only fools rush in where angels fear to tread...

 

    Ok, youngugs, ole Grandfossils' not sure how to wrap all of the tales up today, perhaps something beautiful and raw from Erik Rittenberry's Poetic Outlaws and my an another reader’s discussion of it:  

Stanley Kunitz: A Poem has Secrets that the Poet Knows Nothing Of

APR 17, 2024

“The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue.” 

— Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz is certainly one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. 

He received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice (in 1959 and 2005). His works often explored the vital kinship between nature and the human experience. He had a profound awareness of the natural world and often used it as a metaphor for human emotions and the passage of time. 

Kunitz’s poetry is steeped with images of loss and regeneration, aging and mortality, and a sense of grappling with the ultimate questions of spirituality and transcendence. 

Before we get into Kunitz's most notable poem, “King of the River,” I wanted to share with you what inspired him to write this profound piece. This poem explores the cyclical nature of life, the passage of time, the spiritual dimensions of an “upstream” struggle, and “the inexorable process” of his own fate. 

Below is a brief exchange Kunitz had with an interviewer who asked him how this brilliant poem came into being.

Hope you enjoy it. 

Interviewer: My favorite poem of yours is “King of the River,” and I believe my reason is that the salmon, ostensibly the subject of the poem, is half-fish, half-Kunitz. Could we talk a little about how the poem came into being?

Kunitz: What triggered “King of the River,” I recall, was a brief report in Time of some new research on the aging process of the Pacific salmon. I wrote the poem in Provincetown one fall—my favorite writing season. The very first lines came to me with their conditional syntax and suspended clauses, a winding and falling movement. 

The rest seemed to flow, maybe because I'm never very far from the creature world. Some of my deepest feelings have to do with plants and animals. In my bad times they've sustained me. It may be pertinent that I experienced a curious elation while confronting the unpleasant reality of being mortal, the inexorable process of my own decay. Perhaps I had managed to “distance” my fate—the salmon was doing my dying for me.

A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. It takes on a life and a will of its own. It might have proceeded differently—towards catastrophe, resignation, terror, despair—and I still would have to claim it. 

Valéry said that poetry is a language within a language. It is also a language beyond language, a meta-medium—that is, metabolic, metaphoric, metamorphic. A poet's collected work is his book of changes. The great meditations on death have a curious exaltation. I suppose it comes from the realization, even on the threshold, that one isn't done with one's changes.

The King of the River

If the water were clear enough,

if the water were still,

but the water is not clear,

the water is not still,

you would see yourself,

slipped out of your skin,

nosing upstream,

slapping, thrashing,

tumbling

over the rocks

till you paint them

with your belly's blood:

Finned Ego,

yard of muscle that coils,

uncoils.

If the knowledge were given you,

but it is not given,

for the membrane is clouded

with self-deceptions

and the iridescent image swims

through a mirror that flows,

you would surprise yourself

in that other flesh

heavy with milt,

bruised, battering toward the dam

that lips the orgiastic pool.

Come. Bathe in these waters.

Increase and die.

If the power were granted you

to break out of your cells,

but the imagination fails

and the doors of the senses close

on the child within,

you would dare to be changed,

as you are changing now,

into the shape you dread

beyond the merely human.

A dry fire eats you.

Fat drips from your bones.

The flutes of your gills discolor.

You have become a ship for parasites.

The great clock of your life

is slowing down,

and the small clocks run wild.

For this you were born.

You have cried to the wind

and heard the wind's reply:

"I did not choose the way,

the way chose me."

You have tasted the fire on your tongue

till it is swollen black

with a prophetic joy:

"Burn with me!

The only music is time,

the only dance is love."

If the heart were pure enough,

but it is not pure,

you would admit

that nothing compels you

any more, nothing

at all abides,

but nostalgia and desire,

the two-way ladder

between heaven and hell.

On the threshold

of the last mystery,

at the brute absolute hour,

you have looked into the eyes

of your creature self,

which are glazed with madness,

and you say

he is not broken but endures,

limber and firm

in the state of his shining,

forever inheriting his salt kingdom,

from which he is banished

forever.

Sloan Bashinsky

That poor salmon,

what did it do 

to deserve

reminding the poet of his

own self? :-)  

Ethan

Try it the other way, what did the poet do to feel that his self resembled a salmon? 😉 

Sloan Bashinsky

Or, what the poet didn’t do, which caused him to feel he was no different from a salmon that did what it had to do? :-)  

 

Ethan Summers

Truth is Sloan, that you asked a very good question. I didn’t manage to understand the poem until I started to think how to answer to you. So, imagine that you’d be slowly, gradually, morphing into a salmon trying to swim against the stream towards your birthplace, and then try to read the poem with the eyes of a fish. Ultimately read the title and you might just feel poet’s admiration for those who against all hardships, battered, with the blood dripping from their belly, fight to their last breath against the current, only to meet their fate, unwavering, almost defiant in their steadiness  

Sloan Bashinsky

Erik’s title is what caused me to post my question: 

"A Poem has Secrets that the Poet Knows Nothing Of”.

Kinda reminds me of the heart has its own reasons that reason cannot know.

It Kunitiz didn’t uncover the poem’s secrets, how can we?

The Sockeye, or any saltwater-freshwater salmon, makes that arduous return because its genes demand it, it has no choice in the matter, and it reaches its spawning ground, or dies trying, naturally, or killed by a fisherman, bear or eagle. 

There’s a religious theme in this poem, heaven and hell, and swimming against a current without assistance of greater knowledge, perception, awareness, understanding, by rote, a computer program, like a salmon. Or a lemming, as each salmon has the same genes as its own kind driving it.

Salmon are herd creatures, they do not deviate, until they are killed, or they die of exhaustion, although some kinds of salmon do not die spawning, such as the Atlantic salmon and the Siberia salmon, I think.  

 

Ethan

True, I wonder though, are we more free than the salmon is, or just as constrained by our genetic structure as it is? Is our freedom a real or just an illusion?

Sloan Bashinsky
The salmon and human genetic codes are one thing,  human social, religious, political, educational programming, egos and karma are something else altogether.😎 

 

Ethan

Obviously, our world is far more complex than the one of a fish for our body is a far more complex machine and has a far more complicated structure than the one of a fish. 
What I suspect though is that our emotions could be entirely explained by the work of hormones combined with the amount of oxygen delivered to the brain. Little modifications in how the hormones work, anomalies, malfunctions and you have a different individual altogether. My thought is that we are not as free as we think we are, and in this regard we subtly resemble that fish after all. 

But even in those conditions, the title of the article is challenging indeed, just as you said, and could easily be the object of a separate discussion 😃

Sloan Bashinsky

For the reasons you and I stated, for most people, freedom is an illusion. Look at the qualifiers in the poem, mocking freedom.

 

    In early 2004, I started attending a very different kind of church service in an office building. No collection plate was passed. Each Sunday, someone different spoke for a little while, and the meeting ended. 

    One day, someone else came forward at the end and said, “Close your  eyes and ask what you can do to best serve God?”

    I closed my eyes and saw a beautiful white quill writing pen, tears came to my eyes, and got up out of my chair and walked out of there and drove home.

    That night, sitting in the easy chair in my and my wife’s bedroom, staring out the window at large, bare-limbed black willow tree in moonlight, I opened my writing journal and put my pen on the pater and one word came, and another word came, and I started balling my eyes out, as more words came, each a poem, but not cast into verse, and that went on for several weeks, and then it slowed down, and then it stopped.

    Here are two of the poems, which I remember verbatim.

He is the paper, the ink his blood, the pen his soul, and the poet is God.

    Although he sometimes tries to write fiction, every character is a character in himself, ever plot a plot a plot in himself- there are no surprises, only his to discover parts of himself he has lost, forgotten, thrown away, or ever even knew were there. Perhaps in that way he and God are somewhat alike- they both create to discover just who and what they really are. 

    Then, this fell out of me:

Only fools rush in

Where angels fear to tread,

But if there were no fools, 

Who’d lead the angels?

    That evening, I felt something huge and wonderful-feeling trying to wiggle its way into me. It was a really tight fit. There were lots of tears. that went on for about two weeks. 

    Every morning I took the same walk of about 4 miles.

    This particular morning, when I reached the turn around point and headed home, I felt angels' presence, and then I heard in my thoughts, “This thing coming into you is your angel twin. All people have an angel twin, and yours will live out this life with you.”

    I thought, “That’s neat!”

    Then, I heard, “By the way, this is your son.”

    I nearly collapsed to the ground.

    My 7-week-old son had died of sudden infant death syndrome just before I entered my last semester at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa. His death had so unhinged me that I was not able to fit myself into the plans and molds my father and this father and my mother had made for me, nor into any plans and molds I had made for me.

    In 1988, I had gone to his unmarked grave several times carrying a yellow peace rose like the one on his simple oak coffin. I cried oceans of tears and snot at his unmarked grave. When no more tears and snot came, I had the cemetery put a marker on his grave, on which was engraved: “Infant Son: He opened out hearts and set us on our journey.”

    I put all of those poems into a floppy disc document and took it to a copy center and they made it into a saddle stitch pamphlet, which I named A Crazy Person’s Bible. I was anonymous. I gave away hundreds of copies by leaving them in cardboard boxes at a city mall.

    Many years later, after my goodmorningkeywest.com, goodoodmorningfloridakeys.com and goodmorningbirmingham.com went to a cyber cemetery, I created afoorldworkneverneds.blogspot.com and started writing their most days.

    I wrote there after I moved from Key West back to Alabama in late 2018, and I continued writing there through the Covid-19 shutdown.

    By then, I had reverted the first half of the blog posts to draft. 

    Then, I started new blogspots, which became books at archive.org.

    Yesterday, I felt it might be time to return to writing at afoolsworkneverends.blogspotlcom, because its title fits me better than anything else. 

    Having said that, I wonder what’s next?

    What can I do to best serve God?

    Meanwhile, from The Christian Science Monitor today: 

 

She’s worth $1 billion, but can Taylor Swift write poetry? We ask experts.

Do poems and lyrics serve the same function in art? Or are they entirely different mediums? We asked poets (and Swift fans) for their analysis of Taylor Swift’s wordsmithing.

Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out April 19.
By Stephen Humphries Staff writer
@steve_humphries

Taylor Swift occupies a position in popular culture that makes Beatlemania seem like a passing fad. Her every move is scrutinized.

The April 19 release of her new album has been shrouded in a blackout. No advance singles. Zero interviews. But Ms. Swift’s 11th LP does appear to follow a poetic theme. The album’s tagline is “All’s fair in love and poetry.” It’s being released during National Poetry Month.

Consequently, “The Tortured Poets Department” is heating up a debate that’s been simmering since before Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016: Can lyrics qualify as poetry?

Historically, poems were often performed aloud with musical accompaniment. The etymology of “lyric poetry” is the Greek word lyrikos, which means “singing to the lyre.”

“There are people out there who would argue that a pop star can’t be a poet,” says Elly McCausland, who teaches the “Literature (Taylor’s Version)” course at Ghent University in Belgium. “She’s deliberately pushing back against that and also asking us to examine our own attitudes. What is poetry? What can poetry be?” 

 

    Any damn thing it wants to be, Elly. Any damn thing it wants to be. 

    For who, yes please tell me, just who invented the rule that poetry must rhyme, have pentameter, be cast into verse? Surely it wasn’t the maker of the first stone- otherwise there’d be no stones to break all those slaving rules!!!

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com