~MICHAEL MILLIGAN~
THIS
LATE YEAR—SMALL WISHES
WHILE AGING AND SURVIVING
ALONE: PATRICIA FARGNOLI'S DUTIES OF THE SPIRIT
Without a shred of romance
to cloak it,
Fargnoli
reminds us that death looms
on all our horizons —
the decline
towards our ends is as much colored
by suffering as it is
informed by
wisdom.
Already established as a
unique and vivid voice, in her latest book, Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press,
2005), Patricia Fargnoli further proves her mettle both as poet and
person. More personal and narrative than her last book, Small Songs of Pain (Pecan Grove,
2004), this latest offering testifies to Fargnoli's endurance in the
face of psychic and physical pain and privation.
While too narrow a focus on individual experience
and the private, internal world of a poet can undermine art and
universality, Fargnoli so adeptly
welcomes us into her world that we
find ourselves deeply engaged at the outset, and identifying utterly
with the poet. Her sense of place is impeccable — describing, indeed
re-creating the physical and emotional landscapes through which she
travels, Fargnoli fastens us securely to our own. Concurrently, all
countries become the same country, all vistas the same vista — the
boundaries between reader and poet dissolve and for a time we inhabit
the same realms.
Our mutual journey begins with "The Invitation," in
which Fargnoli has "opened the doors / near the garden… The peacocks
are strolling / among the lobelia / for no one but you." An enchantress
every bit as seductive as Circe, Fargnoli entices us to throw all
caution to the wind and enter this new place where
the impossible
is shaking
its bright turquoise feathers…
Afterwards the bed,
with its turned down silk.
We enter and give ourselves up, despite a
late, last warning, a caution the temptress surely knows we are no
longer able to heed. "What you have left behind / will forget you /
soon enough." Already we are drawn into commitment; we have crossed
over into Fargnoli's world; we have surrendered into her light. And her
dark — a constant presence that lurks in all the corners and moments of
the world we now inhabit with her — a darkness from which distractions
are at best temporary, as in "First Night at the Frost Place," when a
bat,
a thing so dark, it
seemed
snipped from the burlap of
shadow
high in the rafters above our
candlelight
could almost be unnoticed, as those gathered for dinner
continued to pass the
good food,
continued to reach tentatively,
stranger to stranger. Oh
we were jovial—we told jokes,
we laughed, we cracked open the
closed
doors of ourselves to each other.
In fact, Fargnoli does notice the creature's erratic
flight, though she postulates she might have missed it entirely, a
somewhat disingenuous statement given the sensitivity to surroundings
and the slightest vibration of air or water that indicate the presence
of life that Fargnoli demonstrates in every poem along the way. So
there it is, the bat dodging in the shadows, obscure and unattainable:
so far above us it
fluttered.
Seen/unseen. Seen/unseen.
In that pulsed last line Fargnoli offers us her heart; we feel as
though it was our own. Luminosity and tenebrity are encapsulated, given
wings and set loose as an inseparable condition we contain and are
contained by.
This first infiltration of the wild into the garden
intimates a crucial centrality to Duties
of the Spirit. Fargnoli accomplishes a convincing one-ness with
the world, a physical and psychic pinning of the self to the rotation
of the earth through days, seasons, years. It is her relationship with
the untamed, both in herself and in the woods, orchards, wetlands and
houses she frequents that defines her poetry and her risk. "To walk is
to go forward into the landscape…" she writes in "Walking on Reservoir
Road," "is to press yourself to the world until you become one / with
its thrusting body." Wide open, sexual and sensual, Fargnoli
presses forward with all her senses, and is never more blessed than
when she is so full of the world that she nearly becomes the world
itself. Sometimes Fargnoli temporarily liberates her spirit through
intimacy with another, as is the case in "Brief Encounter" when "All
time was with us // in that circumscribed world." Wondering later if
she is even fleetingly remembered by her erstwhile partner she
concludes:
Still, this mattered, this brief
touching,
the way someone slides out of mist
and into mist, whatever was
to whatever is.
On other occasions Fargnoli finds pause
and contentment in the details of her surroundings. In "Couplets by the
Cove after a Hard Year" Fargnoli describes a tableau where she sits:
On a flat
rock...sketching a pinkweed. An aphid,
transparent, climbs down to
trespass across the page.
One duck floats on the white
sails of her wings…
Rank odor rises from the marsh.
Two more golden insects escape
the weed's stem
and wander the page's white
landscape…
Below my rock, the water laps
in—gentle as hands
on a breast—bits of foam, blades
of light.
Dried leaves, blood brown, mend
the fractures
between the boulders. Waves
gravelly speech.
There is healing here: poultice
of salt, bandage of moss,
the little enduring hips of the
beach roses.
Again we are brought to use all our senses, and through them
reach toward something deeper than the concrete landscape.
Fargnoli's difficulties in maintaining that holistic
awareness could easily be debilitating but she perseveres, forging
ahead, and we follow, even knowing that sometimes Fargnoli, as occurs
in "Evidence," loses "the road, the field, and all sense of direction."
When she laments, as she does in "Talking to Myself in This Late Year,"
that "Yes, I am getting old; / yes, being poor takes too much out of
me," we feel not pity but empathy; we are driven to examine our
mortality and the complacency that enables us to avoid the hard
questions regarding aging. Without a shred of romance to cloak it,
Fargnoli reminds us that death looms on all our horizons — the decline
towards our ends is as much colored by suffering as it is informed by
wisdom.
In Duties of the
Spirit, Fargnoli draws no distinctions between attained wisdom
and accrued pain and does not anticipate enlightenment as a part of the
life to death procession.
I am slipping on the
scree on my mountain,
I am sliding, my knees, my hips.
If there
is a bottom to all this, I
haven’t found it.
If there are answers one comes to
after a long life,
they are elusive…
suggests "Small Wisdoms." Spring, and renewal, "This blossoming
means I've survived another winter" have become bittersweet.
I know what they mean
now, those elders,
when they first said life is so
short.
I mean I understand fully.
We are lit matches
under the eye of the great fires,
a short flame, and that’s all of
it.
Furthermore, knowing these things, even accepting them, alleviate
nothing, not even our fear:
I am afraid. I mean I
am scared to death…
of all those things
you fear too,
though you may be better than I
am at denial,
or maybe not.
Our discomfort notwithstanding, Fargnoli continues
to focus on isolation and diminishment. "Applewood, the End of October"
finds her in a hand-to-mouth struggle, with no cushy job to finance her
life or her poetry, living in a two room place with only three windows:
…I know this is my
last place: from a home, to a condo,
to the light-filled apartment on
Beaver Street,
to here—each move a
divestiture…
…what is left is
what I cannot bear to leave
behind.
Although she wants only a little more than the bare
minimum needed to survive, Fargnoli's small wishes trouble her. In
"Desire #3" while equating a lack of desire with moral goodness, she
feels incapable of mastery, fears she will become "…like the man / in
the novel about Africa, who stumbles like a child / through the rain
forest howling: I want, I want, I
want." Yet this is the same person who considers,
…how often she does
give praise, if not to a god,
then at least to light, its
thousand permutations,
to herons performing tai chi in a
salt marsh,
to unbroken sea and the unbroken
slipper shells
and the same person who, in "The Winter House" refuses to be one of
those found
…curling themselves
into an absence
as though the only
world exists
beyond plate glass.
The poetry of Duties of the Spirit, dulcet-toned
and full of image, is deceptively simple. Fargnoli lets the poems speak
for themselves in straightforward language. But there is ample music in
the lilt of her conversation, and in the sharp measures of her
vulnerability. The words here are stripped of any armor, divested of
masks, allowed their own essence. Our initiation into the complexity of
Fargnoli's mind and spirit (and through that into our own) proceeds
directly from this precision. She never attempts to acquire ownership
of word or world. She never tries to manufacture a false transcendence,
the kind of completion we would all like to carry away with us after
traveling so long with naked truth. Because Fargnoli denies nothing its
essence, we are present with her until the last page and poem, an end
which is not an end really, but another piece of letting go while
knowing we will never stop wanting to hold on. But when Fargnoli speaks
directly to us in "The Leave-Taking," we recognize ourselves in the
flowers seen from the "wooden garden swing" and understand, as Fargnoli
does, the impermanence of all our doings and un-doings, our comings and
goings. Saying farewell, Fargnoli concludes:
I swept up dropped
petals and held them
in the cup of my two
palms, absorbing their velvet,
their edgy fragrance,
before I uncurled my
fingers, and let them fall.
* * * * * * * * * *
THE
DISCOVERY OF SELF IN THE LANGUAGE
OF OTHERS: SUSAN TERRIS'S POETIC LICENSE
Her dexterity with language, her
establishment of formal
constraints, her ability to
work within set
boundaries,
and the sheer loveliness of
each poem completely engages
us.
We write poetry to discover
the extent of ourselves, to find the essential heart we call self.
Susan Terris's lyric vehicle into her inner world, Poetic License, purports to be
about the work of others, and so it is on its surface. But Poetic License ultimately and
deftly turns into an exploration of the preoccupations and thematic
obsessions of Terris herself. Her dexterity with language, her
establishment of formal constraints, her ability to work within set
boundaries, and the sheer loveliness of each poem completely engage
us. By capturing our entire attention, Terris is able to touch that
part of ourselves shared through the medium of exceptional art. We
partake her discoveries as though they were our own — reminded that
insight into another human being is also insight into ourselves, that
what another feels we are also capable of feeling.
In this brief but ambitious collection, Terris
selects forty mostly twentieth-century American poets (Emily Dickinson,
slightly out of time, and maybe T.S. Eliot, who preferred to be
English, the only exceptions). From the work of each of these poets
Terris gleans ten to twelve words and sets out, as she explains in her
dedication, to "capture a fleeting, impressionistic view of how each of
these poets speaks to the world." Since each poem in this series
consists of only thirty to forty words, the reader might initially
expect a kind of trivia game where the object is to guess which words
belong to which poet — Terris or her subject. But in Terris's hands,
which words she chooses from each poet become far less important than
how, while paying due respect to the masters from whom she draws, she
crafts them into a universal language.
Each poem in Poetic
License is placed in a group of four, two to a page, under
titles naming a particular theme, i.e. "On Love," "On Endurance," and
so on. Each of the four poems is identified only by the first names or
initials of the poet to whom Terris offers homage. Many are easily
recognizable — Edna, Sylvia, Rita, E.E., Langston. The book also
contains a list that facilitates
identification (there are four
Roberts, which could be a little tricky). And it is clear that Terris
derives inspiration from the work of her choices. Some of the
inspiration is stylistic — we recognize Emily Dickinson's
breathlessness in some of these poems, and William Carlos Williams's
critical use of line and breaks — some of her debt is less immediately
obvious. Which is a good thing here, because Terris is so skillful and
so much her own poet that beyond recognizing her place in the lineage
of American poets the reader, unless of an obsessively analytical mind,
has no need to be distracted by the question of who contributed exactly
what to Terris's tool chest.
While the framework of Poetic License contributes to the
book's success, it is Terris's awareness of language that fleshes the
skeleton and brings it to breath. She accomplishes this without resort
to the usual confessional narrative but through a mastery of lyric that
never succumbs to linearity. In an age where so much poetry lapses into
a conversational dictum that fails to rise above the artificially
line-broken paragraph and the purely banal, the music of her lines
recalls the sound of the lyre, and the flute, and the drum. We are
reading a poetry that not only reveres the twentieth century but also
the origin of the human species with its craving to carve beauty and
order out of the chaos of stone, hide, bone and wind. Take these lines
from "Muriel":
In the hollows of the
flesh
An unknown blessing,
White birds of silence, traces of
Vanished dream…
Terris accomplishes her melodic and
rhythmic tension seemingly effortlessly, but the results bespeak not
only an innate understanding of sonics but a well practiced ear.
Consider the mutual effects of consonance, assonance and stress in the
following lines from "E. E.":
The secret self
arrives.
He dares to meet it at the door.
It swoops across the darkened room
Streaking the air with a caress.
He scarcely speaks.…
That hard "c" in "secret" sets an anxious tone that cuts like a
serrated knife all the way through to "speaks," the implication being
that this visitor "He dares to meet" is fraught with ambivalence. We
are not allowed to rest on the sense of arrival but, slightly off
balance, are pushed from the door through the darkened room. All the
"d"s and "k"s begin or end stressed syllables, prevent us from
coasting along as spectators, even when the rich "oo" of "swoop" and
"room," at the heart of stressed words, lengthens the line toward a
reflection of ecstasy similar to that of flight. Even as the secret
self caresses the air the poem's subject is struck almost dumb: "He
scarcely speaks." And that caress, with its soft second syllable,
tempting us to relax for an instant, pulls up short since that caress
has also "streaked" the air. What a wonderful contextual word that is —
"streaked." The soft beginning, "str" followed by the long but sharp
dipthong reinforces the dual sense of exhilarating airborne alacrity
coupled with an implication of blurred vision. Here is ambiguity in
meaning reinforced by sound, appearing exactly where ambiguity is
called for. The subject is unable to see the secret clearly, even
when he moves to meet it and to open himself as he has opened that
door. The poem remains grounded in the inescapable dangers attendant on
daring to reach toward revelation even as we thrill to the moment of
rendevous.
The lyrics Terris composes orbit a fundamental
grasping for personal understanding of both the self and its
relationship to the surrounding world of incidence. In fact, the word
"self" appears in sixteen poems, a repetition that might seem to verge
on the redundant, except that in this case the repetition is precisely
what stabilizes us, curiously concrete for all its terminological
abstraction. We need this terra
firma, as poem after poem tugs at us, insistent that we let go
and soar, an impulse that indulged might correspond to a leap off a
cliff. For while the urge to seek out the self can at times, as Terris
writes in "Norman," lead us to a place where "We are seasoned / touched
by laughter. / Here the light and the spirit are serene,” we can also
discover, as occurs in "Carolyn," that "despair wracks the self," or as
happens in "Robert" that "As the years grow stale, / Seedtime is past.
In winter water / Each craft plots its own chill course."
It is perhaps Terris's greatest asset that she
embraces suffering without succumbing to bathos. Instead, her
unflinching gaze spurs us to cast about determinedly for a sense of who
we are and how we continue to not merely exist but blossom in the face
of misery. While examining the inward lives of other poets, she
examines her own and finds the gateway to a journey that we can all
undertake. Terris offers no false encouragement; she never implies that
the way is easy, or always lighted, or even that all will find comfort
in the end. Still, Terris brings us to the desire to walk and climb and
fly even without a sure direction and despite knowing nothing is ever
one thing or the other. We might find, as does "Jane," "Sometimes a
snake coiled / On a rock will flick out its tongue, / Test the
possibility of change," but also discover the same burden as "Theodore"
whose "Spirit is sluggish, irregular, / And flies with unnatural
weight." Terris brings us the possibilities of clarity, wonder, and
transcendence, but never conceals the facts of abandon, self-doubt and
heartbreak. But regret is balanced by consolation, the impossible
sustained by wonder. By the end of Poetic
License, Terris has helped us manage courage, a strength and
determination that is almost dazzling, as realized by "Denise," who
knows "The grave self might be snared," but remains undaunted. "Still,
I plunge, follow the lure. / Maybe risk will challenge the pain."
* * *
Something must be said about the physical
book itself. Like all of Adastra's publications, Poetic License is composed of
handset type and letterpress printed. Publisher Gary Metras, sometimes
with the help of his poets, chooses stock, designs cover, and prints
each of Adastra's books by his own labor. The love of poetry and the
love of the printing craft are always evident. In the case of Poetic License the design of the
book is an intimate part of the way the book works — this book would
not be remotely as profound an experience if mass-produced. How to
explain exactly? All these things matter: texture, layout, simplicity,
the smell of paper and ink, the evidence of love. Really, we can feel
it in every page. Consider the conclusion to the printer's colophon:
Design and labor
by Gary Metras from July to
September
during a wet summer where the
local trout streams ran
high and fast
much of the time
with trout catches
either liberal or conservative
Fargnoli, Patricia. Duties of the Spirit.
Dorset, Vermont: Tupelo
Press, 2005. ISBN: 1-932195-21-1 $16.95
Terris, Susan. Poetic
License. Easthampton, Massachusetts: Adastra Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0-938566-96-2 $14.00
© by Michael Milligan
