Five Lines / Issue 13
Chesterton on why poets are more sane than all you other people. Also: Big Thief on change, Lyons on happy valleys, and Milosz on record-keeping.
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. “her glistering things sifting / on the old cider mill. A holy show.”
"Happy Valley"
Alice Lyons
The brook is this mix of roar & hiss as if God
has managed to scalpel a section of tempest & clothespin it in
the woods Over There Always draped in the trees
while we eat white summer peaches from celadon bowls
while the sun bleaches & blue jay squawks score the maple, oak
birch and apple-treed sky with their oblique Scriabin musics.
Fifteen years since I have seen a real Fall
her deciduous burlesque, her glistering things sifting
on the old cider mill. A holy show.
I hold a wooden fragrance & a sodden mush of crushed
flowing apples in a cache and will never give it up.
The cardinal is the best bird because it is a red mark
on the blank snow amid the charcoal Twombly of maple, oak
birch and apple branches. Pines are green & faraway, don’t figure.
My sister in spring is even prettier, her smile
the genuine quality of it undiminished in the many months
since I have been in Happy Valley. It roars and is constantly
in spate because it has its reasons spring being spring plus my visiting.
The other day I was bopping around the Poetry Foundation website (like you do) and found this poem. And immediately loved it.
The stream of consciousness style here doesn't feel like the affected sort I've sometimes encountered in modern poets (and have been guilty of myself), and it took me a minute to understand why. It's not just a removal of all punctuation, the sometime inclusion of it. It's not just the use of ampersands and enjambment, and that there is no discernable strategy to it. This does not mean at all that Alice didn't have intention in these choices. Just that the intention has vanished into the sweep of the poem. It's a kind of virtuosity, where the artist has gone so far with their technique and practice that it fades and only easy-sounding beauty remains.
The rhythm of the poem feels breathless at points, then stops, then starts again. It's fitful, it's focused, it's skipping months and years to get to the next season, it's pausing to dwell on sharply-focused images, then rushing on again. In this way it's like the brook it describes. This is something I love in poetry, when the form of the poem shifts in time to the subject it seeks to crack open. This really is an ode to a place that changes but always stays the same, and maybe that's why it resonates with me, in the thick of a Midwest autumn as I am these days.
And really, any poet who can get away with tossing out references to Scriabin and Twombly so effortlessly has got my instant respect. What a flex.
2. "Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea..."
from Orthodoxy
G. K. Chesterton
For as long as I can remember, imagination has been central to survival for me. The stories, art, and music I grew up with formed me in ways I'm still uncovering, and now they are forming my own children. I was rereading Orthodoxy the other night and was pleased to discover that good old G. K. joins other favorite double-initialed thinkers like C. S. and J. R. R. in defending this sort of moral and spiritual formation via imagination, and then goes further:
“There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance.... Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin.”
The difference between imagination and reason is that the former seeks to experience the world, while the latter seeks to understand the world. It's the difference between watching a butterfly land on a leaf and pinning that butterfly to a board. Understanding is not a bad thing, and can often lead to wonder. But if we're going to stay sane in a world as wild and unpredictable as ours, where the difference between what we know and what we don't is still unfathomably vast, imagination must win out.
“The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite... To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
Another way of saying this might be that a poet has run headfirst into his own limits, and realized he can do little to expand them. Sounds a lot like original sin (or low anthropology), which not only explains so much of human experience, but also requires mercy and forgiveness as opposed to self-improvement. That's the sort of logic I can get behind.
3. "Would you live forever, never die / While everything around passes?"
"Change"
Big Thief, from Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Change, like the wind
Like the water, like skin
Change, like the sky
Like the leaves, like a butterfly
Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?
Would you smile forever, never cry
While everything you know passes?Death, like a door
To a place we've never been before
Death, like space
The deep sea, a suitcase
Would you stare forever at the sun
Never watch the moon rising?
Would you walk forever in the light
To never learn the secret of the quiet night?
Still, like a stone
Like a hill, like home
Still, what I find
Is you are always on my mind
Could I feel happy for you
When I hear you talk with her like we used to?
Could I set everything free
When I watch you holding her the way you once held me?
Change, like the sky
Like the leaves, like a butterfly
Death, like a door
To a place we've never been before
Would you live forever, never die
While everything around passes?
Would you smile forever, never cry?
This gentle memento mori of a lyric by Big Thief recognizes a hard truth: that for change to occur, something has to die. And also, death's not a fearsome thing, but "a door / To a place we've never been before." The sense of adventure and discovery waiting on the other end of the painful experience is hard for me to grasp with my head, but easier for me to grasp with my heart. There's hope here, that this is not the end.
I love a dense thicket of a poem as much as the next person, but I also think that some of the best songwriting I've encountered involves the simplest materials: rhyming couplets, durable metaphors, repetition of phrases with small changes, etc. This stuff doesn't make me say, "wow, that was fascinating!" like I do after a late Bon Iver song. Rather, it allows me to settle down and think about what's being said instead of trying to unravel it during the course of the song.
I suppose conversations could be had about the comparative value of each, how we balance them out in our own poetry-writing, the theological significance of simple vs. complex, the existential implications... or we could just sit and enjoy the song.
4. "the large moment of the bird / looming, befuddled in a foggy cloak"
telephonetics
Chris Wheeler
There is something left to love
on the other end of the great
twisting wire, wave after wave of it
crusted only with crystalline raindrops
then the large moment of the bird
looming, befuddled in a foggy cloak,
then again only the silence
of the line pressed flat
by its margins, ebbing, flowing.
I wait breathless and slowly
the line itself begins to move, past strobing
exclamation points, following
my eyes and speeding past them
into the middle distance. All the words
contained in it, and still the silences
matter the most, looming up, brewing
a sound in their innards, a song
to herald the question of another day.
I don't know if you did this as a kid, but on long drives I would often try to unfocus my eyes enough that the telephone wire on the side of the road (or the white line on the shoulder) would start to move on its own.
This poem is about communication, but also about how we are estranged from it. There's something of a disembodiment of words spoken through wires juxtaposed against our nearness to the actual wire. We are so close and so attentive to this conduit, and yet so far away from the actual communication carried within it, all the relationships and backstories and emotions transmitted through metal. The bookend image of the bird is a sort of image of hope, how maybe the silent loneliness of the journey we are on, all in separate vehicles and separate wires and separate houses, will break into some sort of better song down the line.
5. “mutually unknown, we walk the earth / Without much comprehension”
“Secretaries”
Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems
I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing
That is dictated to me and a few others.
Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth
Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle
Or ending it with a comma. And how it all looks when completed
Is not up to us to inquire, we won't read it anyway.
Berkeley, 1975
Something I've noticed in much of my poetry reading over the last few years is that poets talk a lot about being taken over by the poem, as if they are a conduit and not an instigator. You could call it listening to a muse, or unearthing a fossil (a la Stephen King), or midwifery (a la L'Engle). But it all comes back to an outside force at work, pressing down upon the artist, whose primary responsibility is to accurately tell what he or she sees and feels and hears in the world.
Czeslaw, who had a front-row seat to some of the grimmest events in our modern history, adds another dimension to the responsibility of the poet: that of record-keeping. We are not here for our own fulfillment or expression, but to witness, to testify of what we have seen throughout our short histories on earth. We are not here to interpret or understand, nor even to stand as judge and jury, wielding our words (righteous as they may be) for the sake of punishing those we stand against. Rather, we record.
I need this wise image of the poet many days, when my grievances rise above my grief, when my desire for vengeance overtakes my need for mercy. The sense of letting go of the outcome — something over which we usually have little to no control — not only allows the poem to go where it needs to go, it eases the heart enough to do the next right thing, out of love.
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris
"At some point, 'expressing yourself' has got to take a backseat to presenting a clear vision of the world around you." – Yes. These Five Lines were well chosen and I gained a lot of insight from your presentation of them. Thank you!
I particularly enjoyed #3. The janitor, wondering if his prayers are heard or just lost, still perseveres in his work for the sake of the children to come. Such humility and purpose❤️