The Irish Language: Hard Questions, Harder Answers, and Hope Through the Words of a Poet

 One of the most thumbed-through of the books I own in the Irish language is a dictionary: An Irish-English Dictionary compiled and edited by The Rev. Patrick S. Dinneen in 1904. I have other Irish-English dictionaries which are more useful to me than Dinneen’s, dictionaries that are printed in standard Roman type, unlike Dinneen’s which retains the half-uncial lettering and unreformed spelling in which Irish was written for centuries; dictionaries which have kept up with the times and can tell me the Irish words for “injection mould” and “file transfer protocol”; dictionaries laden with all the serviceable, civil service-concocted words necessary for communicating the intricacies of the bureaucratic machinery running the modern Irish state. These are all valuable dictionaries in their own right and I depend on them almost daily. But I don’t love them the way I do Dinneen’s; I don’t take as much pleasure in them; and they are not nearly as heart-breaking.

  I open Dinneen at random and my eyes are drawn to the word cairríneach which I’m told is the word used in West Kerry for “a frail scythe”. I flip on, and come across luch meaning “shreds of extraneous matter in tallow that is being melted down”. And further along there’s tothbhuarach “rushes pounded and prepared for the making of a spancel”.

Personally, I’ve never heard anyone in the present-day Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland which lie mostly along the Northwest, West and South-West coasts, use any of these words in ordinary, everyday conversation. They are among many hundreds, perhaps thousands of words which, though they have a dictionary existence, are passing or have passed from the living speech of native Irish speakers. These particular words come from a world that was pre-industrial, isolated, and conservative in custom and religion; they lived on the tongues of people who farmed smallholdings of fairly poor land, of cattle-raisers and sheep-herders, of fishermen and carpenters, of thatchers and farriers.  And they join whole classes of words that have gone silent in the speech of the Gaeltacht—the names of plants, of weather phenomena, of finely observed character traits. They join too the traditional songs, poems and stories that are forgotten or half-forgotten by living people and have gone to their rest in the archives of the heroic collectors of folklore and language data.

 “To imagine a language”, says Wittgenstein, “is to imagine a form of life”. And the form of life conjured up from a survey of Dinneen is so remote from the life of the present-day Gaeltacht, never mind the rest of Ireland, that the language itself seems almost as alien as Sanskrit. Long gone from the daily life of the Gaeltacht are the net weavers, the tailors, the cobblers and the blade sharpeners along with their rich hoards of specialized craft terminology. As far back as  1921 the great Blasket Island writer Tomás Ó Criomhthain took pride in the fact that a deal was struck at a market through the medium of Irish. “The farmer sold the big bullock through the language of his country and the buyer bought it through the same language. Though I’m not rich I’d rather be listening to these two worthy men making a bargain in the language of my country than have a pound of yellow gold”, he says, adding that the young farmer who sold the beast used his profits to come to the Blasket to improve his Irish. “It’s a pity I don’t hear the same sort of thing from every fair”, laments Tomás who was undoubtedly hearing the passing of a world where the earthy banter of a bullock’s selling was now as likely to be in English as it was in Irish, even in the Gaeltacht. As for our own day, you can forget about anything as inefficient as the aonach, the market fair, Tomás was referring to.  Bullocks tagged and tracked by computers are shown and auctioned off in a matter of minutes, ownership transferred to and from farmers who know nothing of each other, hardly a word of real English passing their lips, let alone a word of real Irish.

 At this point now the sociologically-minded person might produce a sheaf of woeful statistics about the status of Irish as a spoken language, and depending on her relationship to an Ghaeilge might prophesy its imminent disappearance with the kind of equanimity historical linguistics reserves for Tocharian or Gaulish, or, might fall romantically into the idiom of pure lament: “Mo mhíle trua, mo bhuairt, mo bhrón...” “Och, ochón!”  (My thousand pities, my grief, my sorrow...Alas, alas!)

 I, however, am going to call to my side a different spirit, one canny enough to understand how endangered the Irish language is, and yet one uncannily bold enough to try to turn the wake into a wedding. I’m going to take a look at a few poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, one of the foremost contemporary Irish language poets, and see what they might mean for us as learners and speakers of Irish, see if there’s inspiration and strength we can draw from them.

 To set a bit of context I want first, however, to quote you something written about 10 years ago by the very fine Irish poet Gréagóir Ó Dúill from an essay in Poetry Ireland called ‘The Language Shift’ which he followed by a poem of the same name. In the essay Ó Dúill confessed, with a lot of obviously sincere handwringing, that he was abandoning, by and large, his Irish language writing for English. As a writer he says,

I do not think that my own experience is unique. I now find that, after eight collections, a selected, two anthologies, a collection of short stories, a literary biography and much editing,

reviewing and adjudicating in Irish I have started to write in English. I am still sorting out the reasons. One is the erosion of ideology, or the form of ideology which underpinned my daily decision to go on writing in Irish. Maltese has more status even in the Gaeltacht area in which I spend most of my time. Another reason, more importantly, is a recognition that English is my maternal language. A professional writer must see his or her maternal language as a key resource, and English as a particularly rich one, a resource deserving to be exploited. English is also the maternal language of much of my actual and potential market.

He then follows statements such as this with a poem in English ‘The Language Turn’

[Listen to him read it here]   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBLlA4lLMyw

 Beside this I want to set the opening paragraph from an essay Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill wrote in 1995 in The New York Times Book Review called ‘Why I Choose To Write In Irish; The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back’:

Not so long ago I telephoned my mother about some family matter. “So what are you writing these days?”, she asked, more for the sake of conversation than anything else. “Oh, an essay for The New York Times,” I said as casually as possible. “What is it about?” she asked. “About what it is like to write in Irish,” I replied. There was a good few seconds’ pause at the other end of the line; then, “Well, I hope you’ll tell them that it is mad.” End of conversation. I had got my comeuppance. And from my mother, who was the native speaker of Irish in our family, never having encountered a single word of English until she went to school at the age of 6...Typical.

 But here’s a poem of Ní Dhomhnaill’s that might give us a whole different take on what a writer might feel about working in a language that even her own mother thinks it’s crazy to write in :

Féar Suaithinseach  Miraculous Grass, trans. by Seamus Heaney

There you were in your purple vestments

half-way through the Mass, an ordained priest

under your linen alb and chasuble and stole:

and when you saw my face in the crowd

for Holy Communion

the consecrated host fell from your fingers.

I felt shame, I never

mentioned it once,

my lips were sealed.

But still it lurked in my heart

like a thorn under mud, and it

worked itself in so deep and sheer

it nearly killed me.

Next thing then, I was laid up in bed.

Consultants came in their hundreds,

doctors and brothers and priests,

but I baffled them all: I was

incurable, they left me for dead.

So out you go, men,

out with the spades and scythes,

the hooks and shovels and hoes.

Tackle the rubble,

cut back the bushes, clear off the rubbish,

the sappy growth, the whole straggle and mess

that infests my green unfortunate field.

And there where the sacred wafer fell

you will discover

in the middle of the shooting weeds

a clump of miraculous grass.

The priest will have to come then

with his delicate fingers, and lift the host

and bring it to me and put it on my tongue.

Where it will melt, and I will rise in the bed

as fit and well as the youngster I used to be.

 One way of reading this poem, obliquely enough, perhaps, is to see the ‘host’, ‘an abhlainn bheannaithe’ as the numinous body of the Irish language itself, a tongue fallen into the most unpropitious of circumstances, fallen out of the hands of official and officious and hypocritical male-dominated cultural practices. But here the language of humiliation and pain, as Frank McGuinness has called it, is transmuted into the language of celebration, sensuality, delicious deviancy. Why not, the suggestion seems to be, make some kind of a virtue out of linguistic marginality, even transgression? Why not go for broke in the faithful expectation of miracle? And why not a woman poet to accomplish it?

 It’s not that Ní Dhomhnaill is completely sanguine about all this. In her New York Times article she talks about the current language situation in Ireland:

At some level, it doesn’t seem too bad. People are warm and not hungry. They are expressing themselves without difficulty in English. They seem happy. I close my notebook with a snap and set off in the grip of that sudden pang of despair that is always lurking in the ever-widening rents of the linguistic fabric of minority languages. Perhaps my mother is right. Writing in Irish is mad. English is a wonderful language and it also has the added advantage of being very useful for putting bread on the table. Change is inevitable, and maybe it is part of the natural order of things that some languages should die while others prevail.

 And yet, and yet...

 And yet, and yet, indeed. On some level I sometimes think we allow a certain unconscious belief in absolute historical determinism to color our views of future possibilities. The Irish language in a globalized economic system and a global iPod culture, surely it’s all down hill from here?

 And yet, and yet... Frank O’Connor claimed that Gaelic culture could be characterized by “the backward look”, an Irish tendency to retrospective anticipation, to looking at the past (not the present) as indicator of the future. Of course it depends on where exactly you look. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill sometimes looks back, reaches back, into the amazing Irish poetic tradition for tropes and hopes of the flowering of the vastly improbable. She has often mentioned, for example, as one of her poetic forebears Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, the 18^th Century poet who composed one of the greatest love poems and elegies in Irish ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’, ‘The Lament for Art O Leary’. Composed at a time when Irish was on the verge of being abandoned by large sections of the population, this poem is a miracle of lyrical intensity, a fully realized sumsumption of the entire Gaelic tradition of the caoineadh, the lament, and a miracle of survival, living on well into the 19^th century in the oral tradition of West Kerry, indeed all of Munster:

            Mo chara thú is mo thaithneamh!

            Nuair ghabhais amach an geata

            D’fhillis ar ais go tapaidh,

            Do phógaís do dhís leanbh,

            Do phógaís mise ar bharra baise.

            Duraís, ‘A Eibhlín, éirigh i d’ sheasamh

            Agus cuir do ghnó chun taisce

            Go luaimneach is go tapaidh.

            Táimse ag fágáil an bhaile,

            Is ní móide go deo go gcasfainn.’

“My friend and my delight, when you went out the gate you came back quickly and kissed your two infants. You kissed me on the tips of my fingers and said ‘Eibhlín, stand up and put your work aside fast and soon, for I am leaving home and I might never be returning.”

 Listen to the echos of this (and much more) at the end of a poem called Dún ‘Stronghold’ by Ní Dhomhnaill:

            Ach níl in aon ní ach seal

            i gcionn leathuaire

            pogfaidh tú mé i mbarra éadain

            is casfaidh tú orm do dhrom

            is fágfar mé ar mo thaobh féin

            don leaba dhúbailte

            ag cuimhneamh faoi scáth do ghuailne

            ná tiocfaidh orm bás riamh roimh am.

“Everything lasts but a moment. In half an hour you’ll kiss the top of my forehead and you’ll turn your back to me, and I’ll be left on my own side of the double bed, remembering in the shade of your shoulders that death will never come to me before my time.”

 With a poem like this we can be certain that death will never come to the Irish language itself before its time, and there’s an energy and musicality in Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem that while full of literary nuance is also full of the vigor of the spoken, everyday language. Anyone who has spent a night in a pub in Ballyferriter or Spiddal knows that spoken Irish has a vital, earthy, fluent existence that really can’t be captured in the “native speaker” statistics such as those piled up in Reg Hindley’s book ‘The Death of the Irish Language’.  The numbers game isn’t the whole story.

 Ní Dhomhnaill wonderfully and humorously and bitingly catches something of the continued vitality of the spoken language and its importance for literature in a poem called ‘Claoninsint’,  literally, ‘Indirect Speech’:

            Tá’s againn, a dúradar,

            cár chaithis an samhradh, a dúradar,

            thíos i mBun an Tábhairne, a dúradar,

            cad a dheinis gach lá, a dúradar,

            chuais ar an dtráigh, a dúradar,

            níor chuais ag snámh, a dúradar.

            Canathaobh nár chuais ag snámh?

            Mar bhí sé rófhuar, a dúradar,

            rófhuar do do chnámha, a dúradar,

            do do chnámha ‘tá imithe gan mhaith, a dúradar,

            bodhar age sámhnas nó age teaspach gan dúchas

            gur deachair dhuit é a iompar, a dúradar.

“We know, they said, where you spent the summer, they said, down in Crosshaven, they siad, what you did every day, they said, you went to the beach, they said, you didn’t go swimming, they said. Why didn’t you go swimming? Because it was too cold they said, too cold for your bones, they said, for your bones that are turned to no good, they said,  not able to cope with hardship, with your unnatural high spirits, it was hard for you to handle, they said.”

 Here and elsewhere in the work of Ní Dhomhnaill, and indeed in the work of many other Irish writers who choose to be mad enough to continue writing in Irish, the corpse is certainly sitting up and talking back, even singing back. From the margins, from the scarcely acknowledged gaps and discontinuities in the mainstream anglophone culture in Ireland, is coming a whole range of discourses that in refusing to shut up or be shut up opens up a profound questioning of cultural values and to some extent is producing, in literature, at least, a kind of hybrid vigor as English language Irish writers try to take in the insights of such a critique. Issues not only of language, but of gender, of colonization, of genre, of the social position of the writer—all these are informed and deepened by the practice of poets like Ní Dhomhnaill.

 Central to it all are the problems and opportunities presented by translation. For many people in Ireland and for the vast majority of Americans interested in Irish literature it is through translations that much of present day Irish language writing becomes available. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has actually translated some of her own work into English, and a great number of poets from Seamus Heaney to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin to Medbh McGuckian to Paul Muldoon have produced often stunning versions of her poems in English. Muldoon, in particular, seems to have a sensibility that is congruent with Ní Dhomhnaill’s literary playfulness and linguistic caprice.

 Though it’s through translation that Ní dhomhnaill has garnered a large international readership, it probably goes without saying that in poetry in particular something is always lost when it enters another language. In the case of Irish and its somewhat endangered status it really matters what it is that’s lost. I want to put before you a poem by Nuala called ‘Ceist na Teangan’, literally ‘The Language Question’; here it is in Irish and even for those of you that have little or no Irish I’d ask you to listen carefully to the sounds and rhythms:

            Cuirim mo dhóchas ar snámh

            i mbáidín teangan

            faoi mar a leagfá naíonán

            i gcliabhán

            a bheadh fite fuaite

            de dhuilleoga feileastraim

            is bitiúman agus pic

            bheith cuimilte lena thóin

            ansan é a leagadh síos

            i measc na ngiolcach

            is coigeal na mban sí

            le taobh na habhann,

            féachaint n’fheadaraís

            cá dtabharfaidh an sruth é,

            féachaint, dála Mhaoise,

            an bhfóirfidh iníon Fhorainn.

[‘The Language Issue’ trans. by Paul Muldoon]

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

This is a brilliant poem in English, and my intent here is not at all to disparage it on the level of literary achievement. But here is Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem in very literal English:

            I set my hope floating

            in the little boat of the language

            like you’d lay an infant

            in a basket

            that would be woven together

            from iris leaves

            with bitumen and pitch

            plastered on its bottom

            then to have laid it down

            among the reeds

            and fairy women’s distaff

            by the side of the river

            seeing, you don’t know,

            where the current will take it

            seeing, like the story of Moses,

            will Pharaoh’s daughter save it

For all its poetic faults, this literal version points up a couple of things that got buried in Muldoon’s poem—the specificity of the plant name coigeal na mban sí ‘fairy women’s distaff’ and the earthy solidity of the phrase ‘cuimilte lena thóin’ ‘rubbed or plastered on its bottom’, among others. I personally think, on the pure linguistic level, that’s a loss, that these are things I’d rather keep alive on whatever tongue they’re translated to, as they’re still alive on the Irish tongue.

 Anyway, as I reach the end of this talk, I realize that whatever questions I’ve raised here, I haven’t so much given answers to them as much as align myself with a series of hopes I find compellingly interlinked in the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Among them would be the hope that out of the maelstrom of postmodernity the vivifying differences of languages, cultures, genders and spiritualities can retain their unique virtues without descending into chauvinsim and exclusivity. Is it too much to hope for a reasonably bilingual Ireland a generation from now?

We can hope anyway, on a day like today. How improbable is it that in Portland, Oregon, scores of people have gathered to meet the Irish language? I give Nuala the last word. This is from her poem Feis:

            Osclaíonn rós istigh im chroí.

            Labhrann cuach im bhéal.

            Léimeann gearrcach ó mo nead.

            Tá tóithín ag macnas i ndoimhneas mo mhachnaimh.

            A rose opens in my heart.

            A cuckoo calls in my mouth.

            A fledgling leaps from my nest.

            A porpoise is playing in the depths of my thinking.

              

                    

[A Talk Given At Marylhurst University’s Irish Language Day (c) Ger Killeen]

Out of Ulro: Some thoughts on 'The Declarable Future' by Jennifer Boyden

Out of Ulro: Some thoughts on The Declarable Future by Jennifer Boyden (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013).

1.

 Near the end of a poem called ‘Night Pitch’ from Jennifer Boyden’s new collection The Declarable Future, the speaker, stumbling through the house after midnight, lurching forward to the pitiless conclusions of insomnia’s syllogisms, considers her neighbors across the street. “I have to admit it”, she says, “the neighbors look like hell” (p.10). And this is no mere sardonic slap at their artificial waterfalls and Toyota Sequoias; in their own way these people, like many people in the First World, are kept awake at night; they sense, however obscurely, that “oceanic despair” which erodes the contours of their seemingly unexamined suburban lifestyle just as surely as it erodes the hard edges of the speaker’s own certainties. They look like hell. We all look like hell. It means, in spite of all our evasions, we know that being awake is a symptom of a shared condition—being lost. But unlike Dante’s dark wood, the place of our lostness is a lit-up simulacrum of nature where we control the dimmer switch.
 What is so impressive about this poem, and so many of the poems in the book, is the deep sense of empathic alertness which attends the diagnosis of our contemporary global malaise, an understanding that we are all in this together; there is in the working of these poems a determined effort to see and see through our massively commoditized, denatured and desacralized world, and an equal determination not to stop there: these poems commit themselves to both the present and a future, a future where there’s a chance we might become authentic neighbors to each other and to the earth itself. So, even at their most melancholic these poems manage to achieve a hard-won victory over the temptations of cynicism and despair—they prise open a space for an ethic of compassion, and sometimes with a surprising leaven of humor, counsel us as to the route of our going on.
 And The Declarable Future makes large claims for poetry itself as a vital cultural force for navigating our way out of the dangerous straits of the postmodern condition.  Here is a poetry that is not content to simply describe an outer and inner world in the belief that such description is a kind of self-authenticating interpretation. Rather, Boyden’s poems,  with their gorgeous language, their parabolic narratives and bold associative leaps, are “thinking poems”. Individual poems and the book as a whole unfold a set of philosophical arguments about knowledge, language, experience, and time; at the same time, these arguments exfoliate from a sensuous life-world which the poetry unveils as marvellously complex, ambiguous, unnerving and perplexing. Together, these poems make a claim on the very process of thinking, enacting in a range of language registers a movement of the embodied mind that acknowledges and goes beyond the linear and the expository, the visible and the quantifiable.

2.

 For me, Boyden’s poetry is thoroughly visionary in the strict Blakean sense. The Declarable Future imagines the universe in terms of allegorical figures whose partial visions are responsible for structuring different possibilities of meaning. She gives us “the giant”, “the woman”, “the person with the loupe”, “the lost man”, figures whose activities and contention dramatize our present-day condition and our salvation. She gives us an I, a she , and a he with fully realized lives, full of precarious understandings; she gives us a we in a dance of reaching out to and withdrawing from each other; she gives us sky and clouds and water and trees; she gives us angels; she gives us the gods. Stripped of any grandiose mythologizing diction, her poetry points us to a state analogous to what Blake called “the fourfold vision”.  What is this vision, and how does Jennifer Boyden give us a version that is convincingly contemporary?
 In a letter to Thomas Butts, Blake wrote the following verses:
Now I a fourfold vision see.
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah's night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton's sleep!

 Boyden’s version of the single vision and Newton’s sleep  begins with “the person with the loupe”. In the shadowy town where many of the book’s narratives unfold, this figure is the arbiter of what counts as knowledge: “For anything we needed to know, we were to ask / the person with the loupe.” (p.39) Neither male nor female, the person with the loupe has a kind of disinterestedness which renders the world colorless in the process of being scrutinized and ordered. The person with the loupe insists on the primacy of observable fact and deductive reason, reason uninformed by other human faculties; Blake would describe this “single vision” as a form of blindness characteristic of natural science as he knew it, and when we collectively assent to it we are party to the creation of “Ulro”, a sterile world of materialism, social atomism, and cynical manipulation of others,  “a planetary society of two-legged insects”, as Milosz once called it. Every generation produces its own Ulro, and Boyden’s is the world of ecological disaster, the big consequences of human-caused climate change, and the related, more intimate consequences of a homogenization driven by commerce:

                See how one thing is already so like
                the other? The tabloid blondes, the small-town,
                one-block crops of Starbucks, the Gap, TGIF,
                all pronounced good in this land of ours,
                these storefront windows where they force
                another tired bulb of desire. (p.68)

  One thing, however, which gives a subtler inflection to the figure of the person with the loupe is the pervasive sense in this book that Boyden deeply understands the impetus to such meticulous observation; it has much of value, but it cannot be an end in itself. She gets the difference between science and scientism (marvellously dramatized in the poem ‘The Book of Various Studies’ p.33), and sees that there are some ways in which the poet’s acts of imagination are congruent with those of science at its best. The person with the loupe says

                Each calendar day is a square
                the size of all the others. (p.40)

 And we should be uneasy when we hear this:

                But the days we recall best seemed otherwise: some shifted long
                while others shadowed fast. (p.40)

  However, towards the end of the book, in an eerie poem called ‘The Person With The Loupe Confirms The Children’, where children are taken off by a convoy of trucks and later returned,

                                                The person with the loupe
                called out their names from memory,
                and we were grateful for this, as the list had gone missing,
                and no one else was sure of how to know them. (p.88)

 Knowledge and, later, understanding can start from here, but it is only a start and it can be blind to other kinds of experience which are decisively constitutive of our humanity. If  “The loupe cannot see dreams: they do not exist.” (p.46) But we know they do, that they are another door of perception, and we have to be on the alert for those places where the single vision wavers:

                The birds have proven more difficult,
                as they seem to exist but get both near and far.
                The loupe is still turning one way
                and then another to determine the whether-
                ness of birds.

                This takes some time, which we are grateful for,
                as until it is declared we will be free to wonder.

3.

 It is the figure of “the lost man” which catches the peculiar dilemmas and paradoxes of living virtually anywhere at the beginning of the 21^st century; but, equally it is the lost man who in recognizing his lostness asserts the possibility of frail, confused human beings disentangling  themselves from the disaster-producing, hyper-abstract systems that structure our relationships with each other and the earth. The lost man knows things in a way that the person with the loupe cannot know and his existence is impenetrable to the vision of the loupe: when the two meet in “our town”, the lost man seems drunk to the inhabitants, and when the person with the loupe is summoned,

                Who is he, we asked the person with the loupe.
                You assume he exists, the person with the loupe replied. First
                have him stick out his tongue. But inside
                the man’s mouth flapped an emptiness
                we waited to understand.
                There is nothing here, said the person with the loupe,
                I cannot work with this.

 The lost man, in fact, is a way out of the single vision, unassimilable to the terrible geometry of Ulro, which is why he is lost in the first place. Since I’ve been using Blakean terms (and here Blake’s figure of Los comes quickly to mind) it’s easy for me to conceive of the lost man as Boyden’s version of a process of imaginative restoration which could bring us to what Blake called “organiz’d innocence”, a mature, adult innocence forged in the fires of experience.  And it is a process—Boyden’s lost man doesn’t represent some facile opposite of the person with the loupe (though he is his “contrary”); just as the latter is a beginning state (flawed but useful), so the lost man, while achieving  a genuinely wider vision, has his own limitiations which need to be transcended too; transience and the ephemeral are problems for him.
 What does the lost man know? The lost man knows the truths about the world which are revealed in imagination. He knows there is a time for darkness unsullied by artificial light when imagination can provide its own illumination of a world more multiform and strange than most suspect. And

The lost man understands the problem with the body
is that it exists. He has seen
that though the body is our own, it can be removed from us.

When he can see his body, it is what he is reduced to.
When it disappears, he owns where it might arrive.
Trees sweep stars into little bundles.
Grasses rise impossibly from the burn.

His children had slept with a light on
so their bodies would stay where they left them.  (p.55-56)

  In the everyday world the lost man’s imaginative agility can be disquieting, uncanny, even prophetic, because the unconscious fantasies embedded in things and language are always present to him, needing interpretation.  In ‘The Lost Man Interprets A Code’ when the speaker’s husband drops a knife on his toe there has to be something more going on, it has to mean something:

                My husband’s toe, I say, is injured.
                The lost man nods anxiously, wants to play along, looks
                for a correlating signal to key the code by.
                My husband moans in the kitchen, pointing down. Ah--
                the lost man winks to let me know he’s got it:
                my husband is pointing down. Therefore,
                toe means whatever-is-under-the-floor.
                Bleeding has yet to be established.
                The lost man awaits the clue. (p.77)

  A lesser poet might have remained enamoured of her own smart psychological satire, but Boyden lets us fall through the floorboards when the poem takes a darker turn and we suddenly see, as the lost man in all of us sees, what really lies beneath the surface of our domestic discourse:

                We should have seen the onslaught of these times coming:
                when the guard patted down my three-year old
                at the airport; when the people in the break rooms
                of information extraction stopped discussing
                whether the sound this time was more like the scraping
                of a chicken or the detangling of a root;
                when the leaders couldn’t recall. (p. 78)

  In this stanza we find a vital understanding of our condition and we see how crucially that understanding  is dependent on a philosophy of language itself. Poetry sets itself in fierce opposition to any idea of language as merely the transmission and reception of information: that would be to imprison oneself in the small world of the person with the loupe, where everything is unproblematically what it is, all concepts are clear and distinct, and words operate like labels. And concomitant with this simplification of language is the simplification of the world, of ourselves, of our experiences, of the animals and plants, of things. Our similes and metaphors are doorways to our deepest understandings of the world; given the condition the world finds itself in right now it is distinctly possible we’re “on a walk that took a bad turn / onto a very long road.” (p.28)
 Many of these themes come together, or better, collide in what to me is the most brilliant poem in the book, ‘Which Particle The Particle’, where Boyden meditates on the tiny possibility that the Large Hadron Collider could produce “strangelets” which theoretically could convert all matter into strange matter. “A flipped switch and—poof—Oneness. Just like that.” (p.61) The sardonic humor around instant at-oneness which seems to be what many people want (“Otherwise the plastic Buddhas and grass-like mats wouldn’t be / selling so fast...” p.61) flashes darkly in this poem which nakedly puts on display and worries its way through the peculiar postmodern inflections we’ve given to death and love, fate and choice, technology and self. So many dominant narratives today conspire to dehumanize us, as though the contingency of existence is a new kind of secular original sin of which we will be purged by Botox and Supercolliders. Boyden says, wait. What’s that monitory whisper you hear in your daughter puzzling over death in a Dylan Thomas poem, in your father’s illness, in the cool language of scientists who just might convert the world to one big uniform strange lump? It’s the suspicion that what keeps us truly human is what we can’t calculate, the discrete “thisness” of our specific lives and everything in them. We might have a chance if we are able to allow things to be themselves, to change our relationship of control, to let them speak with their own specific eloquence. “Cousins”, Boyden writes in the book’s title poem, “is it possible / we have misunderstood the mud?” (p.27) I’d say it’s certain.

4.

  The Lost Man Leaves A Will is the book’s final poem. Our only genuinely moral choice in a broken historical situation where we can’t go on is precisely to go on. We need courage and will, we need to build a kind of difficult thinking which dwells in the place of our own undoing, and by dwelling there restores the connections we have cut. If there is to be a future that isn’t a plastic wasteland we have to live on the side of the leaves, the water, the deer, the very smallest, unconsidered things:

                To the worms, my thanks. I ask you to make me rich
                within yourselves: you stayed. While the earth
                was fleeing itself, I named you, and you answered
                to the place of my naming, and remain. (p.97)

 The poetry of The Declarable Future lives here.

© Ger Killeen

Keeping It Real:  Thoughts on John Yamrus
‘doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon’ (Epic Rites Press, 2010)
‘Can’t Stop Now’ (Epic Rites Press, 2011)

 There’s a strand in American writing that seems to combine a suspicion of an easy articulateness, a too easy intimacy, with a torrent of volubility. “Call me Ishmael”, the narrator of Moby Dick says curtly before launching into his wonderful flood of language; “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”: thus Holden Caulfield at the beginning of Catcher In the Rye; or take, even, a poem like Creely’s ‘For Love’ where the difficulty of writing the truth of something becomes the way into keeping going in the struggle to approach that truth:

              Yesterday I wanted to
          speak of it, that sense above
          the others to me
          important because all

         that I know derives
         from what it teaches me.
         Today, what is it that
         is finally so helpless,

         different, despairs of its own
         statement, wants to
         turn away, endlessly
         to turn away.

In John Yamrus’ poetry too, you often get a narrator who gets in your face with a terse statement about writing or life or death, who wants to give the culture at large something it needs, not what it wants, and who won’t allow either himself or his readers to evade the authentic claims of dailiness by escaping into the illusions of formalism. And yet, underneath the toughness, there is the unexpected lyricism of ordinary speech asserting its insights in anecdotes from talk , the conversations the poet has with others and with himself.
 Here is a poetry which is resolutely anti-cerebral, a kind of street-zen-writing, an attempt to keep practicing what Yamrus calls “this beautiful,/ monstrous thing”. He slaps you in the face, sometimes roughly, sometimes gently, like one of the old zen masters whose only goal is to wake you up the life that you’re living, right here, right now, a life that’s always full of humor, ugliness, exaltation, pettiness, stupidity, brilliance, dejection, good sex, bad sex, sickness, love and dogs.  In the following poem from doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon you find that world encapsulated in a funny and strangely wise vignette:

                        this morning

                        i was
                        nearly killed

                        by a
                        car

                        speeding through
                        the parking lot

                        at the
                        liquor store.

                        how

                        perfectly

                        fitting.
                       

  The self-deprecating humor here is typical of Yamrus, and in a world full of chance happenings for good and ill you either “play the hand/ you’re dealt”, or you’re in danger of becoming a self-important, unholy fool; as the poem ‘in the job interview’ from Can’t Stop Now puts it:

“they
 never really
 go away, do they?

 they’re always
 out there,

 doing
 their business
 behind their own
 crazy
 set
 of
 locked doors,
 desperately hoping
 the world will one day
 prove them
 right.”

The way I read Yamrus, even if the world will never prove you right in any ultimate sense, that’s no reason to quit, to retreat into cynicism. The act of writing poems, making art, making music  is, perhaps. all we have to keep chaos and old night at bay, however temporarily.  “the main thing is/ to keep it/ real.”  We simply don’t know our ends, but how we choose to go on really does matter;  this stunning poem from Can’t Stop Now  says as much and more:

            doing

something simple,
but making it
perfect,

can often be
a thing of
beauty.

today, i watered,
pruned and re-arranged
our potted plants,
 
and
then,
i thought
of

you.

 As a very public poet Yamrus, unsurprisingly, writes a good deal about poetry itself.  He acknowledges Bukowski as an influence, but it would be unfair to Yamrus to say that his work is derivative of Bukowski in any facile way. I think, actually, that what they have in common, at their best, is an ability to look at and listen to the commonplace and transfigure it; it remains commonplace but it’s allowed its own peculiar eloquence as each small everyday happening is verbally refracted through these two individuals. Yamrus, in fact, is generally sparer in his articulations than Bukowski, and in my opinion he shows a surer touch in most of his linebreaks than Buk. If, for example,  you examine the ‘this morning’ poem above, you’ll notice how the tone of the last three lines depends on using the linebreaks as slight pauses to give each word of the phrase equal weight, and modulate them towards humorous irony. Or take the lines I quoted from ‘in the job interview’--  there is genuine philosophical depth behind the various usages and positionings of “they”, and “they’re”, and look at the marvelous sets of multiple meanings Yamrus gets from “doing/their business”  and from “prove them” solely by where he chooses to break the lines. Yamrus knows what he’s doing “and,/ for some / strange reason,// it/ works”. 
  The other aspect of poetry he deals with is how other people respond to it, other poets, interviewers, and people who seem incapable of understanding its art. My favorite of these is the poem ‘he looked at me and’ from Can’t Stop Now where the poet/narrator is asked in a TV interview “in your writing/ don’t you even care/ about musicality?” He reacts better than I would have, actually, to this question “that didn’t even deserve an answer”, and he says
            there’s something
             good about being hated.

it’s as real as
rain.

 I’m interested in the verb “hated” because from Yamrus’ point of view it’s not overstatement. Many of the encounters he documents in his poems relate to people who seem to hate poetry, or at best can’t cope with its manifoldness and its anarchic energies, and take on the anyone-can-do-that attitude of defensive dismissal. Mainstream culture sneers at poetry as marginal (how many times have we heard that poetry is dead?), or tries to corral it safely inside the academy.  But poets like John Yamrus keep working, keep fighting, doing their cartwheels on the edge of the abyss of conformity. Can’t stop and won’t stop. Loving it that “right around the ninety minute mark/ the poetry reading/ got nuts”. Can’t stop and won’t stop. Keeping it real.

© Ger Killeen