I’ve been spending time with David Baker’s Midwest Eclogue and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard this past week. Both are books I’ve dipped into before, but wanted to spend more time with for my “Poetry of Place” independent study.
BPK is an old favorite of mine, I read her first book, To the Place of Trumpets, some years ago, and immediately connected to her memories of a religious upbringing, and what it feels like to want to walk away from certain aspects of that (can’t remember the name of the poem where the bad angels – or was it saints? – walk the speaker from the church, but it’s a great one). I’ve also read Song and think that its title poem “Song,” as well as poems like “Dead Doe,” and “Three Cows and the Moon” are some of the most hauntingly gorgeous stuff out there. I’m especially haunted by the song the dead goat head sings – “The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call. / Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song / Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.” Song was influencing my work heavily a couple years ago. The almost mythical meditations on gardens and fields gave me a way to explore the rural landscape of my early childhood, which feels almost more mythical than real to me at this point. BPK also made my lines and sentences much longer, more winding, for awhile. Returning to Orchard now, her most recent book, I’m still blown away by her ability for such dense meditation, for sinking so completely into the myth-life of a place but still bringing in fragments from her life. “Black Swan” is especially strong in this regard in the way it works with the personal myth of finding her son beneath the black wings of a swan and putting him into her belly. I’m realizing, though, that my line has changed a lot since my heavily BPK influenced poems, as has my subject matter – the densely meditative/personal myth poems of my early life (and ancestors) are not where I’m going right now.
David Baker’s Midwest Eclogue is also a book I’ve spent some time with in the past, and without having fully realized this before, I think it’s quite important to the way I’m writing right now. I find it interesting that Baker dedicates one of my favorite poems of the book to Linda Gregerson (Baker’s “Late Pastoral”) as I have consciously recognized her as an influence lately. Where Gregerson’s latest book, Magnetic North, can be exceptionally intellectual, Baker’s Eclogue seems more along the lines that I’m aiming my poems. I like that the personal narrative is often quite clear in the poems, even while Baker draws from historical figures and text, scientific knowledge etc. After reading Orchard, I’m also feeling more at home with the way Baker lets more air into his lines – some of the shorter lines and nonce forms actually remind me of Marianne Moore, and they’re close to what I’m working with now. While Baker is not anchored to place in a way that disallows leaps or other areas of focus, I also relate to the current day “placement” of his Midwestern semi-suburbia, semi-rural sensibility, where the deer come and go at the edge of our landscape… and we appreciate them even while feeling a bit like interlopers.
Both Orchard and Eclogue are incredible books, and I’ve enjoyed taking another look at them.
Baker, David. Midwest Eclogue. NY: Norton, 2005.
Kelly, Brigit Pegeen. The Orchard. Rochester, NY: Boa, 2004.
- – -. Song. Rochester, NY: Boa, 1995.
1 Comment
May 13, 2008 at 11:36 am
Since you’re reading poets of place, I’d suggest Philip Levine and Jim Daniels, both of whom write about Detroit. I love Daniels’ poem “Mapping It Out, Warren, Michigan” from his book Night with Drive-By Shooting Stars (2002). It makes me think of every rural, Midwestern town since NAFTA.