by Carol Pearce Bjorlie, Rapid River Poetry Editor/Columnist
Nesting Dolls
Oksana, my Russian daughter-in-law gave me a set of nesting dolls last Christmas.
There are five of them. They nestle inside one another, enveloped by the largest doll. I take them out and line them up. I put them back together inside their large outer shell. This week it occurred to me that they are a metaphor for my poetry writing and reading life.
While an epiphany of ideas was rising, I read The Asheville Poetry Review, year 2010. Near the end is an interview with poet, Michael S. Harper. (His most recent book is Use Trouble, 2009. Winner of Guggenheim, NFA fellowships, The Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America, numerous national book awards, Pulitzer in 1993, and professor at Brown University.) The interviewer, John Hoppenthaler, asks, “How has your poetry changed during your forty-year journey?”
Michael Harper responds by telling how he began with a rhyming dictionary given to him as a child, how he had to learn everything the hard way. He tells about neighborhoods loved and lost, studies, (including pre-med), and “biding time.” He mentions musicians and writers who have mentored him.
What I learned from this interview is that nothing we learn or do is irrelevant. Harper says, “For myself poetry still burns in the residue, for I have still failed of a certain parlance, a certain elegance and tonality of phrase and nuance; to add what musicians knew: “Don’t Explain” and don’t fear being too personal, too idiosyncratic, too bizarre, too (Monk) “straight, no chaser,” too rigorous to modify impeccable phrasing, genetic inheritance.”
Reading about Michael Harper’s life and musing over my nesting dolls, I discovered a synthesis. Michael Harper’s writing life, like my fifty-two-year writing life can be put in order when I discover the hollows inside myself where poems and writing reside.
My love for words started with my tiniest self. In utero, I heard my mother sing. With the light that followed, I listened to my father read and quote English Romance poets. When he died I was sixteen. I began to write.
Over the years, poems have found me: “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold, was one of the first to claim me, especially the line, “Ah love, let us be true to one another.” T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” enriches my life. When I play Bach Suite No. 1, I hear “Burnt Norton.”
from Poem V
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence.
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Liesl Mueller’s book, Alive Together, and her poem, “Brendel Playing Schubert,” is a revelation that someone else understands what it means to make music. Not only the audience, but the players retreat into a “nowhere where the enchanted live.”
I discovered this poem after I left a 30 year career in a symphony orchestra. These poems live in doll #3.
Brendel Playing Schubert
We bring our hands together
in applause, that absurd noise,
when we want to be silent.
We might as well
be banging pots and pans,
it is that jarring a violation
of the music we’ve listened to
without moving, almost holding
our breath.
The pianist in his blindingly
white summer jacket bows
and disappears and returns
and bows again. We keep up
the clatter, so cacophonous
that it should signal revenge
instead of the gratitude we feel
for the two hours we’ve spent
out of our bodies and away
from our guardian selves
in the nowhere where the enchanted live.
~ by Lisel Mueller
Where I live influences what I write. My Minnesota poems fill Doll #4 with snowstorms, clouds and sky. My North Carolina poems reside in the largest doll. In this space, mountains become choirs, clouds, shrouds, and October, an Appalachian tapestry.
This morning my nesting dolls are contained in their proper spaces. They don’t fit any other way, like poems that claim me in time, some written by me, most written by others, belong to me in their time. I take out old poems, and am “there.”
I read the oldies. I read them in order. They remind me of two things:
1. My writing is a testament of survival;
2. “i am not done yet.” (lucille clifton, from good woman: poems and a memoir, BOA 1987.)
Read the poem “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” by Michael S. Harper
