Seeing Through the Center

The series of essays that Scott Russell Sanders has included in Writing from the Center explore the writer’s relationship to the landscape and culture of the Midwest, but the essays do more than that. They present a rhetorical aesthetic based on sight, a way of knowing through the careful visual penetration of the center of what the eye sees.

In “News of the Wild,” Sanders remembers his father as he prepares for a canoe trip with his daughter. He adds tobacco to his list of supplies remembering that the father followed the Ojibwa custom of sprinkling “tobacco on the water before setting out in a canoe, as an offering to the spirits for a safe journey” (117). For the Ojibwa, the ceremony endowed the experience of journey and return with dignity and sacred obligation to tell what one saw. Sanders remarks that his father always asked his son, “What did you find?” (118), whenever he returned from even the simplest of trips. The practice taught the son to be a careful observer of all that he saw, and it taught the son the sense of circularity that pervades the visual observations that inform his essays. Sanders sums up his father’s legacy to him by saying that in the “sharing of what [he] had found was the journey completed, the circle closed” (119).

This sense of the father’s legacy is fleshed out in the opening essay of the book, “Buckeye,” with the image of the walnut box containing two buckeyes from the writer’s desk. The father had carried the buckeyes in his pocket to ward off arthritis, and he had made the box from a plank bought at an auction. The top of the box was carefully inlaid to make the most of the grain in the wood. Sanders notes that if he stares long enough at the converging lines from the four diagonal joints, “they float free of the box and point to a center deeper than wood” (2).

It is this image and the image from his father’s explanation of the name of the buckeye that coalesce in the discovery that the essay offers. The father had handed the boy a freshly peeled seed and “closed [his] fist around it so the seed peeped out from the circle formed by [his] index finger and thumb” (3). The boy equated the eye that peeped out to the gaze of the deer that the father and son had often seen in northeastern Ohio.

Years later, the author returns to the site from which his boyhood home has been bulldozed and the woods flooded for a reservoir. Touching the bark of a weeping willow that he had helped his father plant, he becomes acutely aware of his father’s presence and looking up he sees a red-tailed hawk “circling in the air above” (7). He is certain that the hawk and father are one. Watching the hawk vanish over the ridge, the man finds a centered completion to unresolved grief. By looking with care and intensity, insists the essay, the eye can see “a center deeper than wood,” a center that transcends the surface view.

Sanders begins his title essay for the volume with another circular image of seeing beyond the obvious. A Kenyan follows a bird, a honey guide, that continually circles back to him as he leads him into the woods to the honey tree. No one in the tribe knows when the pattern of cooperation began providing both man and bird with the honey they both desire. According to Sanders, the honey guide that every writer must seek is authenticity. In his mind, authenticity can be found only at the center of experience. The writer must “move in loops, out and back again, exploring our home ground, as owls or foxes or indigenous people explore the territory they use for hunting, gathering, mating, and play” (159). This desired authenticity has a spiritual, psychological, and geographical dimension and must grow out of “one’s entire life” (164). Sanders equates the effort to find this center to the Quaker notion of “centering down” and cultivating “an inward listening” (166-167).

In “The Common Life,” Sanders tells of joining his daughter and her friends in making bread. The circular, repetitive motion of kneading the dough gave him “a sense of being exactly where [he] should be and doing exactly what [he] should do” (66). The connectivity of the experience wound like a rope back through time. His daughter Eve had learned the process from her mother Ruth who had learned it from a Canadian friend who had learned from her grandmother. The authenticity of the experience came from the shared process and the ingredients that combined with the yeast and the flour--“the sound of birds and the smell of April dirt and the brush of wind through the open door” (69). The process that extended to the distribution of the bread to his neighbors was an exercise in centered life, a part of what he will call in “Voyageurs” biophilia.

On a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters with his daughter he saw a granite cliff on which an ancient tribe had drawn pictures of their life. “What I saw,” Sanders writes, “in the faint red figures was a group portrait, a way of declaring: Here are the people of this place that fly and those that go on four legs and those that go on two” (129). To explore life, to affiliate with life, was the tenor of the trip that observed otters frolicking in the stream, the eagle watching the gliding canoes, and crying loons and gave voice to the writer’s wish to receive their blessing, “to dwell alongside them with understanding and grace” (123).

He speaks of visiting Cedar Bluffs in “Sanctuary,” of walking the loop that the trail makes and concludes that there can be “no sanctuaries unless we regain a deep sense of the sacred, no refuges unless we feel a reverence for the land, for soil and stone, water and air, and for all that lives” (64). The vision of Sanders is post-Edenic in its emphasis on reimagining man’s “place in creation.”

In “Beneath the Smooth Skin of America,” he calls for children to be educated in their home ground, “to handle stones and leaves and dirt, watch squirrels and bats and bugs, pore over photographs and fossils and maps, feel the land in their bones” (20). In “Faith and Work,” he celebrates physical labor, the post-Edenic call to husbandry over the land and the unity of generations to come. Speaking of the builders of the house he remodels with his own hands, he insists, “They measured well, plumbed and squared the walls, drove the nails home, as though they were building a shelter not for strangers but for sisters and brothers whom they would never meet” (97). In “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water,” he tells of his youthful fascination with the periodic table and muses that man is “always speaking about the unsayable in terms of what we can touch and taste and see” (147). He acknowledges that no system of codification can ever express the totality of life but that “the harmony of the whole, the music of earth, air, fire, and water is still compelling.”

“All good writing, everywhere and always, is an act of attention,” (51) Sanders declares in “Imagining the Midwest,” and in “The Writer in the University,” he admits that if he had the freedom he would take his classes into the land, urge them to learn trades, and “listen to the rhythms of [their] place and the voices of [their] neighbors” (115).

Working with a Dominant Symbol

“Native Trees” and “Touching the Tree” are two short lyrical poems early in W. S. Merwin’s The Rain in the Trees that establish the centrality of the dominant symbol for the volume. “Native Trees” opens with the assertion by the child that neither of his parents “knew the names of the trees.” This statement declares the independence of the child and links that child with the natural world that exists apart from the life of the parents as surely as the lack of punctuation the poet uses throughout the volume declares his independence from traditional form. Form follows function as the poet in poem after poem builds its subversive message around a single dominant image of the destruction of the natural world, the loss of culture.

In the first stanza of “Native Trees,” the parents respond to the child’s questions by acting as though they did not hear and did not look where he pointed. Their attention was drawn instead to the “surfaces of furniture” and the “walls they had forgotten.” The child narrator understands their reactions to argue for “no questions no voices and no shade.” In the second stanza the child, asks whether there were trees where the parents grew up. When they answer yes, the child knows that they have forgotten. He understands that trees had no meaning for them and thus they could not name them. The conversation of the poem bids for the same innocence that Whitman evokes with his child asking about the grass. But while Whitman’s image opens up the poem to man’s centrality in burgeoning life, Merwin’s poem figures man’s alienation from the natural world of his cultural tradition.

The boy is again positioned against the adult world in “Touching the Tree.” The boy hears the tree, talks with the tree, and walks with the tree as opposed to the adults passing by. Their world is figured by the streetcars that sing to themselves, the sound of “ferries chains whistles/ tires on the avenue wires humming among windows/ words flying out of rooms.” The “no” of the parents reverberates with the “no” of the black river beyond the buildings, a river presumably blackened with the refuse of industrialization.

The final figure of the poem is of the boy digging a cave at the foot of the tree for the lion when he comes. The boy instinctively knows that the lion, the representation of the natural world, will need someplace to escape from the urban world. The symbol of strength that is only a dream in the boy’s world is set against the assertion of “I am iron” that the urban world makes.

The black river appears again in “Shadow Passing” with its stagnant water “full/ of the dreams of presidents/ of coal companies.” The automatons that pass on the streets in “Touching the Tree” appear again in “Night above the Avenue,” distanced by the walls and street that separate birth and death, pain and hope, fear and happiness. The speaker who watches from his kitchen window notes that human life has been “transformed” by the traffic and its lights separating them one from another. In “Glasses,” Merwin’s Whitmanesque catalogue of the life of the automaton, they are reduced to glittering “under imported leaves,” so far are they removed from the trees that can be touched and known.

While building has been seen in more rural-oriented societies to be the extension of the natural world—the materials of building bringing honor to themselves in the edifice—building in the urban setting is antithetical to the world from which its materials come and is in effect profane. The futility of this building is seen in “Now Renting” where the final outcome is windows with no one “to see the motionless clouds.”

The Armageddon motif is framed best by two short poems later in the volume. In “Place” the speaker wishes that he could plant a tree on the last day of the world. He rejects the idea of a fruit tree in favor of that original tree, that first tree planted on earth. His vision is of the sun going down while the water from “the earth full of the dead” touches its roots and the “clouds passing/one by one/ over its leaves.” The elements are all here. Earth, air, fire, and water endure despite man’s destructive nature. In the companion poem, “Witness,” the narrator wants to tell what the forests were like before the end, but he “will have to speak in a forgotten language.” The parents that could not name the trees live on in the son whose language has been destroyed with the forests. The play on paper, the product of the destruction of trees, alluded to in “Paper,” the inability of the children to see the speaker in “Print Fallen Out of Somewhere,” and the parallel between the “whispered sighing” and the “wind in the pines” in “Utterance” underline the sense that there is a vital connection between naming and valuing, naming and preservation.

In “The Crust” the servant/speaker offers the definitive statement: “the earth fell from under/ because the tree was cut whose roots held it together.” The servant sees that “with the tree went all the lives in it.” This tree encompassed those who lived, ate, slept, met, and believed in it. And most importantly, it had evolved the only language/ it remembered everything.”

Rain is used to express the narrator’s belief in the ultimate sense of the trees. In “Waking to the Rain,” the narrator records ”a dream of harmony” that he has on his birthday. He hears a man that he later realizes is his father in the rain outside his window. He doesn’t know how long the man called but apparently the calling was equated in his mind with the harmony he felt. In his parents’ room, the only sound he hears is the rain. When this poem is linked with “Empty Water,” the sense of belief that is figured with rain becomes clearer. The speaker in the poem misses the toad who came repeatedly to sit under the Christmasberry tree. He calls for the toad to return, and the call becomes the narrator’s statement of faith or creed as well as the toad’s. The toad, thinks the narrator, is a believer in shade, silence and elegance, ferns, patience, and most importantly the rain. The toad is a kind of soul-mate for the speaker.

“Rain at Night” is a kind of testimony of the speaker in which he bears witness to what he has heard. The message combines wind, rain, and air and the story of what has happened to the trees. The middle stanza pits the acts of the dead against the acts of the living, the believers in rain. The dead wanting only money cut the “sacred ‘ohias then/ the sacred koas then/ the sandalwood and the halas” and then let the cattle in to the stumps. But the “trees have risen one more time,” presumably replanted by the living. The last stanza of the poem returns to the litany of wind, rain, and air and celebrates the fact that the “rain is falling on the last place.”

Random Rhyme in Adcock’s The Difficult Wheel

While rhyme has traditionally been used as a way to organize the structure of a poem, rhyme for Betty Adcock functions independent of structure. For her, rhyme is usually used as a way to reinforce meaning, to let the repetitive sound when it occurs increase the impact or explore the nuances of an idea in some significant way. This repetition which may occur within a line or reach across lines within a stanza or even several stanzas, often seems random, a near accident. There is almost a studied effort to avoid pattern, to keep the reader from expectation. Rhyme when it comes bids for the attention of the reader in an arresting way and seems to grow organically out of the poem rather than to call attention to the expertise of the poet.

“One of a Kind,” the poem that announces the title of the volume, is a good example of the predominant technique used in the collection. The vehicle of the poem explores the anomaly of the mule. Approximate internal rhymes are used in the first stanza--“thick as a stump”-- and the next to last stanza--“he works and balks’--to suggest the stubborn nature of the brute beast. He is a sturdy animal, a veritable workhorse, but he cannot be easily moved against his will. “Thick” suggests density of mind as well as physique and “stump” amplifies both the density and immovability and suggests the exact opposite of the flexibility of the branch or shoot from which the tree grew. “Work” and “balk” seem counter opposites and when correlated with the initial pair suggest the positive and negative that resulted in the union of horse and donkey. The paradox figured into these two rhymes is explored in the intervening stanzas.

Additionally, in the first stanza, the approximate rhyme of “colors” and “other” pictorially declare the anomaly. His mottled coat brands him as being somewhere in between, stranded in a kind of no-horse existence. The completeness and the irreversibility of this phenomenon is spelled out in the pure end rhymes in the second and third lines of the next to last stanza: “unknowing” and “one going.” These two stanzas are connected subtly by two highly unusual rhyming adjectives, “knobbled” and “rubbly.” to suggest the brokenness of the pragmatic institution that is the mule.

Contrasting with the dissonant rhymes that describe the mule are the assonance of the pure rhymes of “race,” “trace,” and even “-paced” that describe the horse that does not exist in the mule’s dreams and the future that will not be foaled to continue the lineage of the donkey.

The identical rhymes of “over and over” in the second stanza and “rowing and rowing” in the next to last stanza express the futility of the repetitive cycle in which the mule is caught. Each time a mule is born, his lineage ends with his inability to reproduce himself. The nature and purpose of his existence is equally repetitive and static. His is the fate of the “difficult wheel.” These identical rhymes set up the surprising turn at the end of the poem and the revelation of tenor. The identical rhymes of “whip” and “whip” and “man” and “man” introduce a definitive echo that finds closure in the end rhymes of the final couplet: “whip” and “kinship.” On at least one level, the mule, who was one of a kind, figures the hard-working farmer who is now one of a kind.

Every poem in The Difficult Wheel uses rhyme to a greater or lesser degree in the forms introduced in “One of a Kind.” The first poem, “Prophecy,” shows the greatest incidence of rhyme with every stanza using a variable pattern of end rhymes, while “Illuminations” uses a single identical rhyme near the end of the poem. Generally, rhyme is used sparingly and falls into three broad patterns; identical, internal, and end rhymes. More often than not internal and end rhymes are slant or approximate rhymes.

Adcock’s use of identical rhyme is particularly interesting in its daring to do what some might consider pedestrian repetition or the triteness of Poe’s over-quoted “nevermore.” In Adcock, it seems always the right choice. For example, in “Illuminations,” a poem that describes an ancient yardman from the point of view of the children who feared the mystery they attributed to him, Adcock uses identical rhyme in a combination of end and internal rhyme in the conclusion of the poem: “I believe we thought he’d turn to us and tell it/whatever it was. Or turn on us with it.” The indefinite “it” underscores the mystery, the presence of the man and his mystery in the lives of the children, and the larger sense of unknowing that the poem figures with this man whose walking stick was made of a number of used flashlights soldered together.

In “Time at the Movies,” the communal we have parts in plays “that replay in the minds/ of those we know/know us.” A stanza later “Someone remembers./ If not as you remember.” These rhymes reinforce the communal nature of the dominant figure in the poem and suggest the overlapping of frames that seems part of the celluloid film when viewed in stop-time. The next to last stanza, inches the film forward by the repetitive rhyme.
Now imagine, little by little
the skeins of light, the sounds crisscrossing,
start to scatter and to dim
the way a house will darken bit by bit
as one by one the people there turn in
to dreamless sleep, talk fallen into quiet.
The repetition by small increments sets up the conclusion of the poem, in forgetting the images are forgotten, the mental film becomes blank.

The technique is used as benediction in the “The Bird Woman.” The woman who repairs wings, feeds those who have fledged too young, and sews cat-torn bodies has become one with their world. “And by the ground this woman keeps/ they rise. They rise.” This repetition is both denotative and connotative. It figures the literal act of flying and suggests an equating and perhaps even ironic sense of ascension. In which case, the bird woman becomes a kind of messiah.

“In Another Life . . .” uses the technique as reversal of meaning. The poem explores the might-have-been, the woman the poet would have been had she stayed in the country of her birth. In the next to last stanza, “not” is used as an end rhyme enclosing four lines: “I reach toward what is not . . . reaching toward the woman who is not.” The stanza ends with “She had meant to do that, meant to write./ Oh what was it she had meant to write?” But the rhyme pattern is even denser than this. The last two lines which speak of the might-have-been woman are connected to the writer who reaches for what is not by the repetition of “write” in those enclosing lines: “this woman in the shut room of a city/ who writes with a wall of books behind her,/ writes this.”

Louisville Review

The Spring 2005 issue of the Louisville Review treats a wide variety of subject matter in its poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Selections in fiction are well-crafted and readable in styles both realistic and fanciful. Subjects explored ranging from a mother’s concern about her son’s involvement with Jihad to a junior high boy’s preoccupation with the development of his own social identity, from the power of the mega-church to subsume the identities of its practitioners to the power of cultural myth to explain private choice, and from the perspective of a dog on life and death to one man’s culpability in the life and career of another. Nonfiction ranges from craft to personal revelation.

The poetry for the issue is primarily free form with one to three selections representing the work of the 30 poets chosen for the volume. The poems are short, often anecdotal, with a strong sense of voice and a contemporary approach to subject matter. The subjects explored range from such current experiences as the Tsunami and West Nile Virus to such traditional subjects as multiple roles of the self, the nature of writing, crises in relationships, and the cacophony of urban life.

The best short story in my judgment is “Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers” by David Brendan Hopes. In a self-confessional mode, the narrator introduces the reader to the artist Carlos and traces the development of the relationship between the two from the earliest encounter to the point at which Carlos disappears from the narrator’s life. The narrator plays Judas to Carlos, a kind of Christ of the paintbrush. As a freshman, the narrator meets Carlos one night when he hears his cries of anguish in the empty university building that housed both art and business. The business major finds the art major kneeling before a painting, “tears streaming out of his eyes.” There was compassion but no blood. The scene reminds the reader of the single icon on Carlos’ apartment wall described in the opening paragraph: “a staring lynx-eyed Christ with Byzantine ambiguity of expression, between wrath and longing.”

The narrator becomes an instant disciple of the young master painter, and moves through a cycle of betrayal. While the painter, a kind of suffering servant who never complains and is ultimately giving, sells off his possessions and nearly starves, the would-be business manager sells his paintings at increasingly higher prices for a tidy commission. He rationalizes the thefts by insisting that the painter knows what is happening and by setting up a trust fund in both their names. While the Judas archetype is enacted in the life of the narrator, the story only seems predictable at the end when the artist disappears leaving behind a lasting gift of artistry. It is then that the narrator’s wish to connect with the artist, to figure in his journal, is realized as a bid for immortality. The ultimate nature of the artist’s love for the narrator and the self-consuming devotion to the often absent father-figure play into the writer’s use of myth as well.

In nonfiction, I was impressed with what Pamela White was able to do in the brief personal essay “Meeting June.” Looking backward to an experience she had had as a young child on a cold winter night in Alaska, she is able to capture the sense of the excitement of the rare trip to Goose Lake for skating and to combine with that excitement the darker sense of danger of cracking ice that she only partly understood at the time.

White uses the reflection in the car window as a focal image to foreshadow the experience she is about to reveal. She notes that the passing lights provided a fleeting reflection of her child’s inner self, “clear and inviolable, wise and all-knowing” before it turned back to darkness.

Anxious to join the darkness, the daughter is called by the father to the light of the hut where she has seen him kiss June Faulkner on the cheek. With the laughter of the two adults in the background, the child fantasizes that she pushes June through the cracked ice. She skates away from the other children, holding the “stars in the grip of [her] eyes and pulled [her] reflection all the way back down and into [her] heart.” But the ice didn’t crack and she heard only June Faulkner whispering in her ear.

One of the most interesting poems in the volume is Jonathan Weinert’s “Blazes.” The speaker observes a reader reading. In the first stanza, the reader is compared to a ranger who “walks until the end of woods.” The woods become a metaphor for the interaction of man and text that extends through the next seven stanzas. In the last stanza, the poem turns back to a concluding denotative description of the reader.

The woods are “untraveled” with few hikers, the trails are difficult for the ranger to clear, and the trail markers are hard “to renovate.” The ranger has time to think and is transformed by his experience in the woods. He imaginatively extends himself into the life of “someone else,” and he catches the illumination of a shadow self that in effect makes himself transparent. The ranger’s experience and the reader’s experience are equated and each extends himself, the reader “to the end of words” and the ranger “to the end of woods.”

Weinert reinforces the relationship between the tenor and vehicle of his extended metaphor by describing the brush as “scribbling up the trail—a single line, like prose” and comparing the stars to “letters on a page.” He deepens the sense of the metaphor by alluding to such traditional images of the imaginative role of literature as the mirror and the lamp and the shadows in Plato’s cave. The ranger “sees himself as someone else” reflected in the beaver pond. This stranger is “built of shadows.” The stranger doesn’t look at the ranger but “looks right through him.” The experience of illumination comes from this reversed image, “a world in negative.” The blood of the ranger “runs green or clear,” and the “brook trout’s veins run gold.” There is alchemy in the experience of reading that blazes in “pointed fires” of the white pines and the “night sky’s blinding.”

The reader reads to the “final page, and then beyond the page.” His mind extends beyond the reading and this superlative of illumination is figured in the title and touchstone of the poem. The word “blazes” is used in all of its multiple meanings. It signifies the mark that indicates the path, the strength of the emotion, the shine of the illumination, the intensity of the imaginative fire, and the dissemination of meaning or spreading of news.

A similar use of extended metaphor can be seen in Debra Kang Dean’s “The Bog.” In this poem, the rescue of a woman who has broken her ankle is used to explore the refraction of light or the ambiguity of illumination. The anecdote pits the pragmatic interests of the rescue party against the seemingly petty concern of the woman for the shoe that must be removed. Obsessed with the fate of the shoe, the woman redirects her emotion from her own pain and embarrassment to the one thing that she believes she can control. The closing image—“She cradles the shoe”—distances her from the cradle or stretcher that removes her from danger.

The extended image distorts the reality of the situation while it clarifies the nature of the woman. It’s not merely that she is concerned about a pair of shoes, but it is that she is interested in maintaining control of her life. Reflecting back on Ms. Pogany, the extended metaphor explains the central concept of the poem that “light distorts and clarifies.” When “seen dead on,” Ms. Pogany appears “eerily alien.”

In both Dean’s and Weinert’s poems the extended metaphor carries the poem and provides the poetic dynamic that captivates the reader. In Gabby Kindell’s “Mother Poem,” the poetic intensity comes from the first person narration, the voice of the poem. The persona engages the dead mother in dialogue over the flowers that she brings to celebrate each birthday. She questions whether she might exchange the flowers for the bones that are left in the grave but concludes that the boundary cannot be crossed, that “dirt or flesh” dictates the separation.

The power of the poem comes through the direct address, the request to “hold the hips” that “held the weight of [the narrator] for months.” Embodied in that request there is a deeper request, the request to know “some secret part” of the mother that has never been known and to gain a level of intimacy that is forever denied. The reality of separation rides on the irony of the italicized “beautiful” in the last line.

The poem with the greatest metrical beauty in this volume is Richard Newman’s “Dumpster Fires.” Written in terza rima, the poem celebrates the beauty of the contained urban fire against the night. The interlocking rhymes of the tercets move the commuters in the poem from office to home and provide a sense of order and safety in an otherwise dangerous environment. The presence of firemen relieves the travelers from anxiety freeing them to enjoy the dance of the flames and detonates the potential for rage. The experience is even provided a sense of ordination by the concluding couplet. Not only is the fire “contained,” but thanks to the heavens, “It rained.”