Myth of Arrival

"This land of jungles and paddy fields
is where Heaven meets Earth."
— Larry Mitchell, "The Ballad of Vietnam"

I have just finished reading a book about war and survival. Very few poets have written about war first hand. That is not to say there are not a lot of war-themed poems in the world. When George Gordon Noel, known to the world as Lord Byron, went on his first European tour he kept a poetic diary of everything he came upon as he went along. He saw first hand the Peninsular War (1808 — 1814) as Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to invade Spain and Byron wrote about it at a time when no one else was doing such things. When he returned home he translated his diaries into poetry and published them as the first of four cantos called Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The poems immediately became a huge success which lead Byron to note, "I woke one day to find myself famous."

The bulk of poetry that deals with war tends to be anti-war poetry, usually written by those who have never experienced it, living on the other side of the planet from where it is happening. Much of the poetry written by members of groups like Poets Against War and Poetry Without Borders: poets of witness falls into this category. There is nothing good or bad about that; it just is. Poets like Brian Turner in Here, Bullet (2005) and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau (1988) are the notable exceptions, recording their first hand war experiences. Now we should add Larry Mitchell to that select list.

I have just finished reading Mitchell's Potawatomi Tracks (The Ballad of Vietnam and Other Stories) from heliographica press (2004). Larry Mitchell is a Potawatomi from the Prairie Band reservation in Kansas and lived through the fire fight that lasted for days on the notorious Hill 805 before it was overrun by the enemy. His "The Ballad of Vietnam," a free verse poem, starts this way:

Firebase Ripcord sits on the ridge of a nearby mountain.
A desolate firebase;
one that looks like the brown hump of a buffalo … (1)

Larry Mitchell is an excellent story teller. The poem takes us from that hill back into time to record Mitchell's experiences that lead him up to find himself "an infantryman that served in this rifle company/ on Hill 805./ Under a livid grey sky,/ it took me half a July morning to dig a fox-hole" (3). The sign of a good poet is writing a poem that makes you want to re-read it again and again, that makes you want to go up to strangers and say, "you need to read this!" "The Ballad of Vietnam" is such a poem and Larry Mitchell is such a poet.

Perhaps one of the hardest parts of telling a story is the ending, especially when there is no clear stopping point. Survivor's guilt, substance abuse, fear all blur the lines between "the end" and the life the writer is living now. So it is to Mitchell's credit that he ends his poem the way he does, setting us up for the other themes of his book — Mitchell's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, his hellish decent into drugs and alcohol, the endless racism and abuse he suffered as being both a Vietnam Veteran and a Native American. But Potawatomi Tracks is a collection of poems about survival most of all. In the Introduction the author Joni Bour writes, "This isn't an easy book to read. It is painfully easy to follow, but it isn't easy to look at" (i). And yet looking hard and long at our collective actions is exactly what we need to do. Potawatomi Tracks is a book that needs to be read by everyone who has been affected by war, regardless of their political presumptions.

As long as we keep sending soldiers out into the world to fight and die and suffer on our behalf we need poets and story tellers like Larry Mitchell to tell us the hard stories about what our actions are doing in the world. That is the other job of a good poet. "The Ballad of Vietnam" is such a poem and Larry Mitchell is such a poet.

Gyumri! A city sitting between the Mountains of the Caucuses on one side and the edge of the vast empty Arpacay valley that makes up Eastern Turkey on the other. I loved those low Armenian mountains; that range where Mount Aragats shadows our little, ruined city and further south, beyond our sight lies the mythical Mount Ararat where Noah landed his Ark. Yerevan, the Armenian capital, gets that view. We get the very edge of everything — ruined, earthquake shattered city block after ruined, earthquake shattered city block — mountains that nestle us and then then spread out in either direction, disappearing into the horizon — a dry grassland swept by unending wind that looks like some long-forgotten seabed — and somewhere out in all that emptiness, I could hear, Kurds and the Turkish army fighting. That was in 1995. I wrote this to Shelby a little while ago:

What was it? A thought of cold day triggered a memory of living in Gyumri (formerly Alexndropol, formerly Leninakan, formerly Kumayri) and from that I wrote this sonnet.

Ah, poetry! You must understand, this was after the Leninakan Earthquake of 1988 that killed 25,000 people and left the city in ruins. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1995 to '97. I worked in an orphanage for disabled babies and taught English at the Lord Byron School and walked by this church every day on my way to work.

  

Ten years ago I was changing diapers and feeding newly borns. This is the mythology I tell myself, the memories I remind myself. I lived on the graves of countless, countless, countless dead people. Unable to bury everyone, the dead were left where they lay. It was winter, December, there was no heat. People burning their libraries for warmth. The survivors building on top of all this. My hut lay on top of mass graves.

This is the mythology I tell myself, the memories I remind myself. I love Gyumri and those mountains and that empty seabed and those little babies. Then a memory of a cold day brings all this back. Sentimental poetry is, they say, a danger. I kept a diary up until my 27th birthday. That too is sentimental. As well as all this I carry with me.

Say it simple. I walked by a ruined
church in the main square every day. Do not
mention all your drinking, how you weakened
and threw up blood. Just the ruined church. What
it meant to walk by that church, the distraught
widow, the dying neighbor, the pepper
legged dog that died outside your window. Not
the church. You stopped seeing that. And later:
"Spirit soon/ I shall wander these/ winter
fields," your last diary entry. The dog
died and the neighbor died. You grew harder
and drank and you went blind. All this drunk fog.
The dog died. The neighbor died. And blindness.
Blindness. No church. No church. Worthless. Worthless.

I need to have more conversations about poetry. Or, rather, I have been enjoying the ones I have had recently so much that I find myself wishing for more. I have a friend currently in a MFA program and we periodically talk about their pros and cons of such programs. A couple of days ago the topic started out with me kvetching about my terrible self-promoting skills and how it seems nowadays I rarely attempt to get anything published. I wrote:

I might have said this before (sorry in that case) but I wish I was a better self-promoter … mainly because I know it's more of a knee-jerk reaction on my part than anything else. When I was a younger Zachary I kept running into people who were middling to poor artists but constantly pushing their work and thus got fame (though a lot of it was momentary). I'd think, "that's terrible, I'll never do that." Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. So my first reaction to the idea a poem needs to find a home other than in my notebook is, "just write, when you're dead you can get published." Usually my line of thinking in those moments is of Gerald Manley Hopkins or Mz. Emily D. who wrote for themselves and never saw fame and sometimes even urged their work be destroyed at their deaths. I don't know if I would go that far, I try to make sure someone is collecting my work as I go along; but on other moments I think, "it wouldn't hurt you to mail things out once in a while." And then I'll get a poem in some college literary magazine somewhere or on-line and feel happy …

Later in the conversation we talked about what made a good MFA program? It is marvelous to live in an age where poetry is not only seen as an art worthy of devoting your life but that there are means of actually attempting to so. The issue to me isn't whether there should or should not be MFA programs turning out poets. There are and that is the end of the conversation. No, what is highly more interesting to me is what low expectations students have of their programs:

… I think if my grad professors had made a bigger deal out of getting published it would have helped me. I was asked a while back what to look for in a MFA program. Was it the professors? Was it the program? And I wrote back (email) and said, "you will be spending $30 - 50,000 dollars to get a MFA degree. For $30,000 you better have an award-winning book at the end … if a program can't promise you that, save your money." … it's amazing to me that I spent $42,000 dollars and still do not have a book of my own poetry to my name. For the same amount of money I could have printed my poems off at iUniverse and sent a copy to every library in America … maybe even to every poet in the directory.

Huh, that is an idea .. isn't it? Well, obviously there are many poets in the world who do get their work published on a regular basis and do not have to wait until they are dead to win fame. Some of them are even coming to Mid-Michigan. I was looking through Grand Rapids' Media Mouse and found some of the following:

Grand Rapids, MI

Fall Arts Celebration-Poetry Night with Sharon Olds! and Sonia Sanchez! October 11, 2006 7:00 @ L.V. Eberhard Center. Quote, Sharon Olds, the award-winning author of eight volumes of poetry - most recently Strike Sparks, is a professor and permanent faculty member in New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program. Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than a dozen book of poetry, including "Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems" and "Does Your House Have Lions?," which was nominated for both the NAACP image and national Book Critics Circle Awards.

Lansing, MI

The NuPoets can be found at Gregory's Ice House. Quote, Lansing's longest running urban poetry scene. Everyone is welcome every third Tuesday. $5 cover. Open Microphone @ 7:30.

November Teasers

Li-Young Lee @ Aquinas College, Nov. 7 AND Western Michigan University, Nov. 8

David and Sabrineh Fideler, translators of Love’s Alchemy, will be having a book signing and presentations on Persian Sufi poetry @ Schuler's Books, Grand Rapids, Nov. 9, 7:00.

I have said bad things about Billy Collins in the past and I need to stop. Actually, I need to apologize to Mr. Collins (at times I wonder if my blog is carefully screened by the Poetry Snark Police, sending whole paragraphs of glib criticism to the respected email addresses of various poets) having committed the first grievous sin in the poetry blog world: committing on work I had not personally read. For the record, here is the sentence that brought down the wrath of sanctimonious poets and the people who love them:

A friend of mine announced one night over dinner that 83 percent of contemporary poetry is not worth reading. (Collins, xv)

In my defense, I think a couple of my statements were fair, "It seems to be in vogue for the top of the poetry heap to complain about what is being written today … or at least it was 2 years ago at the Dodge Festival in New Jersey. Again, I think a person with dignity would devote their lives to other projects if they really thought the hundreds of us writing today (Virgil Suarez estimated once that only about 800 people serious devote themselves to poetry in this country) had nothing to say. What a sad waste of that person's energy!" Yes … but still, I owe Billy Collins an apology.

In any case, if you haven't actually read the five page Introduction to the Best American Poetry 2006 (and only the first two paragraphs where Collins' claim that only 17% of poetry worth reading) then you missed out on some interesting criteria he uses to judge what he likes and takes other critics to task. This highly interests me for many of the same people, in whose blogs I've been following the drama (and more or less damn the man to some sort of poetry hell for the crime of "superiority," passing "value judgments" and being "contradictory"),¹ all suffer from various forms of superiority, passing value judgments and being contradictory themselves. Myself included.

For example, even though I like to think POETRY as some sort of Small-Town Democratic Movement (and what I realize I am thinking about is not poetry per se but open mic. poetry readings that allow everyone "5 minutes or 3 poems, whatever comes first" — thanks Rue!) I too have my own ideas of what makes good poetry and bad poetry. My book shelve are full of good poetry. The stuff I don't buy is bad poetry. So I am a capitalist? Just like everyone I know in America. I also happen not to like post-modern critic-speak that fills the pages of many acclaimed poetry magazines that, after re-reading it for a third time, still makes me feel dumb for not understanding post-modern critic-speak. Apparently neither does Billy Collins. He states:

For me, the thorny word in the [book's] title is not best but poetry, because I am rarely sure of what we are talking about when we talk about poetry. Serious discussions of poetry commonly imply a very narrow definition of the genre. When I hear it said that "poetry … is about the extending of human consciousness, making conscious the unconscious, creating a symbolic consciousness that in its finest moments overcomes all the dualities in which the human world is cruelly and eternally … enmeshed," I wonder if that would include Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" or the Yukon poems of Robert Service. When I read that "poetry's perpetual direction is its way of ensouling events, of seeking the doubleness in the events, the events' hidden or contradictory meaning," I get the feeling the writer did not have Chaucer's ribaldry in "The Miller's Tale," Swift's vituperative "The Character of Sir Robert Walpole," or Ovid's "The Art of Love" … So much poetry — traditional and contemporary — falls outside the circle of such discussions that we might pause in our awareness of how small an area is circumscribed by such high-sounding, presumptuous critical talk. Many vital poems are excluded for being too ludic, satirical, insufficiently hallowed, or for coming up short in the sensitivity department (ibid, xvii — xviii)

And in a world where people use the term Neo-Formalist as in insult, that rings true. And what is wrong to be drawn to a poem with a "recognizable sound of a human voice" at the helm? Or poems that "seem to be going somewhere"? And most importantly Collins explains what makes a good or bad poem and then follows through with seventy-five examples. Important because so often I have no idea what criteria other scholars use to judge a poem. It is refreshing to get a glimpse at what makes another poet tick.

Works Cited

Collins, Billy. The Best American Poetry 2006. New York: Scribner Book Company (2006)

1. the last charge I call up old Unka Walt's "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself" in defense. In fact, most of the bushwhack attacks on Collins have nothing to do with what he wrote in his Introduction, rather they are attacks on his character, his poetry and what bastards all poetry critics are, the bushwhacker being the sole exception. [back]

Date: September 18, 2006

Time: 4:30 PM

Location: Rm 215/216, The Women's Center, Kirkhof Center, GVSU, Grand Rapids, MI.

I urge all and every last one of you to take Monday afternoon off and go to this reading! I first came into contact with Ingrid not because of her amazing poetry but because I was looking for someone who could help me with a question concerning the wily Afrikaans sonnet. Not knowing who she was other than a professor at the University of Cape Town I sent off a letter full of questions and probably a few misspellings.

Then, one morning about two weeks ago in the Muskegon-Hacklet Library, I made a discovery. I had gone there, in part, to look at their copy of The Book of Kells and was delighted with a giant stain-glass window taking up one whole wall with the faces of Shakespeare, Goethe, Longfellow and Prescott in multi-colored glass. On the way out I happened to glance at the New Acquisitions shelf and there was Seasonal Fires (Seven Stories Press, 2006) by none other than Ingrid de Kok! I sat down and read the entire book that morning.

A few days later I wrote her back and told of my discovery. She said she was about to embark on her reading tour of America and would be stopping at Grand Rapids to give a reading at Grand Valley State University. Here is what their Women's Center has to say about her:

Ingrid de Kok is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Cape Town. She has published three earlier collections of poetry: Familiar Ground (1988); Transfer (1997); Terrestrial Things (2002). The U S edition of her new volume, Seasonal Fires, was published in May 2006. Poems by Ingrid de Kok appear in over 17 anthologies in South Africa and 14 or so international anthologies. She has been published widely in literary journals in South Africa and abroad, and her poems have been translated into eight other languages, most recently Turkish. She has been awarded the Carapace/Snailpress Poetry Prize (2000); Dalro Poetry Award (2002) and the Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Literature (2003).

I believe in some off-handed way picking up a book of poetry and reading the first poem you come to shapes one's whole view on all the other poems you might read. That might seem unfair if you chose a poor poem but what excitement to discover a new world in a dozen or so lines if the poem is splendid! That was the case for me with Dolphin Eater, a poem that caused all the hairs to go up on the back of my head.

There was nothing else to eat.
So I ate the dolphin
and asked my friend
never ever to tell.

Like lightning
that night
sea struck me
and I screamed in my sleep
for a boat to take me back
to the first shore
where I had eaten no dolphin.

In my eyes dolphins dancing
in the bay close to shore
a gift of the evening tide
to the strollers on the beach.
In my mouth, dolphin.

I tricked the silent ferryman,
gave beads for land,
and the silver cargo of the dhow
discharged into my palm.

Nothing will save me now
in the waves off the cliffs.
I will not be brought home
on the leeside of a dolphin's fin. (32)

The poem immediately places us in the heart of mythology. The dolphin is a mythic creature of good will in almost ever culture it is seen in. In Greece, Dionysus turned the Tyrrhenian pirates into dolphins for kidnapping him; a dolphin rescued Arion the poet from drowning and carried him to safety. In Hindu mythology there is a dolphin associated with Ganga, the protector of the Ganges river. Dolphin and whale gods feature heavily in Polynesian religion. So it is little surprise that the taboo of eating dolphin meat would be harsh; and like many other characters in de Kok's poetry, here too the speaker is damned.

What about this theme of damnation? Let us pause a moment and reflect on not just life under South African apartheid but also the shame and conflict its post-apartheid world created. de Kok's poems in Body Maps (the new selection of her work) range with titles like "Reparation," "Too Long a Sacrifice," "Child Stretching," "Death Notices" and "Kalahari Campsite." Each poem I turn to holds a sense of pressing dread, urgent anticipation, feverish alarm. I recall reading in college the Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee's book Disgrace (1999) and not getting it. True, the male protagonist was unappetizing and hard to sympathize with as he womanized his way through the story. But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that caused him to do the things he did? I knew nothing about that so I could not understand his motives. And if you don't understand the purpose of the Commission or if you forget your history and pretend other things happened during South Africa's dark years, then as de Kok says in Bring The Statues Back, concerning the removal of the monuments of apartheid's architects such as Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd:

Let's put Verwoerd back
on a public corner like a blister on the lips;
let's walk past him and his moulded hat,
direct traffic through his legs,
and the legs of his cronies of steel and stone. (142 - 43)

To understand the conditions South Africa now lives under is to understand the narrator in Dolphin Eater as well. "There was nothing else to eat," we are told and yet still through this terrible neglect the narrator is damned. There is no innocence here, "the first shore/ where I had eaten no dolphin." It is impossible to return. You might be pardoned of your evil but what good is that if it haunts you daily; "in my mouth, dolphin"? You might be cunning. You might trick Charon, "the silent ferryman," who ferries the dead across the river Styx in the underworld of Hades. But even that is pointless when there is no self-salvation. Hearkening back to the Greek myth of Arion rescue, de Kok ends the poem with this apocalyptic pronouncement: "Nothing will save me now/ in the waves off the cliffs./ I will not be brought home/ on the leeside of a dolphin's fin."

I wanted to say something about Dolphin Eater because it is one of her earlier poems, coming from Familiar Ground (1988) and de Kok gets better and better with each book. There is a good chance that this splendor might get overshadowed by many of her newer more political poems. That would be a shame because this is just as good as anything else you will find in Seasonal Fires. I hope she reads it at GVSU next Monday.