Nurkse & the Half-Known World

To be a poet is to be interested in something other than ourselves. In his book Walking Light, Stephen Dunn insists that poets must enlarge their sense of the personal to include “the kindred and alien experience of our fellow humans – everything we’ve read about, observed, or overheard that impinges on us – not to mention our daily engagement with the less than visible half-known world that we vaguely apprehend. In short, all that is not ours until we’ve found words to make it ours.”

How does the poet gain access to the half-known world? D. Nurkse’s worthy and luminous efforts permeate The Border Kingdom, a collection organized around an investigation of states of limbo. It is an inquiry into suppression, competing desires, the struggle against borders, and the struggle of living within them. Using image and archetype as catalysts, experiences – both alien and kindred – become uniquely limned in the mysteries of this numinous realm.

In the poem “At High Falls” an image of a hawk does strenuous work and has a hard wrought beauty besides:

A migrating hawk memorized us,

wheeling, and left its faint cry

in the ribs of the brass bed.

Consider the dimension of the hawk in these three lines. It is, first, an image that can be placed without much trouble into real life: it is bird that exists; it flies in a sky that is presumably blue and situated in a somewhat overhead position. But more than simply appearing, the hawk memorizes the couple in a predatory pause, capturing what has passed but lives on (in our memory, in the mind of the hawk, on the page) and the scene becomes transitory in an instant. That its cry, left in the lovers’ bed, infiltrate the “ribs” of the bed connote not only a penetrating depth, but something unnervingly skeletal: the hawk is a harbinger as well. All of these characteristics inform the relationship taking place within the poem. Sadness and nostalgia are made visible through an image intricate enough to hold this additional insight.

The hawk also contributes to the poem’s mysterious cast. Lorca sought a “visible mystery” – an aesthetic entered into as escape, or evasión, as he expressed it – as he sought to write “diaphanous” poetry directed by a poetic logic, not a human logic. When an image cannot be placed into real life, it is deemed surreal, and Nurkse, despite his realistic images, is awash in the waters of Spanish surrealism. The hawk is as much from the unconscious as it is from the sky. Poetic logic begins to take over the poem as it gains momentum and moves toward new knowledge.

Another advantage of the image is that the reader places her confidence in its power, not in the speaker’s impressions or emotions. Its value is in its objectivity – we don’t question the motives of the hawk in providing this new data. Here is Bashō, to whom the objectivity of the image was paramount:

……Felling a tree

and seeing the cut end –

……tonight’s moon.

The reader doesn’t question the motives of the tree. The natural world stands on its own, independent from interpretation. That it provides an impression of the moon through its shape and color is hardly disputable, but its mystery, which arises from what is not in this poem, is the source of its beauty. So to, the poem “At High Falls” tells of events, not emotions. This strategy distances the poet, providing a vantage point that enables him to assess to what extent he is involved in what he is describing. In “High Falls”, the “us” of the poem is subordinated in favor of the external world. Similarly, many of the images in this collection – the hawk, paper cups stained with Montepulciano, an oyster shell – provide a scrim of distance. This distance moves the reader away from the realm of the personal and toward a larger, communal realm of human experience. Effective images also provide the propulsion to leap from what is known to what is unknown – from a cut tree to tonight’s moon. Such leaps are intended not to assemble random relationships within a single plane, but provide a link of continuity between two worlds. They help the poet gain access: the quotidian experience becomes a rite of passage into archetypal experience. My experience is our experience, the poet proclaims.

Archetypes unlock the door to the half-known world – they are the universal dream that clarifies without need of verisimilitude. Jung, the arbiter of the archetypal experience, asserts that a person who speaks in archetype speaks in a voice stronger than her own. Nurkse’s use of archetype provides the personal – those “kindred and alien experiences” – broader and deeper reach. For example, the collection begins with classical states of limbo, among them the Great Crusades, and ends with a contemporary limbo, before a potential bombing (“this crusade, this carnage”) while the rains of warheads spiral in the moonlight “but they may never land,” as well as a personal limbo (“Hardly had I died / when I found myself driving”). The voice achieved is stronger, amplified, elevated…from the occasional to the eternal realm. For Jung, this is the source of true art.

* * *

At its core, “Sacrifice” is no more than a personal childhood anecdote, but one lashed to the numinous world. The brew of pleasure-regret is the remains of the centrifugal force that comes from innocence lost, no matter the scale. Following the poem’s first real discovery, in which the speaker finds that the backs of the stuffed rabbit’s eyes “shone just as bright as the staring pupil,” the pulse of momentum is felt like an accelerator’s punch, allowing for the ravages that follow. In the final discovery, an alternate realm is apprehended. This creates the poetic moment where the mystery – that border town between known and unknown – resides.

Sacrifice

How angry we were

at the stuffed bunny

for making us love it

night after night.

We ripped off an ear,

tore out the stuffing,

scattered it in handfuls,

prized out an eye

to roll in our palms.

The back, which we had never seen,

shone just as bright

as the staring pupil.

We licked our fingers

and teased the empty socket.

Night fell.

We listened for footsteps.

When they came

they were the same as ever,

just the blood beating in the mind,

but the silence was utterly new.

We entered it

as you might sneak through a door,

answered it, as if it were a voice—

yet it was just silence

and we could no longer change it

by laughter, tears,

or any silence of our own.

Permissions pending.

Maurice Manning & the Job / Hamlet Archetype

Maurice Manning writes captivating characters, and the single speaker in his collection Bucolics is one. He is less character, however, than figuration – son of an archetypal foundation laid by Job, and Job’s derivative, Hamlet. While to place the overlay of archetype on any work is to simplify it, the collection’s many intersections with such archetypical heroes prompt useful discussion from which blooms Manning’s own unique hero.

The collection is a petition of poems, titled numerically, spoken in appeal by a lowly field worker to the higher power he calls “Boss.” The collection urges provocative questions about the usefulness of a higher power that is apathetic, negligent, and cruel. While Job’s struggles stem from a wind-and-lightning-bolt-wielding caricature of God, it was Job, not God, who emerged as the deeper character through the poetry that illustrated these tensions. Similarly, by giving voice to his shame, pain and wonder, Manning’s speaker unwittingly creates a three-dimensional world in the face of an absent leader who is void of dimension.

Much like Hamlet, an outgrowth of the Job archetype, Manning’s speaker seems forced into verbalization; he is someone who likely lacks the natural proclivity of expression. His lot in life is a humble one, he is naïve, and his speech is a jaunty collage of unpunctuated low diction that has a tone of spontaneity. He seems to be composing as he speaks, at times finding beauty in what he witnesses fortuitously, at other times inflamed with a frustration he is unable to mask. The lines, spry and variously rhymed, betray this jazz-infused spirit; it is a lyrical evolution of biblical verse.

Both Job’s poetry and Hamlet’s soliloquies comment on themselves, and Manning’s speaker acknowledges the vortex his own questions create (I never know what’s going to cross / my path O never what will make / me ask another question that’s / a question in itself.”) Fixed in the monologic form, the speaker’s internal wonder and doubt necessitate his expression, and create his poetry. The act itself precipitates the ongoing argument of poetry and religion. A didactic read of Bucolics leads to the conclusion that poetry is a figuration of religion and that religion, take away the compelling force to make it fact, is no more than poetry. (Perhaps read “tragedy” for religion for a more Platonic, less biblical reading.)

The monologic form also establishes the grand irony of the collection, which is emphasized by the speaker’s often desperate appeals to engage the mum Boss. Boss’ silence becomes a mounting obstacle as the collection progresses; at times it is even tyrannical. The speaker wonders about Boss’ trousers, what he keeps in his pockets, and his seasonal schedule, and accuses him of being a birdbrain, a gambler, and a heartless manager. (His habit of familiarizing his god is also suggestive of Job.) The dramatic irony creates the gap in which the reader can comfortably turn the questions asked by the speaker on herself.

It is a dramatic, not a verbal irony – the speaker himself seems to be a victim of irony, as Job is a victim of an ironic God: Job’s own lack of irony only serves to exacerbate his struggle. Free from irony, Manning’s speaker’s hope at times undoes him, and at times it is his lifeline. The question of how human beings can become slaves (the servile, impulsive use of “Boss” implies both this power structure and racial divide) to an idea is inescapable. The speaker provides one answer as he admits he needs Boss to “tell him what to do.” Boss is in many ways a necessary fiction.

In the following poem, the speaker’s dream seems to accentuate his own powerlessness against understanding, that is, the limits of his own head. The desire for freedom played against confining boundaries is a recurring theme for the speaker as he struggles to know what is outside of his only known realm.

XVIII

there was a fox Boss in my dream
last night a fox the color of
the field before it wakes to green
I didn’t know there was a fox
about until it moved until
it moved like it was sliding Boss
it slid across a furrow then
I barely saw it sliding to
the woods sliding to the river Boss
I never know what’s going to cross
my path O never what will make
me ask another question that’s
a question in itself I’d like
to know why everything is stuck
in the middle Boss of something else
why the fox was stuck inside my dream
though it was making for the river
do you make nothing Boss but questions
did you set that fox inside my head
did you lay that field behind my eyes

(c) Maurice Manning

This poem courtesy of Harcourt Inc.