Five Lines / Issue 10
Oliver's whimsy, Wiman's prose, Bly's noticing, and Penny & Sparrow's rattle. Also, some seasonal melancholy from yours truly.
Hello friends. This is the Five Lines curated poetry letter, in which I share poetic stuff I’ve discovered and why it matters to me. Five Lines is, like everything else here at Tethered Letters, AI-free.
1. "The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover."
“A Caterpillar on the Desk”
Robert Bly
Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion, like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy's hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around in the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily — or perhaps summer's insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.
This prose poem is a study in the art of noticing: what precedes it, what causes it, how it is done, what must be absent and present for it to take place, what comes of it. Noticing involves likeness, the basis of metaphor — caterpillars are like accordions, their antennae like pop-bottle cleaners, etc. The epiphanies that come from metaphors are not the only purpose of noticing, though. Robert's description includes things that seem mundane or, as our society might say, irrelevant: the number of pairs of feet (3, 4, 2, 6, 1, 2 reserve feet) and their location, for instance. The waving motion of the caterpillars body doesn't require a metaphor to be magical enough for an exclamation point.
My children are learning this art, and are much more well-versed in it than I am. Only in recent years, motivated by the incredible things they spot, have I begun to train my eyes to stay on something for more time, to give it my full attention. You have to be in a space of stillness to begin, but noticing can happen literally anywhere; say, at work, at a desk. The gracious presence of little living things helps, but so does a little imagination.
And what comes of it might not be an epiphany. It might just be a sense of things living and moving and having their being without your pushing them forward. It might be the freedom to stop for a second and be still. It might be closeness, it might be a season change, it might be nothing but self-acceptance. But it certainly is gratitude.
2. "like the center of a leaf as the waning expands"
i felt sad today
Chris Wheeler
as if the world on its greased-up axle would only ever spin unplaced as if the only thing on my shoulders was the entire atmosphere as if all the years of my loved ones were sifting away and the bottom bell of the hourglass was suffocating us in its sand as if my brothers had no Recourse no Door no Air no Love like the center of a leaf as the waning expands death clambering over itself onto every limb the cold outflow of every atom slowing syrupy to a sap-still stop and here on this day I wanted to make this sadness into something beautiful I wanted to send word to my loved ones that it won't always stay that the death-grip will loosen that hope never really trickles out of us but only evaporates and returns so: the starlings bubble up out of this bottleneck of tree beams so: the golden rods of autumn foam over my hands into the field so: the edges of everything slowly blacken to a crisp so: the night falls everything Simple and Expected fades formless into its matching void the tree into the absence of tree the sky into the presence of stars and every ache in me melts into the stuff that never ceases to shine
There is no escape from seasonal nostalgia, or at least I haven't discovered one yet. I suppose I will always feel melancholy at the start of autumn. And it doesn't always bother me, because it usually is paired with the excitement of the cold weather, that just says: "Hey you, get up and do something! Try something! Live quickly, winter's coming!" And of course, the cozy quality of warming ourselves with sweaters and blankets and hot drinks and full-fat meals. The sadness is durable, but it's also doable.
I felt a little silly about the title of this poem in the editing process, but it is accessible, and intrinsic to the structure — so I left it. The exact circumstances that prompted the feeling, beyond fallishness, are irrelevant. We don't have to look far to find reasons for sadness, I think. We also don't have to make every sadness an opportunity to buck ourselves up. But isn't it a tendency in all of us to look for beauty? Doesn't beauty itself, wherever we find it — say, in the death of living things as the weather gets cold — speak to something deeper and more important in the make-up of the universe anyway? We can't really escape beauty either. It finds us. And we want to be found by it.
3. "Intensity is the only antidote -- of language, of experience, of ambition."
“A Piece of Prose”
Christian Wiman, from Ambition & Survival
I realize that Christian Wiman has been featured in a bunch of recent Five Lines emails. But I just finished his essay collection, Ambition and Survival, and I logged so many wonderful sections from it I can't help but share one last tidbit. I promise I will move on soon. I'm late in transitioning to my fall poet, Czesław Miłosz, but very, very excited about diving into his work.
But just now, here's Christian writing some prose about some poetry:
"Reality doesn't need us. A poet knows this, and then, in the midst of a poem, when reality streams through the words that would hold it, doesn't quite. W.S. Di Piero, probably the most consistently compelling and idiosyncratic prose writer among contemporary American poets, writes of that moment when one realizes that one's "attempt to write poetry, with all its halting correctiveness and will toward coherence, is of no consequence to the starry sky." And yet it was the starry sky that occasioned the poem, perhaps, that seems to be not simply its subject but somehow in the poem, of it. It is a calling, we say, trying to explain this need to make things the world can do without, as if the plain givenness of reality could ever be a call, as if a poem could ever be an answer." (from "A Piece of Prose")
That calling he speaks of, that drive toward generosity in making, that making of things of no use but of great beauty and meaning -- the things "the world can do without." That's probably one of the most insightful ways of describing what poetry actually is. It's not an answer to a world of terror and beauty, or an explanation. It's the world itself inside of the poem. That's why almost every poet I've read, when asked what poetry is, has little to say about syntax, meter, metaphor, forms, etc. (although they could and do still speak at length about those things). Instead, they speak of it being something otherworldly pressing down upon them that almost drives them to write. Call it a muse, or a spirit, or any number of forces. This is a mysterious thing, and it blows where it will, and the poet is less in the driver's seat and more along for the ride than we'd care to admit.
Poetry by Christians, I think, fails most when it comes from a rigid faith, with little room for questions, doubts, struggle, or other people at all. The best work I've read from those who share my faith is steeped in mystery and wonder. Another way to say it might be: the Law makes terrible poetry. But grace, now. Grace sings.
4. “this muscle, all this muscle, / Could never lift a thing without you anyway.”
“Rattle”
Penny and Sparrow, Struggle Pretty
I'm no good at waiting,
On any kind of talk, at all, from you to me each day.
And I'm sorry; I'm so sorry:
I never can quite seem to pull my weight.
I don't wanna rattle,
And I've got no plans to let myself get tossed away.
But this muscle, all this muscle,
Could never lift a thing without you anyway.
You have me, you have me, you have me only.
When I keep, when I keep, when I keep listening.
You wanna come and stay here,
And depending on the day, I wanna let you in.
But I know me, I know me,
I'm scared I'll just wake up and want you gone again.
I'm not proud, I'm not proud, I'm not proud of me.
So how could you, how could you, how could you ever be?
I'm not proud, I'm not proud, I'm not proud of me.
So how could you, how could you, how could you ever be?
I'm gonna work on waiting,
If it's true you wanna say you love me every day.
And I'm sorry (that it took me
So long to realize) you've always felt that way.
I've been listening to Penny and Sparrow since I nabbed their Creature EP from the now defunct direct-to-fans music service Noisetrade (does anyone remember that thing?) I got so much free music from that thing as a broke college student, and discovered artists from Josh Garrels to The Oh Hellos to The Brilliance on there.
Anyhow, Penny and Sparrow have since gone on to release 8 LPs and a live album. I've always loved their literary and scriptural undertones as much as I've loved their lavish vocal harmonies. These guys still have my heart a dozen years later.
“Rattle” is a song about insecurity in a relationship, a sense of inadequacy and wrongness buried deep inside that makes us less lovable, less necessary to those around us. It's a feeling I'm very familiar with, which is why I might have returned often to this song.
The repetition of lyrics here emphasizes the inner stumbling over oneself that happens when you are insecure about where you stand with someone. And the layers of relational meaning behind each line enhance the tentative nature of the song as well: for instance, "if it's true you wanna say you love me every day" emphasizes the singer's own fault in the matter while casting doubt on the trustworthiness of the other person — not because the person is bad, but because anyone who would love someone so faulty is suspect. And of course, the strategic location of parentheses in the last two lines leads to a duplicitous reading: "I'm sorry you love me" is very different from "I'm sorry it took me a while to see your love for me."
The thing I love about this, though, is that in the midst of all of the hedging and stumbling, there is no doubt here that the other person in this relationship still loves him. The tone is one of astonishment, not despair.
5. “The wind wags / its many tails.”
Don't you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
Don't you imagine? Don't you think? Don't you hear? Isn't the autumn a feast for our souls? The living things around us dream and touch, and look and whisper. They are crowned. They wag their tails. They shift and long.
Mary Oliver is such a romantic, but an open-eyed one. She is, at her heart, about praise and wonder. And the series of imaginative questions that dissolves into delight in what she sees is just more evidence in favor of the romance in the world.
I hope you are enjoying the autumn this way. Don't let silly people make you feel self-conscious about glorying in it. The way some of them talk, you'd think the world had no whimsy in it these days; any chance we get to inject some more into it is a chance worth taking.
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris
I just loved: Law makes terrible poetry. But grace now, Grace sings.
I was moved reading Mary Oliver as I imagined all of nature having sad, happy and hopeful thoughts at the approach of autumn.
Thank you for sharing.
Subscribed because you read Christian Wiman, and I've loved his work for a very long time, but stayed because I really liked your poem—though it feels a little nihilistic, it is honest. And honesty is what I value most in poetry.
Two more thoughts:
1. This series is every poet's dream and worst nightmare—to be read and analyzed. Maybe correctly, maybe not. Who is to say?
2. Mary Oliver has no business being in here at the beginning of fall when I'm just starting to appreciate it and she's already talking about winter!