Poem by David Booth

 

January Light

 

 

Occupation dream: paperboy tromping through snow at dawn, licensing clerk hunting copyright infringements, green teacher talking too much to teens about her love life.

 

Animal dream: ladybug, deer, corpse of lion seal. “In the dream I know I am going to the shore to see the carcass of a lion seal.”

 

Landscape dream: It begins as one and has all the characteristics of a western landscape coming up from the sea, not a person in sight, not a thing personified.

 

I remember once as a young man clipping an article about diplomats from nearly ninety nations gathering in Oslo to ban antipersonnel landmines by treaty. A French delegate like a figure in a dream calls it one of the rare moments in international life where the reasons of state encounter the sentiment of peoples. Invade my pillow. Dust my feet. He prompts my dream of a beach I can see as a child from my bedroom window. The sun is low, the water rough and reddish. Those few people gathered in the lower righthand corner can’t take a step without falling on what looks like infantrymen’s helmets, olive drab, buried halfway to their crowns in the sand. No one moves without being killed or maimed. Years later I am awake for this and looking at a photograph of the selfsame beach, the sun low down and the water, rough and oily looking. Helms made heart-shaped by nature, carried overtop olive-green bodies eternal, waddling out of the ocean. A caption reads: Mexico’s olive ridley sea turtle makes a comeback. They return to their natal beaches to form mass nestings along the Pacific coast, far from fields rigged against wanderers.[1]

 

Synthesis: She imagines her children as heliotropes, standing at different angles from the slope, the sun itself a smudge like a thumbprint, the flowers themselves throwing long sparse shadows.

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[1] The Spanish arribar (to arrive) derives from Latin ad- (to) + ripa (shore/bank). An arribada is the synchronous mass-nesting event of hundreds or thousands of sea turtles arriving on the same beach to lay eggs.

 

Lorna Dee Cervantes review by Koon Woon

 

 

“The Ghosts in April”: Lorna Dee Cervantes’s April on Olympia.

Review by Koon Woon

Lorna Dee Cervantes. April in Olympia. East Rockaway, NY, Marsh Hawk Press, 2021, 139 pages, $18.00.

 

     The kinds of ghosts that haunt Lorna Dee Cervantes’ April on Olympia are literary giants, social activists, friends, lovers, her murdered mother and an entire people, the Olmecs. Cervantes invokes T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in prefacing the second section of the book by “April in Olympia.” [The Olympics is a mountain range in Washington State, where the poet currently resides in Seattle]. There is something noteworthy about the book cover. It is a photo of a new tree growing in the center of a large stump of a dead tree, suggesting that nothing really “dies,” and that memories at least remain. And so this book is largely a collection of memories and addressing people who  are no longer here on this plane or who is out of the reach of the author.  

     Cervantes acknowledges her artistic debts to Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, Art Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Pablo Neruda, James Baldwin, Theodore Roethke, and even Shakespeare. She also pays tribute to social activists Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and there is even a “love” poem for Donald Trump. This is to show that the poet is not fooled or tricked, especially in her mock-serious comic poem, “Constipation,” where the character described by Cervantes likes to make people wait, but who was everything that can swell a progress or two and he chooses to do nothing but to admire himself for his good looks and powers, and in short, he was “a constipation of character, a ration of waste.”

    

This book is divided into five sections. The first two sections are on Olympia which are hard-hitting poems as the author warned in the preface that the poems contain “disturbing material and subject matter.” By this she also means that some poems are difficult to get into because the language is too personal like a personal mythology. In the poem “Inside An Hour:”

          she was dead. Her halo hung in the starry

          starry night. She had finally done it

          this time…

 

          She was a heart stalled on a dare…

 

                                       While men want

          “Something to be,” she needed to do to

          stop doing.

         

    The second section of the book are thirty poems written for each day for April 2021. Expecting a significant poem every day, especially when their titles are given, is unrealistic. But a couple did make the grade. In “Blood” Cervantes decries how justice is sometimes never done, despite all forensic and preponderance of evidence to the contrary, “There was blood evidence and still the culprit got away,” “There was the smoking / revolver,” and the poem ends with “…we walk in beauty in shadow / of the police. All hail the barrage of gunfire / upon us. All notice and hail of blood / this time.”

     The third section is just one poem, written in the manner of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, called “Destination Anywhere.” It fills six pages single-spaced. Where Ginsberg laments all the best minds of

 

 

his generation lost to drugs or insanity, Cervantes mourns the Chicana nation that is lost to “progress,” and to a divided Nation.

     In the fourth section of the, named “Sirens of Olympia,” there is a poem “Night Magic (Blue Jester),” where Cervantes pays tribute to the painter Carlos Almaraz and the Spanish poet Federico Garcia-Lorca playing on the color blue rather than green as in Lorca’s “Somnambular Ballad”:

           Blue that I love you

           Blue that I hate you

           Fat blue in the face

           Disgraced blue that I erase…

 

It is a wonderful display of stream of conscious sonics.

    There are many poems of longing in this collection. Longing for justice, longing for better treatment, and longing for the best kind of citizenship as in the very first poem of the collection stating that “The River Does Not Want a Wall,” with obvious reference to the wall that separates people north and south of the Mexican border, and finally despite the shameful deeds of the oppressors, whoever they may be with whatever first advantage they had, they cannot stop the people yearning for love, as in “Sudden Song”:

          I could know you

          You gave me half a chance.

          Half-wild in the drift of you,

          half-child, why wait when the sun

          dares the morning?

 

 

     I honestly had trouble getting into this book because it is not held back. Injustice is everyone’s

 

business. But I could really expect anything less. For a poet to speak of centuries of genocide and

 

relegation to the worst of lands and urban areas, and denied their rightful place in history, to have their

 

land taken and still to sing, even in the oppressors’ language, this is courage, something I can learn

 

instead of glib tongues that amuse.

 

The Visible Vs. the Invisible

The Visible Vs. the Invisible

 

Vast armies of sand dunes prepare for the desert storm.

Headless vagrant bands band against hunger with no

definition on grocery shelves or grain elevators.

Schools of fish at sea bottom against the sweep of sonar.

 

Instances of the visible versus the invisible.

 

The “five colors” are visible but they blind the eyes.

Likewise, “thirty spokes has a wheel,” but it is their

disappearance that makes the wheel useful.

 

As leaves flutter, we know wind through their gaps.

As raindrops fall, they fall on palaces and vacant lots,

landing on doorknobs of silver or doorknobs of copper.

 

What’s visible can signal the coming of the invisible.

 

As History leaves temples and roads, it also leaves

subterranean songs that flow in people’s veins.

Again, the visible portends the invisible.

 

At bottom, one knows that to strike against the visible only

brings out the invisible.

Nietzsche had said, “Men are bricks for History. Some are

steppingstones while others are stumbling blocks.”

 

Some men are wise enough to withhold judgment

until the invisible becomes visible. 

 

 

Koon Woon

January 16, 2022

A review of Wallace Stevens' poem "The Glass of Water"

 

The Glass of Water

  

That the glass would melt in heat,

That the water would freeze in cold,

Shows that this object is merely a state,

One of many, between two poles. So,

In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

 

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light

Is the lion that comes down to drink. There

And in that state, the glass is a pool.

Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws

When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws

 

And in the water winding weeds move round.

And there and in another state  -  the refractions,

The metaphysica, the  plastic parts of poems

Crash in the mind - But, fat Jocundus, worrying

About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,

 

But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,

It is a state, this spring among the politicians

Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,

One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung,

One would continue to contend with one’s ideas.

Wallace Stevens, 1942

 

Wallace Stevens’ “The Glass of Water” in Three Logical Modes

     Aristotle called metaphysics as “first philosophy,” the branch of philosophy that deals with first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. Wallace Stevens in his poem, “The Glass of Water,” explores these concepts in three stages, or, what I call the three “logical modes.” The poem moves from the physical to the imagination and to the actual world of our lives. Through the poem’s structure, aural patterns, and vivid imagery, Stevens seeks to probe the layers of existence. What Stevens calls “states” that things are in is very similar to what the 17th century philosopher Leibniz calls “possible worlds.” Leibniz postulates that there are many possible worlds including this actual one we live in.  Stevens calls them states that exist between poles. With the glass of water perceived as merely a state between two poles, solid and liquid, serves as the basic analogy as the poet moves into other spheres. What stands in the “center (centre),” like the glass of water, is not the whole or end of reality. There are other possible states or worlds.

     Stevens divides his twenty-line poem into four cinquains - with occasional rhyme. The poem follows an accentual  but not a strict metrical pattern, with a didactic tone as sixteen lines end with an accent. Wallace Stevens was the age of sixty-three when he penned this poem in 1942. This would suggest that he had mused the concepts carefully, separating what is “real” from what is “unreal.” That is, what is possible from what is actual. What is possible is what the imagination conceives and what is actual is the village of “dogs and dung” where “one would continue to contend with one’s ideas.”

     The aural pattern of this poem is very interesting. The first two lines both contain three accents divided between anapests and iambs. The first line has two iambs following an anapest while the second line has one iamb following two anapests. These two lines immediately set up the phenomenon of things changing from solid to liquid and from liquid to solid. The rest of the cinquain tell us that the object (the glass of water) fluctuates somewhere between these two poles (liquid and solid). The argument is from the particular to the universal; namely, from glass and water to poles, and what’s more, the fact that things can change so radically from one state to another we have to posit the ideas of poles, as in first-order logic, a “free-variable” proves the general case as the variable is not bounded by a quantifier.

     The second cinquain of this poem challenges our imagination to entertain the imagery of light as a lion and the glass as a pool where the lion comes down to drink. The lion is described as a ruddy creature in his eyes and his claws. This stanza ends with an iambic pentameter for its last line: “When light comes down to wet his (the lion’s) frothy jaws.” Following this the first line of the third stanza has a wonderful alliteration of the “w” sound in “…water winding weeds…” Then something wonderful is stated about the nature of poetry itself in relation to metaphysics. “…the refractions, // the metaphysica, // the plastic parts of poems // Crash in the mind…” The word “refractions” indicates that the light is broken down to its component colors as it travels through two different media (air to water). I would call this some sort of “deconstruction.” This process reveals to us the “technical” parts of poems; that is, how they are constructed.  And this revelation “Crash(es) in the mind,” meaning, rudely wakes us up, as seeing a lion would. But this is a short-sighted attempt to grasp reality, Stevens tells us, because what stands in the center is a temporary state, and not a pole, meaning a final state.

     To summarize so far, we have in stanza one, looked at what is physical, in the sense that our eyes and other sense organs can perceive and these objects have definite properties, but yet, they are just possible states. These days modal logicians speak of possible world semantics where they assume that there are other worlds besides the one we are in. With this semantics, philosophers are able to analyze language in more ways than whether a sentence is true or false. And in computer science, these “states” are steps in a computation, and they can even prove whether a certain computer algorithm will terminate rather than go on computing forever.

    Before we go to analyze the final stanza, it is helpful to look closely at the title of this poem, “The Glass of Water.” We are talking about a definite glass of water by the word “the,” which is a pointer as it were to the physical glass of water, standing on the night dresser or wherever. We are not talking about
“a glass of water,” which will make it indefinite and so in some sense more general, making it a category rather than something with a particular and unique form. That is why Stevens writes in the last two lines

of the third stanza “But fat Jocundus, worrying // About what stands here in the centre, not the glass//.

“Fat Jocundus is Latin for “pleasant”//. Stevens wants to say that this is a short-sighted concern just to apprehend the immediately state or what is physically there, as many philosophers, Schopenhauer, for one, asks us to distinguish “appearance” and “reality.” Stevens then in short asks us to probe, to engage in metaphysical exercise to determine what are first causes.

     As we dealt with title of the poem with definite descriptions, now when we read the last stanza we see many pointer words as in “the centre,” “this time,” “this day,” “this spring,” “the politicians,” etc. These pointer words “the” and “this,” make things in our “locality,” and make them actual in the sense that we share the immediacy with them. And in the actual, things go on in a routine, predictable way, and this is a far cry from the wild imagination that we can perceive light shining on a glass of water as a lion that comes down to a pool to drink, while winding weeds move around in the water. The imagination is that of the metaphysical, something that can exist but whose realm is not accessible to us necessarily.

     We have the politicians playing cards, we have a population of native people (the indigenes) and we have the messiness of life (dogs and dung), and so here in the actual things are as concrete as they can be, but it is somewhat oppressive, we have no comic relief and we need to forever “contend with one’s ideas.” This is to say that one must still exercise one’s imagination, since not doing so will not let us see through the surface machinations of the local politicians. And so Stevens ends the poem in an admonishment.

     Another aspect of this poem is distinguishing the de dicto and de re of a proposition. A proposition is true de dicto because of its form such as in logic A=A or a bachelor is an unmarried man. De re refers to  

Something being true because of its essence or properties. This is the difference between form and content, or what is formally true and substance. The way I understand it is to do a jigsaw puzzle with the front (the picture) turned face down and just fitting the pieces by their shape alone. That’s de dicto. And de re is seeing what one is doing by fitting the jigsaw puzzle by seeing how the picture fits, that is, working with the content.

     There In these twenty lines of the poem, a fascinating discussion about form and content and an interesting discussion possibility and actuality keep the reader probing beneath the words that appear on the page. The ideas are dense and yet it is a fun read. And it makes one think. 

      Koon Woon