion. It’s the type of command a mother gives, which a child knows to obey. Meanwhile the mother’s line of dialogue “I am your mother” sounds like the self-absorbed pleading of a disappointed adolescent. We have found the sister and her mother at the moment when they exchange roles. And the speaker’s comparison of herself to a bride in the previous line makes it clear that she knows her situation is about to change permanently, as she takes on the care for her four year-old brother.

How terrible for a boy so young to have to make a choice like this! How terrible for the girl, who must urge him to make it. And how terrible for the mother, whatever her madness, who realizes that she must release the grip she has on her son’s hand in the fourth line of the poem – no four year old boy could break out of a mother’s grip if she is not somewhat willing to let him go. No wonder they all shed their different tears.

We don’t know what happens after the child goes to his sister, how the mother reacts, or how the family – sister, brother, grandmother – set about making lives for themselves in the aftermath. As I’ve said many times in this blog, a poem doesn’t have the same obligations that a story has to complete the narrative and show us what happens next. But by honing in on this terrible moment of decision and change, Yanique gives us a vivid glimpse of three lives in crisis, with a complexity that continues to unfold into the unknown. That she does so in such a small space, with such plain language, is a remarkable achievement.

 

 

 

 

 

Jennifer L. Knox, “The New Let’s Make a Deal”

The connection between comedy and tragedy, or between laughter and darkness, is well documented. The trick, in poetry as in any other art form, is the balancing act – if there’s too much fun and silliness, then any attempt to add gravity feels false or awkward. If there’s too much tragedy, then the jokes fall flat.

Jennifer L. Knox has made a career out of high-wiring the balance between raucous comedy and searing tragedy. Here’s a poem from her book Days of Shame and Failure:

 

The New Let’s Make a Deal

 

The bedazzled tribe of yahoos has returned

with a new too-tanned, top-heavy prize bunny

swishing her porny French manicure ‘round a Frigidaire.

Monty’s boorish plaid: swapped for Wayne Brady,

dapper in gray. A woman dressed like a bumblebee,

penciled brows arched in permashock, weighs her options:

a bright pink bow-tied box, or the unknown thing

behind curtain #3. She squints into the din of hoots,

wrings her hands. Life could be made easy in an instant.

“I pick the curtain.” Attagirl. The box was a gag: a ham

with straps attached to it. A ham bag. Get it?

Wayne takes a bite to prove the meat’s really real

and the audience goes totes bonkers… we’re interrupted

by news of the hurricane. U.N. delegates have gone on

hunger strike until “a meaningful outcome” is reached.

God, give us one hundred more years until the dawn

of the Kingdom of Roaches, until the sea reclaims Death Valley,

until the end. Hey, what kind of poem is this? Behind curtain #3:

a combo washer-dryer bright as a mirrored iceberg.

Bee lady does a shrieking pogo while a guy in a dinosaur

costume mouths, “I love you, Mom!” into the camera.

It’s that kind of poem: a poem for the end of the world.

 

— from Days of Shame & Failure, © Jennifer L. Knox 2015. Published by Bloof Books, reprinted by permission.

Now, it’s probably true that every poem about game shows is actually a poem about the apocalypse. But before we get to the bottom of things, let’s take a bit of time to admire how much Knox packs into those opening lines – the language is rich, dense, and hilarious. I want to suggest that there’s something about the rampant use of trochees that adds to the tumbling, brutal absurdity of it all. (Trochees are the opposite of iambs, they go DUM-dum DUM-dum, like a heartbeat.) So “BUNny / SWISHing her PORNy…” or “MONty’s BOORish PLAID.” Like a good standup comedian, Knox has chosen her language very carefully, to pack the biggest punch, and it’s only when we look again that we see how well-crafted it is. I’m not going to, but trust me when I say I could write a full paragraph on the brilliance that is “She squints into the din of hoots.”

There’s also an element of scorn that I want to highlight, because despite its wit, the attitude our speaker takes with the “yahoos” on tv isn’t something we are meant to feel 100% comfortable with. It’s easy enough to make fun of the contestants on shows like Let’s Make a Deal, especially their cartoonish enthusiasms. But we also know that they’re being cast and coached to “go big” for our entertainment. And as the poem progresses, our own role as active audience members is increasingly implicated. And so while the speaker of the poem is mocking them with gleeful precision, there’s a cruelty here that’s going to turn on itself momentarily.

 

Wayne Brady, dapper in gray

Meanwhile, as we pass by, stick a pin in “Life could be made easy in an instant.” This desire for simplicity, for an easy life, is also something I want to put pressure on.

The poem makes a big turn at the end of line 13 – from “totes bonkers” to news of a hurricane. A storm big enough for the NBC affiliate to interrupt its daytime programming. And our speaker calls it “the” hurricane, as if she already knows about it, as if this isn’t the first update she’s heard. From the hurricane we travel to more bad news about U.N. delegates on a hunger strike. As far as I know, the only actual example of a UN delegate launching a hunger strike is when Naderev Sano, from the Philippines, did so in 2013 to urge the UN to take stronger action on climate change. This was in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, the deadliest on record in the Philippines, which killed over six thousand people in that country alone.

Knox isn’t necessarily referring to these particular events, but the point is that there are serious, even cataclysmic, things happening in the world. Meanwhile, we are watching Let’s Make a Deal. The lines that follow indicate that our speaker realizes how desperate the situation is, but her prayer for “one hundred more years” isn’t really a solution. In fact it’s a tremendously selfish desire – don’t solve the problem, God, just give us one hundred more years, after which I’ll be dead anyhow. Is praying for a solution to climate change beyond the imagination of this speaker? I mean, as long as we’re praying…! Why are her desires merely for a stay of execution rather than a dismissal of the sentence?

For a moment, then, as a reader I am prepared to turn against the speaker of this poem, and to judge her as just as superficial as the game show contestants she’s been mocking. But then Knox turns the tables on me once again: “Hey, what kind of poem is this?” That’s my voice asking this question. Knox catches us just before we are tempted to leave the room. Whether it’s because of my ethical doubts or because we want to finally, FINALLY! find out what’s behind curtain #3, our impatience finds voice inside the poem, and the poem returns us to what’s most important.

 

Tell the truth, when you were reading, you were a little glad that the poem turned back to curtain #3 and that Bee Lady won her washer-dryer, weren’t you? You weren’t hoping for more lines about Typhoon Haiyan, or any other terrible storm, or hunger strikes or climate change or the UN. Whatever well-meaning actions you as an individual reading this blog have performed today to avert climate change, it is most definitively not enough to solve the problem. Whatever you can do, it’s not enough. You are powerless before the forces – meteorological, economic, political, historical – that doom us to destruction. And so no wonder we long for our easy entertainments, including the entertainment of making fun of those who give us easy answers. The world is careening towards destruction, but Bee Lady has a new (energy efficient? water conserving? nah.) washer-dryer to make her life easier and good.

This is partly why this poem really is about the end of the world, as it admits in the final line. We have pivoted from the game show and the disasters to the subject ultimately being about our childish, understandable response to our powerlessness. That’s the real tragedy underneath the comedy.

To me, these daring leaps are what separates Knox’s poem from other poets, whether they are climate activists or pop culture satirists. The fact that she can get all that into one poem, as well as our wavering between moral horror and simple glee, is totes bonkers.

 

 

Lemon Hound 3.0

No new post this week, but I’m happy to spread the word that Lemon Hound, that lively online literary space, brainchild of the intrepid Sina Queyras, is back online after a long hiatus. Lemon Hound was one of the places where I first started writing How a Poem Moves articles (like this one on Karen Solie), and the site has always hosted new poems, new debates, and new articles that are worth your attention. Sounds like they’re getting a bit of help from Concordia this time, which will hopefully make the workload more sustainable for those (esp Sina) who run it, and they’re also open for donations so that we can contribute to the discussions it generates for a good long while. Check them out.

 

Madhur Anand, “Especially in a Time”

 

Poetry has always used other texts to do more with its small space: biblical allusions, or quotations from pop song lyrics, have been common in poetry for a long time, because they allow a poet to conjure or connote more than a stand-alone image or phrase. But recent years have brought about an explosion of poems wrought exclusively from other texts: centos, which are formed by shuffling together lines from other poems and/or lyrics; erasures, which pick a text and remove selected parts to reveal other messages; and other kinds of mashups, remixes, and found poems. The connection to contemporary musical production seems worth emphasizing – like hiphop sampling, these kinds of poetic techniques demonstrate a different kind of virtuosity, more akin to an archaeologist’s or a collagist’s than a traditional image-maker’s, though you still have to be able to spot a great image or phrase in order to make it work in a poem. If Michelangelo said something about uncovering the angel in a block of stone, then some poets are able to see an aardvark in the angel.

One question that hovers over poems like this is: how does the new incarnation reflect back, enrich, challenge, or renew its source text? I could probably scour the text of Moby-Dick in order to create a shopping list for my weekend (“a draught of a draught… of wet…whiteness…”), but that wouldn’t make it a worthwhile poem. What does the new poem do with its materials?

Madhur Anand has a PhD in theoretical ecology, and her book, A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, is at home in the language of science – its vocabulary, subjects, and syntactical patterns. “Especially in a Time” is one of a number of poems from the collection that are, as she explains it, “composed solely from words and phrases found” in scientific articles she has co-published. These poems, then, are a kind of re-mix of biological research. In the case here the paper is called “Rapid morphological change in stream beetle museum specimens correlates with climate change,” by Jennifer Babin-Fenske, Madhur Anand, and Yves Alarie, which was published in the journal Ecological Entomology in 2008. Here’s the poem:

 

Especially in a Time

 

Wild populations recognize that the linearity,

the relative rareness, the major museums, or any area

which is known, is a surrogate

for proximity

 

Stream beetles, Galapagos finches, and Israeli

passerine birds are transformed

into an index of limited

available information

 

Elytral lengths, slope of the regression,

and mid-latitude precipitation

unravel the anomalies

 

A prolonged change is also under scrutiny.

 

— Excerpted from A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes by Madhur Anand. Copyright © 2015 by Madhur Anand. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

 

I read through the study that is being mined here (Madhur graciously provided a copy for me), and what struck me about the paper is how careful and tentative it is. Because it wants to be certain about what it is claiming, the essay is full of qualifications, admissions of speculation and incomplete data, and conjectures about mediating or conflicting factors. This may be a common trope in scientific literature – I admit I don’t read a lot of research papers in ecology – but in Anand’s poem that doubtful precision emerges centre stage.

The poem takes a hold of this idea in the very first stanza: “Wild populations recognize that…” a bunch of things “…is a surrogate / for proximity.” This is a sneaky way to unfold scientific language in order to indict the very sort of scientific project described in the paper. In other words, all of the ways we non-wild populations have to study the world, all of the practices at the disposal of science – isolating anomalies (“relative rareness”), coherent argument (“linearity”), broad comparative systems (“major museums”) – all of these techniques are merely substitutes for the knowledge by “proximity” that the “wild populations” have.

The second stanza continues on this track, noting that the collections of sample data from various species is really just “an index of limited / available information.” It’s worth pointing out here that Anand has picked some delightful examples to illustrate this point – the near-rhyme between “stream” and “passerine,” the quick tour around the world from the focus of her research to the ends of the earth and back to one of the centres of the ancient world. These choices bear Anand’s poetic fingerprints most tellingly — she could have just as easily chosen “gastropod size” or “introduced toad species” for this stanza, which are also mentioned in the article, but they’re obviously not as evocative as “Israeli passerine” or “Galapagos finches.”

This points to another aspect of poems that draw from other texts – as much as forms of archeology, they are also acts of curation, and in that sense they are closer in technique to “regular” poems than they might seem. “Surrogate” and “proximity” are a full paragraph away from each other in Anand’s source text, and so it is Anand the poet who has put them together. In a way every poet is drawing from a similar (if larger) lexicon of possible terms and phrases when she writes a poem, and so the constraint of drawing from a 5-page scientific essay is not so very different than the constraint of, say, forcing each line to fit into a 13-syllable structure or the demands of a rhyming sonnet.

I’m trying to make a point here about how certain recent “experimental” techniques strike me as being very similar in practice to other kinds of constraints in poetry like the use of rhyme, or meter, or syllabic count or whatever. Self-important poets and intimidated readers often see these practices as a radical departure from previous forms of poetry, but for me, “use only words that appear in this essay” is a kissing cousin to the directive, “use only words that rhyme with Innisfree.” This doesn’t diminish the delight at all – on the contrary, the virtuosity required to pull off the conceit enhances our delight, or at least it’s meant to.

Anyway, it seems to me that in “Especially in a Time,” Anand’s skills as a source-mining poet highlight the tension between the search for truth and the barriers to discovering it. I want to be careful, though, about super-imposing too much artificial “meaning” into some of the choices she makes, because part of the fun of a mashup like this is relishing the juxtapositions of scientific and quasi-poetic terminologies that don’t quite cohere. As the poem closes, Anand seems drawn to phrases like “elytral lengths” (referring to the hardened wing-cases found on many beetles), equally for their sonic richness and unfamiliarity as for their relevance for studying the effects of climate change on micro-populations. But we seem to be a long way from unraveling all the anomalies.

In the end we are left with “a prolonged change” that is “also under scrutiny.” It seems like a euphemism for powerlessness – “under scrutiny” speaks to scientific and literary attention, but also to a kind of societal paralysis in the face of tremendous, and terrifying, global trends. Our successes are incremental, incomplete, and qualified, and yet the search for scientific truth and poetic beauty continue. Should we despair because of our inability to discover the kind of sky-opening revelations that will propel the world to change? Or do we keep collecting specimens?

Eric Pankey, “Ash”

 

Religious poetry was probably the first kind of poetry, but that doesn’t make it easy to write. What impresses me about this poem is how it is unafraid to draw from various traditions and approaches in a small space, while confronting a religious difficulty that is both ancient and very contemporary.

 

Ash

 

At the threshold of the divine, how to know

But indirectly, to hear the static as

Pattern, to hear the rough-edged white noise as song—

 

Wait, not as song – but to intuit the songbird

Within the thorn thicket, safe, hidden there.

Every moment is not a time for song

 

or singing. Imagine a Buddha, handmade,

Four meters high of compacted ash, the ash

Remnants of joss sticks that incarnated prayer.

 

With each breath, the whole slowly disintegrates.

With each footfall, ash shifts. The Buddha crumbles.

To face it, we efface it with our presence.

 

An infant will often turn away as if

Not to see is the same as not being seen.

There was fire, but God was not the fire.

 

— from Crow-Work, by Eric Pankey (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Eric Pankey. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org

 

We start “on the threshold of the divine” – that is, near something mysterious, revelatory, but not in it or on it or whatever. The first sentence of the poem is abstract, and at first the poet might seem to be wondering about how to get over that threshold, but that’s not it. Instead he wants to learn “how to know / But indirectly.” In a sense the desire he’s articulating is about living comfortably on the threshold, to have his ear pricked to what’s happening over it. As Pankey zeroes in on this idea he’s able to find metaphors to approach it – the static, and then the songbird. There are problems in both, though: hearing “the static as pattern,” for example, would be an illusion, finding meaning or intention in a phenomenon that actually has none. (An atheist’s accusation of the foolishness of a believer is that she sees a pattern in static.) On the other hand, Pankey’s form of belief isn’t quite ready to proclaim an actual bird singing in the thicket (“Wait – not as song”), but only the possibility of intuiting a hidden presence there. Pankey’s language is exploratory, tentative, careful – there are so many obstacles to portraying genuine religious experience and he seems to be trying to navigate between the obvious pitfalls.

One of those pitfalls is simply focusing attention on a sensation that is supposed to function outside of articulate thought. By writing the poem at all, Pankey is gesturing toward feelings that defy or transcend language, and so his next step, the most vivid image of the poem and the one that takes up the most space here, is about how our very conscious presence precludes the possibility of pure revelation.

The image of the crumbling ash Buddha evokes a few things for me. First, Pankey is referring specifically to the work of artist Zhang Huan, who constructed an Ash Buddha at the Sidney Festival in early 2015, and has done similar work elsewhere. (You can see his Sidney Ash Buddha being unmasked here, and another more recent installation in Macau here.) One essential aspect of the work is that it disintegrates over time, partly because of the presence of the people who view it. Another is that the ash itself is gathered from the remnants of others’ religious rituals (“Remnants of joss sticks that incarnated prayer”), and so represents a kind of accumulation of hope.

The image of the disintegrating Buddha also seems connected to the “observer effect,” an idea in quantum mechanics that certain phenomenon are disturbed by any attempt to measure them. The familiar illustrative example is tire pressure – in order to measure tire pressure, you have to let a bit of air out of the tire, which slightly changes the very pressure you’re trying to measure. Contrary to our usual scientific practice, observation in these cases is an obstacle to understanding.

A similar notion has been present in poetry since the Romantics – the idea that we can’t describe transcendent feelings (religious, emotional, artistic, sexual, etc) and experience them at the same time. For Keats, the choice is to fall from the ecstasy of hearing the nightingale song in order to write his poem or, by submitting to it permanently, “become a sod.”

For Pankey the choice is to face the ash Buddha and accept that our presence will contribute to its disintegration, or to turn away and take it on trust that the Buddha still stands.  It’s worth noting that the first word of this description (starting on line 7) is “Imagine,” and it seems that, in the mind of this poem, as it was for the Romantics as well, imagination can be a facilitator, a bridge between conscious thought and transcendence.

 

I should mention that there’s a lovely light music here too, mostly based on un-rhymed alliterative pairings – static/pattern in lines 2-3, thorn/thicket in line 5, then whole/slowly, ash/shifts, and face/efface/presence later. It’s understated, a bit of not-song in the white noise.

If the ash Buddha image seems to encourage a lingering, attentive turning away from the divine, the penultimate lines point to its inverse, an immature kind of turning away. The infant who believes that “Not to see is the same as not being seen” is clearly mistaken, and Pankey seems to imply that those of us who turn away from the possibility of spiritual transcendence are doing the same thing. Not everyone would agree, perhaps, but I like Pankey’s willingness to allow a bit of the affectionate admonishing preacher to make an appearance here.

Last point: to my mind the biggest obstacle to writing about religious experience is the massive amount of texts, histories, and arguments that have already traveled there. We probably don’t wish to adhere too closely to ideas that are antiquated, but we also don’t want to dismiss our predecessors just because our cellphones have better resolution. Pankey takes this challenge head on at the end of “Ash,” drawing forth one more important origin text.

“God was not the fire” circles back to how the ash in Huang’s Buddha was created, but is also a reference to First Kings chapter 19, in which the prophet Elijah has a vision. It’s worth quoting a bit from verses 11-12: “And behold God passed by, and a great strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces, but God was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but God was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”

Notice how much more time the biblical authors spend talking about what isn’t God. The wind and the earthquake and the fire – such things are vividly evoked, but they are not where God can be found. Even the final phrase stops just short of pointing at God’s presence. The “still small voice” is clearly intended to be seen as where “God is,” but refrains from explicitly declaring it.

Why do I mention all of this? This whole poem has been circling around our struggles to connect with transcendence, to encounter God, and despite numerous near-misses we still end up where “God was not.” Buddha and the God of the Hebrew Bible have made their appearances, as have Romanticism, quantum physics, and child psychology. But the God that Eric Pankey is looking for isn’t in the Buddha, but rather in the disintegrating ash. Not the bearded patriarchal God that reaches for Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but in the space between the fingers. Not in any vision, but in our periphery, as we turn away, pretending not to see.

“Ash” is about the search for God, about trying to be open to an encounter with the divine, despite its inherent, tantalizing ephemerality. What I love about this poem is that it is willing to live in its uncertainty, in fact to articulate that uncertainty, that longing for something just beyond our reach, freighted with conflicting traditions and frustrations, and yet still propelling us toward a higher sense of ourselves and the world.