The Birdcage Archives

Tuesday 31 August 2021

The Poet in The Garden

 
Hello Gentle Reader,
 
Summer has begun to wane. It burned itself out. The scorching, glaring and oppressive gaze has since softened; if not softened, at least grown more distant. Despite the reprieve from the heat, the damage has already been done. Drought has sown dust. The earth baked and cracked. There's no escape from the discussion regarding the questions of food security and shortages, rising prices and inflation, and continued conversations regarding the conservation of water and limiting its application. Those of a particularly pessimistic nature echo the sentiments of the former British Prime Minister, Edward Heath: "we shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war."  As if to spite Heath's words - or all austere doomsayers - as then, and as now: people will endure. If on the grounds alone: what else can they do? A fault of nature, they press on - even if it's more instinctual at its core than cognitive. Even those of the human race cannot deny the primeval governance that perpetually persists within the core of being.
 
As summer burns off into autumn our temperament shifts. Summer is not even tempered. Summer is a youthful season. It's flighty and flaky. It flirts before shying away in feigned coy innocence the next. It worships the jovial pursuits of youth, which are always oh so temporary and fleeting. it's a time of transient flings, stolen kisses and the awkward first rites and rituals; hidden beneath the canopied trees and spring flowers as silent witnesses, with the grass which cradles each of them equally, as the world and days pass in their leisure. Autumn on the contrary has straightened up. It's more versed in the ways of the world. Not hard lined or hardboiled, but objective nonetheless with a prescription of cynicism measured with irony. There's a clarity to the world. One which sheds all ostentatious fabrications and pretense. Transparency is but honesty's reflection.
 
When it comes to American poetry, it seems that all poets are compared to their forebearers: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The dual gods of the American Pantheon. The earth and the heaven of what defined American poetry. In their shadow and beyond their tutelage spawned further poets who became just as legendary and divine to the American poetic perspective: Robert Frost, who in his own right became a literary cultural institution, whose enduring legacy has been at risk of being characterized as a cliche. The comparison and reflection being arbitrarily juxtaposed towards all poets who dare to produce any work of poetic inclination, as it will inevitably be weighed against either Whitman or Dickinson. In the case of Louise Glück the newest minted Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, she is weighted against the image of Emily Dickinson, the woman in white; the saint in the garden; the posy poet; the recluse and hermit. In comparing a poet to Dickinson, the first review takes careful aim over the craft, phrasing, and syntax of each line. Emily Dickinson is readily known for her concentrated and compact poem, whose devotion and adherence to a strict personal form to secure sanctity of the soul, has become the yard stick which is applied with indiscriminate force on whether or not new poetry can meet these otherwise subjective and fluid perspectives. Even the Swedish Academy had made reference to the relationship between Emily Dickinson and Louise Glück, especially when referring to the topic of faith (though in all fairness, even Glück herself recognized and paid homage to the Emily Dickinson in her Nobel Lecture). Anders Olsson states that in the same fashion of the transcending poet Emily Dickinson, faith was not a simple subject of belief versus atheism, or enshrined in the realms of pomp and ceremony, and solemn sermons which indoctrinate the being for further orientation into securing their souls readiness for their passing into the realms of heaven or be denied salvation for the cleansing punitive fires of damnation. No, Dickinson, faith surpassed the simpleton dichotomous ignorance of faith as a purely physical and verbal exercise, to be conducted at its pinnacle on Sunday, followed by continued enchantments in prayer in the evening. Faith is not the mortification of the soul by ritual and routine. Faith became a metaphysical perspective, where “Hope is the thing with feathers,” (Dickinson. Poem 254), and so it is with Louise Glück, whose faith does not reside exclusively in a building and is disseminated by a preacher, who instills devotion through threats of eternal suffering, all from the comfort of his pious pulpit, in which to pontificate his pompous decrees. No, in the terms of Louise Glück faith is a personal matter, one that exists within the ethereal confines, and is not encapsulated in either old or new testaments. Faith exists within the home, within the very being of an individual. It can be located within the everyday and the mundane.
 
Emily Dickinson as a poet is always imagined within the frame of the garden. It is there in that patch of Eden that the woman in white is mythologized into immortality. Gardening was Emily Dickinson’s first claim to fame, where a local paper during her lifetime praised her ability to grow figs, which were considered a rarity of New England. Her niece Martha substantiated the knowledge that Dickinson was a talented gardener, by recounting the lush garden where hyacinths, daffodils, crocuses bloomed in the spring and ripened in the summer; while also recalling those autumnal flowers, such as chrysanthemums crowning Thanksgiving celebrations. All of these and the natural world made their way into the world of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In her later years, as is common knowledge, they became her emissaries and tokens accompanying her poems to friends and family.  In this Dickinson is a spring poet. Her enduring and endearing love of life seeks to stall or ward off death. In the garden and greenhouse is where Emily Dickinson tended to her faith with all its blooms, growing tendrils, unfurling leaves and sturdy roots.
 
Louise Glück on the contrary, is the poet laureate of autumn, or more precisely the poet of October. Autumn is the season of maturity and harvesters’ wisdom. When the adoration of summer has expired, it leaves a clear-eyed sense of honesty and transparency in its wake. This is the season and land that Louise Glück resides in. Her poetry sheds all ostentatious ornamentation and recounts with austere autumn certainty the facts with precision. In the poems of Louise Glück the personal is scrutinized with a clinician’s exactness. The truth is laid bare beneath the sterile light of an honest examination. Many of her collections recount the mortification of the personal with meticulous accountancy, which has mistakenly been applied to Glück being referred to as a confessional poet. This assessment is simple if not egregiously incorrect. Confessional poetry is intimate in its burning histrionics. While Louise Glück remains detached, impersonal, as she coldly records the narrative with surgeon’s steel eye. The best poetry of Louise Glück always stems from the work when the poets voice is disembodied like a ventriloquist and gives perspective to others to reflect and provide commentary on the human condition.
 
In Carol Rumen’s recent installment of her column: “Poem of The Week,” for The Guardian, Rumen singled out Louise Glück’s poem: “The Red Poppy,” from the Pulitzer winning poetry collection: “The Wild Iris.” Carol Rumen first provides the poem, and then a thoughtful afterword analysis. Of course, the speaker of the poem is the tenacious Red Poppy, brilliant and vibrant in its colour, which opens to its lord the sun and expose the glory of its own heart, a beating flame of fire reminiscent of the suns own. In “The Wild Iris,” Louise Glück recounts the similarities between the botanical world and the human world, but also the gardener and a nameless god. The Poppy recounts being governed and ruled by feelings, and acknowledges its own transient existence in the end, when it unfurls its blooms to give thanks to the heavens, at which point it will cease to be. In this the act of worship, love and vulnerability inevitably end in a state where we are left shattered. Of course, the Red Poppy is not the only flower to speak within this collection. Each orating flower is imbued with their own personality such as the lively daisy, confident with a bit of cheek; white roses which display their nerves; and snow drops startle alive by the onslaught of spring; lilies reminisce their first full moon as their end is nigh in the silence of September, as the threshold of autumn approaches. Of course, there is the gardener as well and a god who walks amongst the flowers in turn. What follows suit is a discussion of the circular human experience, befit with grief, despair, rage, and vulnerability. Much like the Red Poppy, when the gardener opens, what follows is the warmth of release, but then the smoldering sensation of losing oneself. Then there is the divine spirit or god who descends from their celestial perch and walks through the garden and ruminates on humanity. This is Louise Glück at her finest, eschewing the disembodied voice of the I and giving it shape, character, form, and personality within the world. As a poet Glück finds strength in being both vessel and prism, allowing these uniquely touching voices and narratives to be redirected and split apart into a spectrum of imagined experiences. They exist within the botanical world, an anonymous Mediterranean village, in the echoes of Greek mythology.
 
This perhaps is what is most endearing and interesting about Louise Glück’s work as a poet, the complete paradox of the personal shaped into the universal; or at the very minimum delivered on the anonymous wings of the universal. The best work of Louise Glück is written from the fragmented multifaceted perspective of the collective. A chorus of different beings call out from the garden, each one imbued with their own unique characteristics which infect their perspective, and in turn how the poem is conveyed. In “The Wild Iris,” this clearly seen through the perspective of both the flowers, the gardener, and the god, who are all engaged in a conversation of the intangible realm of the human experience. There is disappointment. There is grief. There are the faintest signs of love. There are reflections on death. The bewilderment of life and waking to the morning. There are the changing seasons and the passage of time. All of this is reflected as the poet surveys the garden. From her garden, Emily Dickinson spied a bird coming down the walk, who eats an angle worm raw and proceeded to drink dew from the convenient grass; while spying this bird who expressed caution from forewarning danger, Dickinson observed the soul in flight (Dickinson. Poem 359). From the mundane garden the natural world can be observed. Time is measured through the passing seasons; even when sophistries are draped overhead in a blue and gold mistake (Dickinson. Poem 130). While the cycle of life and death are but mundane aspects, forever orbiting one another in casual tedium, such as the bird strolling up the walk, who then eats the angle worm. The same is true for Louise Glück, the tended garden is a patch of Eden (though mortal all the same). It is here, Glück finds a chorus to recount and rejoice at life, while reflecting on the painful trivialities that are incorporated into the business of living.  A place where consciousness is buried beneath and is startled to be beckoned forth from the warm womb of the earth and foretell the coming of spring, which is always the ending.
 
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary

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