Useful Things: Poetry

Brian Gard

Deer Drink the Moon collects the work of thirty-three Oregon poets, and is edited by well-known Oregon freelance writer Liz Nakazawa. Following her own vision, she organized the poems thematically into seven of the state's eco-regions - not by a poet's residence but by a poem's reference. The entrepreneurial and student-run Ooligan Press of Portland State University published the anthology.

This is a book worthy of support for a number of good reasons: to read talented Oregon poets, to further one's interest in things environmental, and to support an innovative teaching program. As it happens, I suggest that you buy it simply to read some good and useful poems.

As an organizing principle for an anthology of poetry, location is as good as any other and, since the location is Oregon, better than most for Oregon readers and readers interested in Oregon. some, at least in Oregon. The Oregon Economic and Community Development Department could probably make it a best-seller by including it among its Brand Oregon promotional lures . Given the sad state of sales of books of poetry, this might only take the purchase of a few hundred copies by the Department . We have come a long way from the time William Empson refers to in Seven Types of Ambiguity : "when Tennyson retired to his study after breakfast to get on with the Idylls there had to be a hush in the house because every middle-class household would expect to buy his next publication ."

More seriously, Nakazawa's vision sidesteps some of the problems associated with contemporary poetry by replacing the dogma of poetry with the love of place. For that reason, I would have preferred a longer introduction. Ms. Nakazawa sets these poems in a context of place. She does not set them on a pedestal; they are not held carefully and brought out from the special drawer, things too precious to use. Rather, in her too brief preface, one feels she would be happiest to have people read these out of love for the marvels of Oregon's landscape rather than out of love for the marvels of poetry.

Most poets use place as a device to travel to places less easily located on a map than the seven eco-regions in this volume. . One of my favorite Oregon poets, Judith Barrington, asks us with casual alliteration to:

Think of your life as a beach -

a wide, smooth-sanded Oregon beach

with the sea on your left as you walk north

and on your right a range of dunes

changing outlines from year to year.

It's a deceptive beginning to a poem about death and what comes afterward, including hope.

In Harney County "The fence line is down" (Ellen Waterston); in the Northern Basin a "starving creek chants" (Danae Yurgel); and in the Klamath Mountains "are the lost swallows of summer" (Steve Dieffenbacher).

"Two Garden Snails" by Erik Muller reminds me of the rose-beetle man in Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals , who, I am sure, would understand how "The rebegun,/ununderstood/dream comes true/in these two snails."

It is formality that makes a poem a poem. Free verse done properly is not free, but formal, just with a formality that cannot be repeated in any other poem. Rob Whitbeck's "Communion Before Rain" demonstrates, as in its last stanza:

Like the windbeaten trees of the canyon

waxing on the downwind side,

we stay downwind

of time. We don't have much,

but we have a purpose.

Out under the fierce sun

there is hay to move

before rain.

A wonderful Oregon poet, amazingly left out of Deer Drink the Moon, calls herself a writer, not a poet. She does not share my view of poetry: that it has become hostage to an elitist and professional set of academic conventions, which, as Dana Gioia says in Can Poetry Matter?, "stand between the art and its audience." I am persuaded that her reticence to call herself a poet, her preference for the elegant restraint of 'writer,' reflects underlying agreement with me. Of course I would think this, she would say.

Contemporary poetry seems an awfully sexist business if one believes its defenders, who publish articles in the professional journals about the importance of poetry and poets. According to critics Male poets are always "grappling," usually with one demon or another, and they are always courageous, their pen and paper the equivalent of a Prince Valiant shield and sword. It is all very Miltonic. Female poets, on the other hand, are always delving into the "mysteries of life," as if their ability to combine sperm and egg is somehow automatically replicated on a the poetic page shrouded in the mists of Avalon.

Gioia refers to the paradox that "as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined." And, as poetry's real influence ebbs, its defenders exaggerate its importance. For example, and this is a mild and harmless one so as not to be accused of exaggeration myself, Mary Oliver in her otherwise wise otherwise rational guide to poetry, A Poetry Handbook , ends her book as follows: "For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed." Actually, no, indeed. Forgive her the hyperbole - after all, these are the concluding sentences of her book. But poems are in fact just words, and I am suspicious that even poets would prefer real rope to a scrap of poem fluttering down to the depths to which they have fallen. The argument that poetry is something special has done nothing but drive readers away.

We have made poetry into the black dress shoes a man keeps stored away to wear with a tuxedo to events he would prefer not to go to because they require a tuxedo and uncreased, uncomfortable black shoes. I would rather poetry be more like the tissue you stuff in your pocket on the way out the door in Spring in case a bit of pollen drifts by. The tissue is used every day and thrown away without a thought. The tuxedo shoes are valued highly but used hardly at all.

I prefer to think of poems as simple useful things: a spade in the shed, an appliance in the kitchen, a name on the gravestone -- things I need to get through the day.

A woman came up to a poet after a reading, tears welling up in suddenly bold eyes. I overheard her. She recited two lines from a poem he had read and said they reminded her of her sister, who had recently passed away. Now I was there; I know there was nothing in those lines about a sister or a death or any combination thereof. It is not bread that poetry is. And it diminishes poetry to make that claim. In Proofs & Theories , the wonderful poet Louise Gluck says that the desire to make art "produces an ongoing experience of longing.Always there seems something ahead.To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it." She writes of the poet but it is true of the reader as well. As with the woman who mourns her sister, when writer and reader come together, without the interference of dogma or academy, the poem is complete and serves its purpose anew.

Buy this book. Read these poems. Start with your favorite eco-region and travel the state throughout the summer. The pure passion of Ms. Nakazawa's editorial vision, perhaps encouraged by the still clearheaded students of Ooligan Press, has resulted

The combination of Ms. Nakazawa with her Oregon- organizing principle and the student-led Ooligan Press has resulted in a refreshing collection of useful things.