Category: Poets

The Poetry of Norman MacCaig

Judging from recent blog entries you might think I’d entirely given up reading, except, of course, for James Joyce (and you’ll have to admit that might have been justification enough to give up reading). It’s not true, of course. Reading is too ingrained to abandon the habit, even if the weather has been beautiful the last two months. I can’t walk all the time no matter how much I want to, not at my age. By default, reading continues to occupy the majority of my time, even if much of it is spent reading news, or what passes for â€?”news,” and magazine articles on a wide-ranging topics. Thank goodness there was no internet when I was teaching. Reading may be my most positive addiction, but it is an addiction.

I have finished several books; I have just avoided the effort needed to write anything meaningful about them. I always enjoy reading poems; I don’t always enjoy writing about them. Luckily, poems seem to lend themselves to blog entries better than novels which seem to demand long, involved essays, not brief comments. Still, it’s often difficult to find poems that I personally like, that represent the author’s main ideas and that stand out as individual works. I don’t really review poetry, I advocate for poets that I’ve enjoyed reading and that I’ve found meaningful in my life.

My favorite poetry book I’ve finished recently and not written about is The Many Days: Selected Poems of Norman MacCaig, a poet I’d never heard of before reading an interview with an up-and-coming Scottish poetess who said MacCaig was her favorite poet. I’m not sure how well-known he is in England, but he didn’t appear in any of my collections of American and British poets, and I had never heard of him. Since I liked some of her poems, I decided to take a chance and read this 120 page selection of his poems. I’m glad I did. In fact, I liked so many of the poems that I just ordered his collected poems and will eventually comment on it, too.

As it turned out, I was hooked on the very first poem:

INEDUCABLE ME

I don’t learn much, I’m a man
of no improvements. My nose still snuffs the air
in an amateurish way. My profound ideas
were once toys on the floor, I love them, I’ve licked
most of the paint off. A whisky glass
is a rattle I don’t shake. When I love
a person, a place, an object, I don’t see
what there is to argue about.

I learned words, I learned words: but half of them
died for lack of exercise. And the ones I use
often look at me with a look that whispers, Liar.

How I admire the eider duck that dives
with a neat loop and no splash and the gannet that suddenly
harpoons the sea. – I’m a guillemot
that still dives
in the first way it thought of: poke your head under
and fly down.

I’m sure my closest friends would all agree that I’m â€?”a man of no improvements.” Regular readers would probably agree that there aren’t many â€?”profound ideas” around here, mostly the same ideas I had as a six-year-old playing in the wetlands and woods surrounding Lake Washington. Though I pride myself on having a large vocabulary, I don’t often use big words, even in Scrabble, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten more than I still know. Most of all, though, I thought he must be addressing me in the last stanza, especially after this year’s love affair with the Pigeon Guillemots.

Pigeon Guillemots

I had a hard time picking just three poems that could reflect the poems found in this collection. â€?”Ineducable Me” comes as close to summarizing his style as any poem I found. But â€?”Linguist” also touches on a reoccurring theme.

LINGUIST

If we lived in a world where bells
truly say ‘ding-dong’ and where ‘moo’
is a rather neat thing
said by a cow,
I could believe you could believe
that these sounds I make in the air
and these shapes with which I blacken white paper
have some reference
to the thoughts in my mind
and the feelings in the thoughts.

As things are
if I were to gaze in your eyes and say
‘bow-wow’ or ‘quack’, you must take that to be
a despairing anthology of praises,
a concentration of all the opposites
of reticence, a capsule
of my meaning of meaning
that I can no more write down
than I could spell the sound of the sigh
I would then utter, before
dingdonging and mooing my way
through all the lexicons and languages
of imprecision.

The older I’ve gotten, the less I trust words to accurately convey feelings and ideas, if ideas are anything more than words strung together. Of course, I also used S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action as a guide to designing my 9th and 10th grade English classes when I started teaching. So I guess this â€?”distrust” of language isn’t really new at all. Though actions speak louder than words, words are sometimes all we have to communicate with others, and, as far as I’m concerned, poets, at least the poets I prefer, are most apt to accurately convey ideas through words.

Though many of MacCaig’s poems are about the simple beauties of life, and about love, he is aware of the incongruity of finding such beauty in such troubled times.

BALANCES

Because I see the world poisoned
by cant and brutal self-seeking,
must I be silent about
the useless waterlily, the dunnock’s nest
in the hedgeback?

Because I am fifty-six years old
must I love, if I love at all,
only ideas – not people, but only
the idea of people?

Because there is work to do, to steady
a world jarred off balance,
must a man meet only a fellow-worker
and never a man?

There are more meanings than those
in text books of economics
and a part of the worst slum
is the moon rising over it
and eyes weeping and
mouths laughing.

I’ve sometimes publicly worried that my blog seems Pollyannaish in contrast to the events taking place in our world. After all, this blog started as anti-Afghanistan blog and morphed into an anti-Bush site during the next election. As a former case worker and teacher, not to mention Vietnam vet, I’m not so naive as to believe that the idyllic life I’m leading in retirement is anything like the norm.

Still, it wasn’t impossible to find happy children in the midst of the Vietnam war and the children of welfare cases often seem remarkably happy. On the other hand, I’ve seen those who seemed to have everything hooked on drugs. We must all find beauty and joy wherever we can; it sustains us in our battle to improve the world.

I suspect readers of my blog will find as much to like in MacCaig’s poetry as I did.

Hottest Day of the Year

I just got back from a week-long trip to Malheur cut short because of temperatures in the high 30’s accompanied by â€?”showers.” Heck, there was nearly white-out conditions in Willamette Pass on the way home.

Can’t explain why it was nearly 80° here on Saturday. But it was too beautiful of a day to spend editing the 1,000 plus photos I took on my trip. With rain forecast most of the upcoming week, I decided I would wait to post shots from the trip and be satisfied with sharing the best of them with Leslie.

We, and half the city of Tacoma, apparently, decided to visit Pt. Defiance Park Saturday. Luckily most were visiting the zoo, not the Rhododendron Garden. I love the garden any time the flowers are in bloom, but the photographer in me loves it even more when brilliant sunshine filters down through the forest cover.

Rhododendron in Forest

That sunshine makes it harder to avoid blowing out the highlights on the flowers, but that’s a small price to pay for the eye-popping colors it produces.

Pink and White Rhododendron

Although some of the plants are beyond their prime, others like this azalea seemed to be at their peak.

Azalea

Walking from light to shadow, I was struck by how different the same flowers look in direct sunlight versus in the shade.

Purple Rhododendron?

I would have said this was a purple rhododendron, but seen in full light I would be tempted to say it was white with purple tinges.

I like to think that Gerard Manley must have been inspired by something like the Rhododendron Garden when he wrote:

Pied Beauty
 
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                Praise him.

Patricia Donegan’s Haiku Mind

Tom’s recent comment that ” When I buy a book of poems, it’s like buying a bottle of single malt. It’s a rare event and I enjoy it very slowly over a long period.” seems rather appropriate to the next book I began reading haiku mind: 108 poems to Cultivate Awareness & Open Your Heart.

It’s the kind of book with commentary that almost demands a daily reading, something, I’ll have to admit, that I’ve never been very successful at. I bought a book several years ago entitled 365 Tao: Daily Meditation and I don’t think I ever got much beyond the 5th day. I am many things, but methodical certainly isn’t one of those things. I’ve always been better at totally immersing myself in a a subject than tackling it one piece at a time.

So, this might well be the only entry you’ll ever read on this book, but despite the fact that I plan on several outings in the next few weeks, I’ll try to read one entry a day as long as I’m home. It might help that I’ve liked the first few haiku, and the commentary following those haiku.

It begins with a haiku that explains the author’s motive in writing the book:

1 Pausing

pausing
halfway up the stair-
white chrysanthemums

ELIZABETH SEARLE LAMB

Pausing is the doorway to awakening. This haiku epitomizes a moment that occurs naturally in our lives, but that we often hurry or gloss over. Haiku awareness is a simple way to slow down and tune in to this fleeting moment, to appreciate what is right in front of us. We pause not only with our body but also with our mind. And sometimes we can be attentive and sometimes we cannot, but that is all right, for the next moment always brings us the fresh possibility to pause and be present again. There are no steps to follow, there is no enlightenment to work toward-there is only the simplicity of relaxing into this very moment that is complete in itself. This naked moment is the only guide that we need to relax our mind. We need to trust this: in the midst of our daily life activities, the possibility to slow down, to stop, and then to appreciate naturally unfolds. For a fleeting moment we pause and note the sunlight on the sheets as we make the bed, note the warm sun on our cup as we sip tea, or note the fading light on the curtain as we enter the room. And we let out a breath or sigh. Pausing.

ELIZABETH 5EARLE LAMB (1917-2004). The foremost American haiku poet living a life dedicated to haiku, called “the first lady of Ameri- can haiku” Lamb was one of the founding members in 1968, along with Harold G. Henderson, of the Haiku Society of America and editor of Frogpond, its journal. She was also an early president of HSA and an honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives. Her last book was Across the Wind Harp: Collected and New Haiku.

As noted above, I tend to be a Type A personality, so pausing, except in the summer when I wasn’t working, has never been something I’ve done very well until I retired and took up Tai Chi and, coincidentally, birding. Perhaps this new found “awareness” is why I’ve become more and more fond of poetry that employs concrete images.

Phyllis Baker’s There Are No Rivers

One of the books I picked up at The University of Washington Bookstore Saturday was There Are No Rivers by Phyllis Baker. Since I had a doctor’s appointment and it was the shortest of the books, consisting of 51 short poems, I decided that I would tackle that one first. As usual, I got to the doctor’s office early and had plenty of time to read, and even got time between tests to read some more. To make a short story short, I managed to finish it in a single day.

Although I certainly enjoyed reading the poems more than I would have enjoyed reading anything I found in the doctor’s office, I was rather disappointed by the book. I bought the book because I was attracted by short poems like this one in the first section of the book:

LEAVING IN HIGH MORNING

I made the bed
and folded up all hope
as neatly as the blankets,
pushed my fears into bags
and fed them to the car.

In the cold and hunger
I forgot to straighten
the life I left.

As some of you may have noticed, I am particularly drawn to works that share my love of the Pacific Northwest, not least because they often help me to see it more clearly than I have seen it before I read the book. Phyllis Baker has apparently lived many of the same places I have, like in the section entitled Grays Harbor 1994-2004. And she certainly touches on my memory of the area in poems like “Strong Rain,” “The Habit of Moss,” and “The Presence of Water” since I quickly decided that the area was too wet for me even though I’d grown up in Seattle where it sometimes seems to rain continually for nine months of the year. Unfortunately, a poem that describes a raging, flooding river that ends

6
Morning .
Soft blowy rain
can’t hurt us now.
Why won’t it stop?

neither moves me nor allows me to see Grays Harbor in a new way.

Perhaps it says more about my own taste in poetry than it does Baker’s poetry, but even though her lines are short and precise too many of the poems lack the concrete imagery that I increasingly demand in a poem. It’s the moment that I want to see captured; not the thought about that moment.