Poetry and the surreal interior (78)

Illustration by Keith Negley, for an op-ed by
Roxane Gay, "Who Gets to Be Angry?"

This afternoon I attended a virtual workshop with the poet Jane Hirshfield. She started with a discussion of several directions she sees our social polity embracing just now, which she dubbed anger, allegiance, and affirmation. She dismissed the first two as being not especially useful for poetry because they are limited—they take you in a particular direction and then only so far. That said, she underscored that they are both necessary generally: to feel righteous outrage is important in life when we see wrongs being done, and allegiance—which she translated as having the "quality of the ampersand, the connecting 'and'"—means community, friendship, trust, loyalty, which we need in order to thrive. 

Numinous No. 33 by Yari Ostovany

The third element, however, affirmation (because she needed an a-word for her list), is useful for poetry. It is a way of saying YES—to both the easy and the difficult, to existence writ large. Shedding the need for an a-word, she suggested the numinous as something to think about: the embrace of the ineffable, always AND, always YES. (The word numinous comes from the Latin numen, 'divine will,' or properly: 'divine approval expressed by nodding the head," from nuere, 'to nod'.) She mentioned the related notion of amor fati, loving your fate—not in a passive way, but through active engagement. Waking up in a particular direction and seeing where it takes you while steering it.

Her first prompt for the generative part of the workshop was "surreal interior." Her instruction: select an object or an animal or what-have-you and inhabit it. Then write.

She read two poems to illustrate this, which I offer here:

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls. 

                    — Charles Simic (1938–2023)

Inside

inside stone is stone and the memory of plate tectonics
inside brick is brick and the memory or forgetting of fire

flower the blooming flower has no inside just as in rain there is no inside
but inside seed are the four seasons, the desire for growth

inside the fly is flesh and blood I do not know
inside the chicken are organs blood vessels flesh and bones plus a dullness of the spirit

inside each human is either a mouse or a dragon
inside each human is either a village or else a pool of piss and a pile of shit

inside each human is darkness, obviously—there’s no starlight
everybody’s dreams gradually disappear inside them

inside a group of people there are people and inside a group of people are mountains and valleys
inside a group of people there didn’t used to be but now there is a bank

inside the bank is a branch president who sometimes ends up
a prisoner a teacher an actor a commander

but inside the cell is a universe that did not originate in an explosion
while inside the virus is a cackling demon

just as inside human disaster is scheming is misjudgment is foolishness
or inside breath is panic is sorrow is death

                    — Xi Chuan (b. 1963), trans. Lucas Klein