The Hide-and-Seek Muse Read online

  In his ode “To Poetry,” Hirsch joins a long tradition of poets addressing their muses, especially during fallow, confusing, or distracted periods [in “Too Lazy to Write Poetry,” Chu Yün-ming (1461 – 1527) writes, “Spirit of poetry, quickly, come back! / Don’t let the spring go by without any poems”]. Hirsch addresses his Poetry with a mix of wry humor and plaintive need that confirms a long, deep intimacy with his subject. “Don’t desert me,” he pleads with characteristically self-directed and mildly mocking deprecation, “just because I stayed up last night / watching The Lost Weekend.” The meta-nod in the first stanza to the classic 1945 movie pitching a writer against Demon Alcohol, and to the time that writers can waste in all manner of self-indulgent ways, shows us that the speaker already feels a mixture of guilty indictment shot through with an inextinguishable, odds-against-all-odds hope.

  The speaker goes on to confess all of the ways he’s betrayed his lover/muse over the years, talking too publically about her “naked body to strangers” and “gossiping about lovers you betrayed” and stalking her “in foreign cities / … / pretending I could describe you.” Hirsch’s narrator is clearly speaking here as both a writer of and writer about poetry, and I admire his chutzpah. The admission that to try to decipher poems, to interpret them, even to “pretend” to understand their meanings involves a violation or impossibility is a brave and uncommon gesture, especially from someone who has devoted much of his life to doing so. Hirsch’s narrator follows his confession with a dazzling, swift pitch of deft moves: a plea for forgiveness, an apology (whose punning cannot disguise pain the speaker feels—separation from his beloved at the same time that it betrays a belief that he just might win her over if he’s clever enough, if he can just find the right words to do so), and a rhetorical question in which the narrator pulls his last trick—divine invocation—seemingly out of the core of his very being:

  I’m sorry for handing you a line

  and typing you on a screen,

  but don’t let me suffer in silence.

  Does anyone still invoke the Muse,

  string a wooden lyre for Apollo,

  or try to saddle up Pegasus?

  Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess,

  indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic,

  pleasance and half wonder, hell,

  I have loved you my entire life

  without even knowing what you are

  or how—please help me—to find you.

  In an interview in The Nashville Review, Hirsch states that “The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.” Poetry—whether mythic divinity, oblivious force, whether encoded or magical, “pleasance and half wonder” or “hell”—is a conflation of muse, lover, and Lorca’s beautiful, unappeasable sadness. “To Poetry” is Hirsch’s homage to his version of his beloved Keats’s “demon Poesy.” Just as Hirsch describes Keats’s odes, his own poem represents “the claiming of an obligation, an inner feeling rising up to meet an outer occasion, something owed.” Ode. Owed. This kind of love, that takes us by life force and commands us beyond our capacity to understand, might be seen as a state of grace. Its force accounts, I believe, for the seemingly inexhaustible and continually refreshed power of Edward Hirsch’s sojourn in the vale of soul-making.

  DAVID BAKER

  Swift

  1.

  into flight, the name as velocity,

  a swift is one of two or three hundred

  swirling over the post office smokestack.

  First they rise come dusk to the high sky,

  flying from the ivy walls of the bank

  a few at a time, up from graveyard oaks

  and back yards, then more, tightening to orbit

  in a block-wide whirl above the village.

  2.

  Now they are a flock. Now we’re holding hands.

  We’re talking in whispers to our kind, who

  stroll in couples from the ice cream shop

  or bike here in small groups to see the birds.

  A voice in awe turns inward; as looking

  down into a canyon, the self grows small.

  The smaller swifts are larger for their singing,

  the spatter and high cheeep, the shrill of it.

  3.

  And their quick bat-like alternating wings.

  And the soft pewter sky sets off the black

  checkmark bodies of the birds as they skitter

  like water toward a drain. Now one veers,

  dives, as if wing-shot or worse out of the sky

  over the maw of the chimney. Flailing—

  but then pulling out, as another dips

  and the flock reverses its circling.

  4.

  They seem like leaves spinning in a storm,

  blown wild around us, and we are their witness.

  Witness the way they finish. The first one

  simply drops into the flue. Then four,

  five, in as many seconds, pulling out of

  the swirl, sweep down. So swiftly, we’re alone.

  The sky is clear of everything but night.

  We are standing, at a loss, within it.

  David Baker’s autumnal “Swift” recounts a community’s gathering to witness a primal and instinctual motion of the other, of the animal world, a flock of homing swifts in ecstatic murmuration. The poem evokes and conjures them first as singular, as bird, as word, allowing the eponymous title to enjamb with the first line of the poem: “Swift // into flight, the name as velocity.” And as the birds exponentially, almost magically, unfathomably multiply (“a swift is one of two or three hundred / swirling over the post office smokestack … // flying from the ivy walls of the bank / a few at a time, up from graveyard oaks / and back yards, then more, tightening to orbit / in a block-wide whirl above the village”), the townspeople themselves form a flock, clustering below, “holding hands” and “talking in whispers to our kind.”

  “Swift” embodies what Baker himself, in Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, has said so eloquently of the lyric poem and the “problem of people”—how the privacy of the lyric’s intense, transient, “swift” interiority is also “a vital feature of cultural identity, even perhaps of collective survival.” In shared ecstasy, the self rediscovers itself as both part and whole : “A voice in awe turns inward; as looking / down into a canyon, the self grows small,” and then the birds, our words, our selves transform: “leaves spinning in a storm, / blown wild around us, and we are their witness.”

  In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James says that for an experience to be visionary or ecstatic it must be passive (that is, it must happen to us—it cannot be induced); it must, perforce, be transient, fleet, swift; it must be noetic (that is, it must inspire a sense of new or profound knowing); and it must be ineffable, beyond the reach of words. “Swift” is both a description and embodiment of ecstatic experience. By richly figuring the word “swift” itself (as bird, as velocity, as metonymic stand-in for Time, Connection, Love, Life, Mortality), Baker manages to articulate an ineffable truth about beauty, the sublime, and the way the self forms in the wake of an unlooked for and newly recognized desire. “We are their witness,” the poet tells us before the poem shifts into the imperative:

  Witness the way they finish. The first one

  Simply drops into the flue. Then four,

  Five, in as many seconds, pulling out of

  The swirl, sweep down. So swiftly, we’re alone.

  The sky is clear of everything but night.

  We are standing, at a loss, within it.

  In this way, the reader, too, becomes privy to and part of the lyric poem’s predicament, its “we” moment of deep and essential privacy.

  BRENDA HILLMAN

  In High Desert Under the Drones


  We are western creatures; we can stand for hours in the sun. We read poetry near an Air Force base. Is poetry pointless? Maybe its points are moving, as in a fire. The enlisted men can’t hear. Practice drones fly over-head to photograph our signs; they look like hornets [Vespula] with dangly legs dipping in rose circles with life grains. They photograph shadows of the hills where coyotes’ eyes have stars. They could make clouds of white writing, cilia, knitting, soul weaving, spine without nerves, dentures of the west, volcano experiments, geometry weather breath & salt. Young airmen entering the base stare from their Hondas; they are lucky to have a job in an economy like this. The letters of this poem are also lucky to have a job for they are insects & addicts & thieves. Volcanic basalt recalls its rock star father. Creosote & sage, stubby taupe leaves greet the rain. We hold our signs up. We’re all doing our jobs. Trucks bring concrete for the landing strip they’ve just begun.

  A cliff stands out in winter

  Twin ravens drop fire from its eyes

  My inner life is not so inner & maintains the vascular system of a desert plant. I’m grateful to Samuel Beckett & to my high school boyfriend whose drunk father yelled when we closed the door & read The Unnamable during the Tet offensive. A sense of the absurd can always help. Outside the base we see borax mines in the distance—the colors of flesh, brown, black, peach, pink, bronze. We stand there as the young airmen settle into their routine. The Gnostics noted it is difficult to travel between spheres, you’ve had to memorize the secret names & the un-namable haunts every aspect of your routine. The names grow heavier as you carry them between the spheres.

  (Photo credit: Janet Weil, image of Robert Hass)

  Brenda Hillman, over the course of her daring career, has always understood that a poem itself, as language, as act of resistance, is a complex personal, environmental, spiritual, cultural, and political system, an ecology, what Christopher Arigo has called “a microcosmic ecosystem in which itself dwells.” Risk and sanctuary, beauty and horror, growth and decay coexist. “In High Desert Under the Drones” is a haibun, a Japanese literary composition comprised of prose and haiku, often focusing on landscape and travel. The backstory of Hillman’s poem involves a trip she and her husband, the poet Robert Hass (pictured in the poem’s photograph), took with two friends to Creech Airforce Base in the desert outside Las Vegas. In a note to me about the poem, Hillman writes, “[Creech] is the place from which the drones (unmanned aircraft) are sent for surveillance—and bombing—to Afghanistan. Because we couldn’t manage to time our protest with those of other groups, we drove to Creech on our own, just the four of us; we did a protest for two days, holding signs and reading poetry—off the highway—as the service personnel entered and left the base. ‘Practice’ drones flew over our heads while we did our action. It is extremely eerie and creepy, not to mention horrifying. The pilots sit in Nevada and ‘fly’ the aircraft which are actually flown from sites nearer to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The drones are responsible for the deaths of many innocents and are extremely costly.”

  On the page, Hillman’s haibun, two prose passages pivoting around a photograph/haiku cluster, creates a space for negotiating its subversive vision. The opening prose field offers up the central public questions of the poem: “Is poetry pointless?,” for instance, or are “its points … moving, as in a fire,” a query that reminds us that words can be weapons, too. What does it mean that these drones of destruction “could [instead] make clouds of white writing, cilia, knitting, soul weaving, spine without nerves, dentures of the west, volcano experiments, geometry weather breath & salt” or that the young airmen feel “lucky to have a job in an economy like this.” Perhaps most radically, Hillman invites the reader to wonder what to make of the statement that “[t]he letters of this poem are also lucky to have a job for they are insects & addicts & thieves ?

  The opening prose passage culminates, “We hold our signs up. We’re all doing our jobs. Trucks bring concrete for the landing strip they’ve just begun,” and then, about mid-way through the haibun, this first field of prose concludes and falls into white space in which the reader encounters an embedded photograph, visual grammar depicting a slant-shot view of Hass holding up a protest sign before a stark scene of sage and highway. Lineated around the photograph is a roughly 15-syllable haiku—“A cliff stands out in winter / Twin ravens drop fire from its eyes”—that helps us to see the torsos of the protesters as themselves kinds of cliffs, pitched against the winter landscape, with poetry, words, like black birds deploying “fire”—ire, anger, protest, life force—from their kept vigil.

  From the poem’s start—“We are western creatures; we can stand for hours in the sun”—Hillman lets us know that her vision is neither simplistic nor isolated. That “we” forces the reader to locate herself or himself in relation to the voice, a “we” that is “western”—as in Occidental, as in not Eastern, as in American, as in left coast, as in mortal, heading the way the sun does. “We” are implicated in the very machinations of the Western world the plural narrator protests. It should be no surprise, then, that Hillman moves, after her haiku, from the collective voice of the opening passage to a first-person speaker who forthrightly and with wry, self-conscious accountability and humor confesses, “My inner life is not so inner & maintains the vascular system of a desert plant. I’m grateful to Samuel Beckett & to my high school boyfriend whose drunk father yelled when we closed the door & read The Unnamable during the Tet offensive. A sense of the absurd can always help.”

  Hillman honors the absurdity of the poem’s predicament and the paradoxes inherent everywhere—in the gorgeous palette of the borax mines, the work ethic of the young airmen at their deadly task, the resorting to and ignoring of words in time of spiritual and political difficulty—perhaps most powerfully at the poem’s conclusion, when, as “[w]e stand there [and] the young airmen settle into their routine,” Hillman reminds us of the belief in certain early Gnostic texts that the soul must pass through several spheres on its way to heaven, offering secret names as passwords to cross thresholds along the way. Those names—the naming of things, the noticing of things to be named—may “grow heavier as you carry them between the spheres,” but Hillman’s poem testifies to the crucial importance of speaking one’s understanding of the truth despite futility, boundaries, irony, and crises that might otherwise overwhelm us into silence.

  STEPHEN CUSHMAN

  List List

  Wine list, wish list,

  to do list, top ten list,

  grocery list, Christmas list,

  price list, packing list,

  bestseller list, mailing list,

  back list, short list,

  passenger list, casualty list,

  guest list, shit list,

  black list, hit list.

  Time Management

  Oil change: every three thousand;

  tire rotation: every five thousand;

  dental check-up: every six months;

  annual physical: figure it out;

  paint the house: one side a summer;

  service the furnace: every October;

  mow the grass: once a fortnight,

  except in drought, if one’s informal;

  rake the leaves: easier to mow them;

  turn over new leaf: every January;

  shave the face: every other day

  makes the shave closer;

  brush the teeth: morning and evening;

  floss the teeth: when stuff gets caught;

  read the Bible: morning and evening;

  reread Walden: in phases of crisis;

  hug somebody: eleven times a day

  for emotional health according to an article;

  rejoice in being so bourgeois: once in a while

  but only as needed; honor eros:

  could be frequently, at least in theory;

  serve eros: could be less frequently,

  at least in practice; pray without ceasing:

  figure it out; pump out the septic: br />
  three to five years, easy to remember

  with elections for president.

  Stephen Cushman is a poet obsessed with the calendar. His poems mark time. Personal and historic anniversaries and other landmark passages (weddings, deaths, births, diurnal and nocturnal motions, the months—his collection Heart Island, for instance, takes as its backbone twelve poems apostrophizing each of the months of the zodiac—the seasons, “sacred” thresholds of all sorts) provide occasion for poetic musings that, though they may begin with noting or honoring a pattern in nature or human behavior, always move the reader into unexpected and provocative territory. As Stanley Kunitz once said of the poetry of Robert Hass, reading Cushman is like stepping into water that is the same temperature as the air. Before the reader knows it, he or she is plumbing transformative depths of a new element belied by the approachable, even amiable accessibility of diction and tone the reader may have encountered back on terra firma, at the poem’s start.