Looking through the three poetry books you had recommended, I decided to commit to poet Louis Glück. I began to grow more and more fascinated with the names of flowers I had never heard of. Within her collection titled The Wild Iris, Glück allows the voices of flowers, plants, weeds and trees to speak through her. These delicate voices are recorded by pen and ink. Recurring characters appear throughout the collection: two gardeners tending to the plants, picking weeds, who seem to be husband and wife. Another voice, the deity prayed to by the gardener, speaks omnisciently. Glück’s garden, a metaphor for her life, brings the reader unexpected elations and emotional downfalls—the first delicate saplings, an early bloom, weeds again and again, a too-soon death. Although the reader may initially be confused as to who is speaking in the poems, perhaps it was the intention of Glück all along. The landscape of this collection sticks relatively to the same format: concise language resulting in shorter lines (as little as one or two words) blended with more complex ideas hidden beneath, that leads to longer lines (as many as 11 words). The poems are aligned to the left of the page, 11 or 12 font, with only the title hovering above each page. The design is minimalist, clean and very easy to read through. She includes blocks of text without spacing, depending on the mood of the poem, and how she wants the reader to see and understand it.
As I began reading the first poem in the collection, The Wild Iris, it dawned on me that I did not know what a wild iris even looked like. So I took it upon myself to look at a photograph of each flower, plant or tree, which she selects as titles for her poems. I examined the flower first, then proceeded to read the poem.
The first poem in the collection, one of the most powerful of the bunch, grants a simple iris a voice:
“At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in the low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater” (Glück, 1).
The major themes of her collection are embedded and revealed in this gripping first poem. I believe one theme is death (as a metaphoric winter). Another two themes are rebirth and resurrection. And lastly, she presents the role of nature and how nature and humans recursively affect and inspire one another. The iris in this poem has survived the harsh winter as a bulb or rhizome. It emerges again in spring experiencing a vague sense of having lived a previous life of suffering, finally awaking from a deep slumber. I particularly loved the lines, “that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little” (Glück). I felt as if I connected to this poem because I believe the essence of me is a soul possessing a temporary shell, only to return back to the ether one day.
As I begun to analyze the poems, I wondered: Do these flowers actually possess a voice in the writer’s reality? Were they intended to communicate with humans clearly, or are these lines merely thoughts and observations by a plant, watching from a distance? A potential answer may be found in the very next poem, the first in a series of Matins (a morning prayer, or the morning song of birds):
“. . . Noah says
depressives hate the spring, imbalance
between the inner and outer world. I make
another case—being depressed, yes, but in a sense passionately
attached to the living tree, my body
actually curled in the split trunk, almost at peace,
in the evening rain
almost able to feel
sap frothing and rising: Noah says this is
an error of depressives, identifying
with a tree whereas the happy heart
wanders the garden like a falling leaf, a figure for
the part, not the whole” (Glück, 2).
Here one of the gardeners speaks to a deity while simultaneously revealing to the reader her mental state and personality: the gardener (the speaker) is depressed and finds identifying with nature a suitable coping (or escape) mechanism. She projects herself—her consciousness, her soul—into various plants. Since Noah has told her she should instead think of herself as an entity detached from the rest of the world, he is most likely rebutting her theory that we all are smaller parts of a whole.
The second Matins paints the picture of the Garden of Eden. Eve suddenly acknowledges her swift mortality and feels abandoned by her “Unreachable father.” The realization of how tangible death has become in the gardener’s life becomes a recurring theme.
The next three poems, Trillium, Lamium, and Snowdrops, are beautiful pieces written in the perspective of those three specific flowers, poems that elaborate so beautifully and tragically the themes of death, despair, resurrection and memories of lives that had past in their own voices:
“When woke up I was in a forest. The dark
seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights” (Trillium, 4).
. . .
“This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over rock,
under the great maple trees” (Lamium, 5).
. . .
“…do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
damp in the earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again . . .” (Snowdrops, 6)
Upon the completion of Trillium, I was pleasantly surprised by the emotions spurring within me by those last lines:
“…I didn’t even know I felt grief
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me” (Trillium, 4).
It was at that moment when I began to place myself into the world of smaller things. I wondered how it is to feel grief as rain streaming from my leaves. I began to contemplate the perspective of being a fragile flower, and wore this lens as I completed the book.
The next poem titled, Clear Morning, allows the reader to logically conclude that the entity of Morning has been personified and is speaking derived of the title, and also because her previous poems that had taken the perspective of flowers use similar first person points-of-view while addressing the gardener as “you.” What the reader actually hears in the poem, I think, is the voice of God, or some higher power.
“I’ve watched you long enough,
I can speak to you any way I like—
I’ve submitted to your preferences, observing patiently
the things you love, speaking
through vehicles only, in
details of earth, as you prefer,
tendrils
of blue clematis, light
of early evening—
you would never accept
a voice like mine, indifferent
to the objects you busily name…
I cannot go on
restricting myself to images
because you think it is your right
to dispute my meaning:
I am prepared now to force
clarity upon you” (Clear Morning, 7).
This particular God is a condescending, harsh and judgmental God. He is a representation of the jaded creator, didactic and scolding, detached yet still paternal. This God is tired of always hearing such meager human concerns. He is tired of speaking through “vehicles only,” yet He still conceals his true form as the Morning. Maybe this is a way for Glück to console herself; by creating her own image of an unforgiving God, by controlling His speech and His perspective, she regains control of what she ultimately cannot, in reality.
The rest of the collection continues in more or less narrative-style. The truth behind the story itself is unknown, with the exceptions of the detailed clarity of the weather and seasons changing in her world. As we read on, we see that God scolds the gardener, the plants and flowers begin to echo the gardener with arrogant demeanors, and the gardener begins to plead to God using plant-life analogies. Each aspect of nature (whether it is be a flower, a weed, a tree, or a time of day) takes turns speaking poem after poem, as if allowing each other input in a larger conversation. Ironically, amongst all this surreal verbal exchange, very little actual communication takes place. God hears the gardener but refuses to listen to her. The fragile flowers scream in agony, but the gardener turns a deaf ear. God bellows, but nobody hears him. Perhaps Glück never intended for these characters to communicate and learn from one another. I think her intention is to present the reader with multiple perspectives—puzzle pieces for the reader to piece together to discover the meaning behind her words. This is an aspect of her writing I can relate to.
I have been writing poetry for as long as I can remember. I always attributed writing poetry to being an outlet for what i’ve internalized. Writing and reading were my two escapes. I somewhat perceive my emotions to be these irrational and sometimes ambiguous and mysterious spirits—that manifest whenever they’d like—in order to possess my body for a span of time to cause brief hallucinations etc (kidding). As a result of this bizarre understanding between my feelings and me, I usually do not set out to write for any audience, only myself. So, my poems are never really easy to understand, straightforward, factual or concise. The heart (or truths) of my poetry tends hides behind the veil of subjectivity, behind metaphors and enigmas only I can understand—whereas the mindset I take on how I write non-fiction revolves around telling simple truths beautifully in my usual poetic tone of writing. The line between poetry and non-fiction is thin, depending on the individual. I refer to my non-fiction as poetic prose. Some would argue against that notion. Could I just rearrange and splice the lines, align them to the left and call it a poem? I could. But I don’t. Here are two examples:
(1) “We climb all seven-hundred steps to the peak of Mount Tapias and trace the scene of mountains and sea with hungry eyes. Greyscale clouds move over the islands just beyond ours; how fast are they going? we ask ourselves. We did not know they would pass so quickly above us: together we run beneath an over-flowing river; the torrent of rain through and through, the dark grey sky wrapping tightly around us. We descend the rocky cement hill, our soaked sandals splash past the dogs with sad eyes taking shelter beneath painted metal roofs.”
(2) “She wanted his eyes to ravage her entrails, scan her fleshy pink walls, know every inhale of palpable nerve endings and the exhales of her eyelashes, to map the infinitude of rivulets and streams sent by her rapidly beating organ. She desired fingertips. His fingertips. She wanted them to trace her. Scratch her. Mark her. To become the clay to transform in his palms. To be molded. Shaped. Torn and pressed together again. Torn and to remain torn. To get underneath his fingernails. To be eaten accidentally. To disintegrate and become part of the wind that will graze his hair. She wanted to feed the birds with her bits and pieces in liberation”
I do admire Glück’s voice: she uses simple language, is concise with her thoughts and ideas, and yet she manages to create an in-depth fantastical world, giving light to the hidden corners in nature that we humans take for granted. I try to do this with my non-fiction. Anaïs Nin sums it up for me: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” What this means for me is that I expect my non-fiction to almost accurately tell the story of what actually happened, including the gritty details. What I felt. Who I saw or touched or smelled. I used to write about myself in the third-person perspective, as if I were that omnipresent God in Glück’s poetry, analyzing myself from afar, avoiding the internal.
My own literary lineage is derived mainly from fiction novels. I was always attracted to works related to magical realism—tales where mundane characters living in their cookie-cutter worlds are suddenly faced with supernatural events, too surreal and extraordinary for the characters to believe and yet, they somehow functioned seamlessly even with elements of magic and dream-like things. Two of my favorite authors is Murakami Haruki, a Japanese novelist/short-story writer and Milan Kundera, an exiled Czech writer. Their writing is both poetic and clear-cut; they tell their fictitious tales in beautiful and revealing manners.
I have been slowly working towards writing poetry that is revealing and straightforward, but I find difficulty having to expose myself. Perhaps the process of writing poetry is just another defense mechanism for my insecurities. Perhaps I should just take a risk sometime and just do it.
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