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FEELS LIKE HOME AGAIN: Collected Poems, by Joel Weishaus. New Orleans, Lavender Ink,
2014. 217 pp. $18.00U.S. (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-935084-26-6.
Perhaps Joel Weishaus’s poetry is predicated on the haiku:
Earth waits patiently
for a raindrop sitting
on a branch
to fall. (65)
Of all forms of poetry, the haiku and its variants offer the least appropriate targets for
traditional close reading analysis in the western academic tradition. We intuit the
contentment of the raindrop, at one with its fate; it is both mundane and remarkable. Do
the displaced final two words signify the fall, or the continued, unhurried imminence of the
fall? The words of the poem encapsulate what Wordsworth, some two hundred years
before, had described as the lesson he yearned to learn from communion with the natural
world, `a wise passiveness.` (`Expostulation and Reply` l.24) All of which adds not one jot to
the healing process that potentially lies within these lines.
The poem builds on itself. Poem relates to poem; the discourse remains a matter for the
poetry and the reader’s, or the listener’s, experience. There is a multi-directional movement
from poet to poem to recipient to nature and to social context. What may at first seem
remote, bound up in itself becomes part of a larger experience that may be as
uncomfortable and disturbing as its initiating move seemed precious. This is a restless
collection of poetry, where we read `In a Piece of Jade`:
Crags and cliffs, steep ravines,
trees wild and free.
Tiny gentlemen sitting in
huts, sipping scented tea.
Elegant women wrapped in
whorls of silk, long tapered
fingers, eyes soft as clouds.
Golden carp sliding down
slimy green stones; square,
flat steppingstone paths.
A tiny Buddha signalling
the clear mudra,
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fresh fallen flowers
dying at his feet. (124)
The serene steppingstone path brings us to the ambivalence of `fresh fallen flowers / dying
at his feet`. Where might such spiritual aspiration lead us?
The most important aspect of the creative process - as Weishaus’s work repeatedly shows
us - is to be found in our sense of what has been excluded by the time we arrive at the final
statement. The poem is haunted by what lies in the shadows around it. The ultimate,
intuitive sense of a moment of harmony within creation is a necessarily contrived construct;
art mimics an awareness that may have emerged from repeated redrafting over a long
period of time, or in a moment of spontaneous composition; but if it is the latter, it will be
as a consequence of meditative habits of thought acquired over a long period of time. This
may be evident in the movement from title to poem:
Yasaka Shrine
Corman’s in the Java, sipping coffee,
watching Olympics on the colour TV.
Snyder’s home packing for America,
on other side of town, Kyoto. (52)
The poem that immediately follows `Yasaka Shrine`, `Upon Seeing a Victim of the Atomic
Bomb` is a stark violation of the haiku as it is traditionally perceived; but without contraries,
as William Blake insisted in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, there is no progression:
I can’t look,
without wanting to vomit
into the President’s Face. (53)
Reference to Wordsworth and Blake is appropriate here, because both these poets, in
different ways, expressed their sense of a shared crisis of alienation from a society in the
relatively early stages of industrial materialism; my Bank Manager uncle was for ever
quoting Wordsworth to me: `The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and
spending, we lay waste our powers`. A recurring theme throughout Feels Like Home Again is
a sense of profound alienation from materialism and American cultural values. This is a
concern that has its modern origins in the writings of the European Romantics from the late
eighteenth century onward.
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The Romantics knew that nature was destined to remain ultimately inscrutable; the `other`;
and it is this dark area of its mystery that Weishaus, along with many of his Romantic
forbears (including Wordsworth), returns to repeatedly.
What’s Out There?
What’s out there, stripped of skin,
Resurrected for the New Year?
White whale bones stranded?
Prehistoric bones standing again?
Children’s bones from the Asian war?
Planks of wood,
Life-lines cut and
Squared. (122)
Shelley grappled with the problem in his poem Mont Blanc, where he confronted the power
and unknowability of nature with Promethean defiance and, I suspect, half scared himself to
death as he gazed upward, realising that without first his mind, and then his words, nature –
the mountain – would remain that most catastrophic of things, `vacancy`.
These poets were in search of the self and found it in what was at best only ever an uneasy
alliance with the natural world which, for all its capacity to sooth their anxieties, remained
indifferent and irrefutably not human.
Weishaus’s poetry explores the self with a view to declaring how little we know of
ourselves. In Wordsworth’s `Elegiac Stanzas` the poet had been moved to write by seeing a
painting of a ship in a storm; in `Even the Dead Have Potential` and `Marilyn` Weishaus
searches in vain for the person through the distorting lens of the camera and media
coverage:
She stood full length in the mirror
still believing
in the flesh
still believing
in the America
that created her
in its wash and wear
underwear. (22)
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In the poem juxtaposed to `Marilyn`, `The Body` the fantasy world of the film studio is
replaced by a hospital cancer ward. Once more, the self is brutally obliterated:
Her bony face old
almost without warning
On hospital bed she’s renamed
“the Body.”
Head Nurse phones, “the Home,”
and soon the Body is gone –
Bed’s remade,
fresh sheets ready. (23)
Somehow we must recover our identities from the extraneous matter of commercialism
and the perception of good health established by modern medicine
We need to do as Wordsworth strove to do: recover the means of `humanising` ourselves.
The Hopi say they must perform rituals,
Or else the sun won`t rise. (It doesn’t. We turn)
It has to do with apparent flow. The crone eats from
A paper bag, while the young are indefatigable
In their essence. (216)
Weishaus does not allow the patronising assertion that so-called `primitive` peoples
understood all things (were closer to nature) better than western, post-Enlightenment
societies; in this way he endorses the aspiration to heal referred to early in this essay,
specifically the healing union of `past and present` and of `current and ancient memories`.
As the extract from `A Poem Addressed to Robert Creeley` (215-17) quoted above explains,
`It has to do with apparent flow`; `apparent` here makes it clear that the `flow` can only ever
be understood to the limited extent that we are capable of perceiving it. Like Shelley, we are
for ever striving to understand what ultimately must remain the impenetrably mystic spirit
of the mountain.
The poem dedicated to Robert Creeley is the final poem in Feels Like Home Again, and it
brings together the recurring themes of the collection; reading this poem does indeed feel
like coming home again. In it, Weishaus explores the condition of humanity as an experience
which exists beyond the historical, cultural, and racial boundaries we are all too expert at
constructing; which of us has not at some time walked the line with Robert Frost and heard
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our neighbour say `“Good fences make good neighbours”`? Like Frost’s neighbour in
`Mending Wall` the builder of walls in Weishaus’s poetry comes:
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me`. (`Mending Wall` ll.39-41)
`A Poem Addressed to Robert Creeley` is at once an intensely personal poem and an allembracing statement; I am reminded of the steady rhythms of Frost, a man presenting
himself as being at one with his physical and mental environment. Weishaus reflects on the
universal experience of the search for individual identity, an identity we then strive to map
onto our need for a social, tribal, existence, our need for common experience which will
then potentially feed our instinct to divide and categorise:
We begin with mirrors, ancient portals –
water, burnished wood, metal, any surface
that reflects “brother face,” as to pass through, beyond
the world we commonly experience,
or think we do. A split here; another facing you.
Being mortal, we crave knowledge of the numinous, `beyond / the world we commonly
experience`; but then comes the crucially qualifying phrase, `or think we do.` There is
another self, `another facing you.` In this way, like Wordsworth in `Elegiac Stanzas` still
attempting to cope with the death of his brother, Weishaus, reflecting on the death of
Creeley, considers mortal frailty and the persistence of art. That he does so employing a top
dressing of the fashionable rhetoric of late twentieth century literary critical rhetoric
emphasises for me the irony that accompanies the confession that our understanding of
these matters remains pitifully small (even the first question mark is hedged about by
brackets; if this is a question, is it an answer? Maybe … ):
Death is both signifier and signified. Does the sign say
STOP or GO(?) Your time was up too soon.
How many poems we now have would not have
been made! A poem appears from whose death?
True to our human instincts, we believe that the more knowledge we accrue, the better our
condition must be. We are cursed with what in this poem Weishaus calls `The illusion of
surplus`, and the resolution, in so far as there ever can be a resolution, is an epiphany
Weishaus has his epiphany, but it is combined with the inevitably qualifying `if`; his vision of
wholeness is destabilised by a oneness that, in the last line of the passage is revealed as one
of several:
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You`re getting it right! And there is also the humility
of decay. Bodies become humus, souls are born
like drops of fresh dew. Not only is this world one,
if you can get there, the last one is also one.
This is the thought that Zadie Smith’s Natalie Blake was reaching for, but she still had a long
way to go.
As the poem draws to a close, we encounter the inevitable moment of recall to where we
are now:
I went to the beach to collect the ribs of things,
only to find cigarette butts and used condoms;
some shards of shells with nothing alive inside.
So mother’s almost blind; sister’s in Florida too.
Friends suddenly appear on my screen, writing:
“What’s happening?” “I just returned from Paris.”
“Are we related?” In Florida. Like nothing else.
Where does this leave us? We are left with a pen in our hand; we are left, for all our
efforts, with words set down upon the previously blank page, checking out the headers,
and, as I have become here, entangled in the webs of the literary canons by which we
measure our cultural prowess and attempt to discover who we are and where we belong:
Your Name, This Net
Traced against the empty,
traced through the header,
it’s a waste of the essence,
of the body of canons. (214)
We seem fated to drift further and further from the `“I” that accounts for itself`, `knowing /
an earth where days remain bottomless`. (`As if a Lecture by Derrida` 210). In his
Introduction to The Green Studies Reader, Laurence Coupe complains that since the 1970s
`the common assumption has been that what we call “nature” exists primarily as a term
within a cultural discourse, apart from which it has no being or meaning.` (2) But what else
can it be, what else has it ever been other than that `green thought in a green shade` to be
found in Marvell’s sumptuously cultivated garden conjured up within his sumptuously
contrived poem? In `Your Name, This Net` Weishaus writes:
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Everywhere is artificial,
a waste of depth,
nothing works in depth.
But though our attempt to combat the `artificial` may only amount to an imaginative dream
of `nothingness`, we are none of us thereby excused from taking full responsibility for the
part we should play in what Coupe describes as `the larger question of justice, of the rights
of our fellow creatures, of forests and rivers, and ultimately of the biosphere itself`. (Green
Studies Reader 4) Weishaus continues:
Outside my window, nothing is named.
I look through and know there
were lovers in those ashes,
traced in memories that hold the door open.
I cry over the threshold, “It’s all empty!”
Dark angels fly past wrapped in bodies of glass.
Look for your name in the depth,
in the darkness, in the rapture
of nothingness.
The pathos of this moment rests on a tension (`rapture of nothingness`) reiterated
throughout this collection.
All poets, from Marvell, from Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley, to Frost, and Weishaus, no
matter how swept up they have been `in the rapture / of nothingness` have also been
required to collect the mail. I am reminded of Wordsworth, since become the doyen of
`nature` poetry, hog-tied in the popular imagination as living his life `lonely as a cloud`,
setting off up Dunmail Raise before dawn (as we know he regularly did come rain or shine)
to intercept the carrier from Keswick so that he could read the latest news of the war with
France and learn of the latest political goings-on in London. It would normally be a good
deal later in the day that he struggled to inhabit the `clear skies` of poetry. So:
Fetching the Mail
Planting a pole into the shore,
poncho flapping like wings,
I vault over the creek,
flying toward clear skies,
into the sun…
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but natural weight and inclination
bring me down into the mud.
So, once a day
Resplendent in wet earth,
I fetch the mail. (158)
© John Williams 2014