Five Lines / Issue 18
Wiman's nature poets, Francis's waxwings, Roethke's door, and Ammons' brook. Also: just over here mopping the floor.
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. "how much time does / a brook have"
“The Brook Has Worked Out the Prominences of a Bend”
A. R. Ammons
The brook has worked
out the prominences of
a bend so as to find
curvature's sliding
speed and now thaw
or shower can reach it
to shell the shale out
from an overhung ledge:
the ledge bends way
over as if to contemplate
its solution in a spill:
right now I think
the skinny old arborvitae's
roots may be holding everything
together: but when the spill
comes the brook will have
another heap
in its way, another
shambles to get
through or around: or
over: how much time does
a brook have: how much
time a brook has!
I find it interesting that for Archibald Randolph (!!), the motion he is opening to us is not one of hurry, but of long and steady thought. The water "works out" a curve, the ledge "contemplates" the solution to a problem. These things are professors, or students, or both. I get the distinct image of pencil scratching over paper, somehow. But despite the work it has already done, that water is going to find another obstacle soon enough, and slowly work its way through that one as well.
I wonder if the elegance of this brief aquatic encounter comes from Archibald just writing what he sees, the not-so-still life before him, and refusing to insert himself or his experience into it at all. He takes the brook on its own terms, as one might (ideally) encounter another person: with interest and attention.
And he comes to a conclusion rooted, not in figuring out something profound, but rather in awe at the expanse of time that the brook's solution represents and how once it solves the heap it will begin chipping away at the next heap. It has all the time in the world, after all, to get wherever its going. I love that his question "how much time does / a brook have:" is not even a question so much as the precursor to wonder: "how much / time a brook has!"
Notably, in submitting ourselves to his impersonal vision, we actually come away with some wisdom for living our own personal lives. What would it look like, I wonder, if we approached the solutions we need with a brook's patient tenacity? What would happen if we considered the obstacle before us an opportunity?
Also if my name was Archibald Randolph I would never go by initials. But to each his own...
2. "I stand between familiar trees."
"The Pause"
Theodore Roethke
I have walked past my widest range,
But still the landscape does not change.
The branch that scrapes across my face
I once saw from a distant place,
But never closer than a mile.
I lean against its bark a while.
The last worn wheel-ruts disappear.
Rain-beaten rocks lie sharp and clear.
My eyes are used to sights like these:
I stand between familiar trees.
Two wind-blown hemlocks make a door
To country I shall soon explore.
I'm really taken by this poem and I'm not totally sure why.
What Theodore evokes here in his sparse couplets is the familiarity in unchanged, worn pathways coupled with anticipation of newness — the "country I shall soon explore." He frames three spaces in this poem: the space he has walked, the space he has seen but not walked, and the space he has never seen nor walked.
These layers remind me of layers of experience, not just location. We have come so far, over land that seems at once familiar and strange, and before we dive into the unseen, we take a breather to look back and forward. There's something of Sam Gamgee in this contemplation, on the brink of taking the step that will place him the farthest he's ever been from home.
I resonate with the younger Theodore's statement that "When I get alone under an open sky where man isn’t too evident—then I’m tremendously exalted and a thousand vivid ideas and sweet visions flood my consciousness.” And I wonder if the key to this poem lies there somehow.
I wonder if, during his childhood in Michigan, he ever escaped out into a Midwestern field that stretched to the edges of sight. Because I know that feeling well — of open space, bound by shelter belts, a few vagrant trees forming a door to the next field... it's one of possibility the same as one of boundary. You want to go on but you also feel tethered to home. You want to see what's ahead but you've already spent so much time imagining what's beyond the edges of your map.
It's a hopeful, cozy, anxious, slippery feeling, and I'm not even sure if I know how to describe it in prose. I suppose I should be glad that Theodore did it in poetry.
3. "Make something of this, / I am told and I tell."
the life of it lives
Chris Wheeler
Some days the only faith left to me
is the dull thud of my prayers colliding
with the ceiling, and the silvery scatter
of a fluorescent bulb shattering on tile
in response. The daily desk-scratching,
the formulation of missile messages
into grooves, ingrained in lovelorn
letters by lovesick saints — these words
are all I have. In all of this splatter of soul,
I hear an unwrung mop landing sodden
on the linoleum, dragged ineffectively
down a long, dark hallway. In all of this
janitorial gathering and scraping, I wonder if
the life of it lives beyond the after-hours
and outside of the walls and in other hearts,
as if the unspoken words I utter past midnight
soak into the porous paneled drop ceilings
or get swept out of the propped doors or
swirl around the drains, if the residue
is all that remains. Mostly
I just enjoy the silence, if I'm honest,
and the solitary work of disinfecting
and dusting. Make something of this,
I am told and I tell. The night is short
and the children return in the morning.
I've been listening to Tim Alberta's The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory on my commute into and out of work each day. It's not an easy listen, offering as it does a cohesive picture of American evangelical institutions in idolatrous decline. But it is a necessary one, I think. And then I found this old poem in my notes and was struck by how it dovetailed with my current thoughts on the subject.
There is a lot to unpack here, and I'm not totally willing to do it in this format, neither do I really know how. But the central metaphor in this poem — cleaning an old building after hours in preparation for those who will come after me — has been stuck in my brain for a while now. It feels true to the experience of seeing the systems you've lived and worked within all your life begin falling apart.
What does this have to do with slow solutions and tree-doors? Not sure yet. I'll report back.
4. "Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany."
from Ambition and Survival
Christian Wiman
"I once heard a painter say that he wanted in his paintings a feeling for nature but without the nature. What he meant by that, I think, was that he wanted the natural world but colored with his own consciousness, wanted his art to be at once of the world and his own mind, but not merely a mirrored image of either one. It's the difference between illustration and the creation of original forms, between representing or refining reality and enlarging it. It's the difference between sight and vision.
The distinction is useful for thinking about poetry as well. Among those poets who take the natural world as their subject, there are poets, and then there are nature poets. Poets are interested in unconsciousness and how the natural world might reveal it; personality is not the point. Nature poets are interested in using the world to dramatize the self; each poem is a showcase for the poets' own dewy sensibilities. For poets, the emphasis is on the poem as event: it's important that they write well and originally. Nature poets emphasize whatever event occasioned the poem: it's important that they be very sincere. Because poets feel acutely the foreignness of nature, and because they recognize both the appeal and the danger of that unlikeness, there is usually some reluctance or ambivalence that makes itself felt in their work. Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany. Poets make you see the world with new eyes, as the saying goes, and they make you want it more, too, though in a complicated way, fostering alike by beauty and by fear. Nature poets make you indifferent to both nature and poetry."
Christian has put his finger on a real problem with, I would argue, all modern poets — the indulgence that places oneself at the center of every poem. It's a tendency I struggle with myself, and it's not just a poet problem, it's a problem for everyone swimming in our current self-obsessed moment.
At some point, "expressing yourself" has got to take a backseat to presenting a clear vision of the world around you. Christian makes the case that highlighting drama and showing off one's "dewy sensibilities" are not excused by some sort of poetic sincerity, that individual expression alone does not a good poem make, and that this direction actually sabotages the really good and beautiful things we claim to uplift.
This criticism is well-earned. The poetry he's describing/deriding might be forgettable because it is not complete. Nature, after all, is not just beautiful feelings and lovely thoughts. It is strange too, and terrifying and hopeful and massive and tiny. Like its Creator, like us, it is so much more than our pretty thoughts about it. And to make it only an avatar for our inspirational feelings at the time is to divest it of its true power as an object of poetry.
There's so much that can be said about this in relation to religious poetry, but I'll leave it to George MacDonald to say it better than I can (thanks to my friend Brad for bringing this quote to my attention):
"The highest poetic feeling of which we are now conscious, springs not from the beholding of perfected beauty, but from the mute sympathy which the creation with all its children manifests with us in the groaning and travailing which look for the sonship. Because of our need and aspiration, the snowdrop gives birth in our hearts to a loftier spiritual and poetic feeling, than the rose most complete in form, colour, and odour. The rose is of Paradise — the snowdrop is of the striving, hoping, longing Earth." (from The Gifts of the Child Christ)
5. "Such merriment and such sobriety —"
“Waxwings”
Robert Francis
Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berrybush
in sun, and I am one.
Such merriment and such sobriety —
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk —
was this not always my true style?
Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds. Can you mistake us?
To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together — for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.
Taking Nature on its own terms — not too unlike taking God on His own terms — offers us so much more than what we get from imbuing it with our shabby maxims. It offers us mirth, and real wisdom for living, and awe. When we partake in it without possessing it or manipulating it, whole worlds open up. We can enjoy waxwings eating berries, imagining them as old geezers gabbing about philosophy, without attempting some recasting of the image through our own souls. I think we'll find that sort of enjoyment more interesting and honest than the alternative.
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris
There is a lot to digest in here! Your poem, in particular, sticks with me-so richly dense with meaning. I find the best poems are never about what they are about and leave the reader to trip over their own epiphanies (which is now my new favorite term, thank you).