Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five November-December 2024
The Exquisite Spell
A manifesto in sixty parts,
Guest editorial by Mark Tredinnick
What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices.”
—Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
1
Poetry is a solitary observance. An austere estate. A devotion. It is a clutch of flannel flowers rising up under ruined sheoaks in a fireground, after.
2
You make it like compline, a night prayer, and for the same reasons. It is a way of speaking the language in which the world speaks, coming true. It seems to remind the world how to go about its mysteries, and include us in them.
3
When a thing is entire and adequate and glamorous with its own integrity (when it makes you want to weep and laugh at once and live a life more worthy of that instance of the world)—a phrase of song, a smile, a sentence, a foal, a scarp, a creek, a vessel, a birdsong, a child, a look in an eye, a frost, a room—we call it a poem. It is a poem, that adumbration of the actual, and it is what “poetry” means; it is an instance of what we try to shape into a humane form, a small habitat, in a poem, and in such poems we affirm the poetry of all existence and contribute to it. We may even, in such poems (writing and reading them), participate in it, that other world (that republic of interconnected things, that ecology of signs and significance, that we neglect in the secondhand prose, the emaciated tropes, in the transactions that constitute most of our daily lives.
4.
Poetry is the language in which the world enacts its being, in which it speaks its mind and keeps its silence and inhabits itself, and knows itself and all of us good, or good enough for now.
5.
“With used furniture … makes a tree”: the poet’s magic trick, as Anne Sexton put it. This dark and moonly art. A trick takes some doing. It takes some craft. Some luck. But it happens. And if it didn’t, what would become of us, all our forests felled, all our furniture left out in the weather?
One takes old news, one’s life, one’s times, these leavings, and makes it a small new world. One takes language, in which one fills out forms and teaches class and scolds children and writes emails, and makes of it this humblest, noblest art: the art made of speech: the poem. From a whole life, you make a minute or two. Sometimes they stay. And sometimes house a reader’s life. A chaos made coherent and habitable.
6.
An old Egyptian belief: if you want an afterlife, if your death is to be survived, your life not lost, your name must continue to be uttered by the living. In Dante’s cosmology, too, all those in Purgatory not thoroughly condemned through all eternity (by their fatuousness, their self-aggrandizement, their meanness and hypocrisy and cruelty during life) were sustained in their hope of redemption, by prayers of intercession offered who by those remembered them among those still drawing breath on earth.
We say the names of those we’ve lost. So that they, if not their lives, continue. This is poetry’s work.
7.
In a poem, no matter what else it intends or speaks or who speaks it, a reader may hear her name said, as if now her life mattered and always had and will.
8.
That which is human within us, some would say divine, is remembered and acknowledged and invited back into its dignity in a poem.
9.
Poetry not only wakes the dead. More urgently, it wakes the living. But you have to give yourself to it, its forms and measures, which are not yours, but belong to poetry itself and to all the communities who have sung poetry and fashioned it and used it and depended on it for their social and private sanity from the dawning of human speech.
10.
Poetry, Robert Bringhurst said, frees language from writing. First there is speech, and then there are the discourses that grow up around governance and commerce and church and state and science and theory and all the rest of it. Which, in their various shortcomings, their addictions to control specificity and sometimes clarity, diminish speech and deprive us of its sexiness and holiness and lyricism. So we need poetry, and we always did, to transfigure writing into language again, restored to its wildness, its organic self, and us to ours in its presence.
11.
Poetry is a deep kind of speaking.
12.
Let’s never go forgetting the innate humanity of syntax. The glory of speech. Sense making. Voicing. Sure, let a poem be opaque like a gesture, oracular like a prayer, complex like a flavour. But let it not just think or exclaim or smash some icons. Let it speak. Let it be. And unless you also know how to dance, unless you know some jokes and how not to take yourself too seriously, neither lecture nor rail nor proclaim. (And always fly a bird into it.)
13.
Poetry is a radical clarity, like the operations and devices of the world.
14.
The other day I heard Stanley Kunitz say (given back to us by Instagram) that from the beginning it has fallen to poetry to tell the story of the soul’s adventures—its leavings and strayings, its draggings of feet and clickings of heels, its trials and delights and terrors—travelling through this earth. Had it not been for the poetry that humans began to write (long before they got sold on commercial fiction), we would not have known how living felt, how it went, what it meant. We may not have worked out how to do it well and feel it all the way down and learn to risk it and give thanks for the gift of it.
15.
To make a poem is to garden by night. The furrow, the harrow, the fallow, the compost, the humility of it. In darkness, you dig and plant and pull and prune. Mostly you turn soil and turn it again. Only sometimes is there moonlight. Always there is weeding. In which there are many lessons: what goes, what stays, what brings you out in welts.
16.
I had been weeding for hours. By day, but it might as well have been night, so thick were the words-out-of-place, so random the commas, so rarely had I looked from the screen or recalled the actual earth. Editing: holy work, but hard. Especially taxing when it’s someone else’s work you’re tending—into a greater likeness of itself. So, when I heard an email land, I stopped weeding and looked.
A note to thank me for some teaching, and to say that the poet had fallen in love with one of the forms we’d studied, and by exploring it, was fathoming new aspects of their voice. At that, I looked up, glad, and saw how an early October afternoon was ending outside. A swill of grandeur, a high tide of amber light. A luxuriance of being. A moment in which all the meaning there is seems to show up, notwithstanding all that’s ill. The old world that had grown weary was in love again, and its whole life ahead of it. But also sad with every life lost and every hope still born.
17.
Just after six, see how the light gives itself up to the trees—
Chinese tallows, greening toward the end of the year. See how
It ambers my neighbour’s high gable. And there, like sorrow, ends.
18.
I had the sijo in a few minutes, a rare event; I sent it as an email to my student. Poetry is both intimate and ultimate. From one’s self, but not merely about oneself. A choir, not a solo.
19.
“Life is a spell so exquisite,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that everything conspires to break it.”
20.
In a moment of correspondence such as mine last Sunday afternoon (the email, the gratitude, the form, the light, the poem, which came in its three sets of fifteen syllables, and whatnot, almost as a given thing), life’s spell, dangerous and gorgeous and eternal, was made manifest, you might say. Eternity surfaced. A moment later, of course, the spell broke, the moment crashed. My father, 93, sat in the lounge room near my study and turned on the TV to watch, for perhaps the twenty-seventh time, an episode of Death in Paradise, an experience only to be had, of course, at full volume.
Many things conspire thus, sometimes fatally, against the poetry of living: the cost of living, marking, business activity statements, passwords, the whining of a dog, commercial radio, commercial fiction, spreadsheets, AI, the latest news from Lebanon.
21.
Poetry recasts the exquisite spell. (Emily doesn’t say it, but means it.) It has that power: to wake the world to us again a while, or us to the world. To exhume the river, to pool the frequencies of the whole and actual world, into ponds of encounter and articulation, and set at least one life to rights.
22.
“Every good poem begins in language awake to its connections,” Jane Hirshfield writes.
23.
Our work is to make ourselves instruments, divining rods, say, apt to receive such language, itself awake to worlds our minds are most often too crowded with concepts and complaints, to apprehend. You have to dismiss a lot of common-place, flat and accidental language to make space for the kind of wide-awake words capable of bearing witness to life and spelling it again for others.
24.
“In significant ways, meaning is prior to language, and extends beyond it—but if language is to bear its trace, the choice of words must be exact.” (Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, 190)
25.
That exactness is not just a lack of ambiguity—the fit, if you like, between the word and the meaning. The fit we’re talking about in poetry is that the shape and feel of the gesture enacted in the language continues and participates in the felt sense of whatever it is that the poetic phrase alludes to. The poem is always a “gesture” (Jan Zwicky favours gesture—as in sketch or dance or movement—for poetry’s relationship with its subject matter) toward the lifeworld of the episode the poem relates to. An apt and humble enactment in which the essence of the moment itself is implied or adumbrated in the form and sound of the poem.
26.
The adequacy of poetic language, its achievement, has a lot to do with how its music makes a rhyme with the thing itself. Bears traces of that moment or person or thing or thought. Makes an impression of it, like a translation, of how it went and felt.
27.
The way the frequencies of forms and events and thoughts that comprise a moment, an instance of world vibrated—so the language in the poem vibrates. And then the reader.
28.
“Language rooted in music is the linguistic medium in which the images of lyric thought are at home.” (Jan Zwicky, 216)
29.
“Lyric meaning is not a form of labelling. Nor does it ‘capture’ the world. No speech holds the world within it. To think of language as though it did would be like mistaking a window for a mirror; or, better, for Alice’s looking glass.” (Jan Zwicky, 221)
30.
Think of a poem as a window, then, because of which, alone, some presence in the world, the felt sense of one moment of being, is able (almost) to reach you.
31.
“For the most part, language obscures the world. In a profound image, language is transparent to the presence of (some part of) the world.” (Jan Zwicky, 221)
32.
A poem overhears the music of the intelligence of things. Of moments of the world.
There is a realm, an order, of being—open, calm, electric, wide, old, limpid—one sometimes enters. In contemplation, is sport, in love, in the wild, in reading, in writing. Some speak of flow state. I think of it as the poetry of things. Writing poetry depends upon your finding your way, through the trowel-work of the mind and fingers gardening in the dark, back into it, the poetry place, down into the lyric frequencies of the real.
With luck, a poem, a lyric piece, will bring that state on for a reader: “a fast forgiveness of weather,” as I put it in “Late Winter Light, One Sunday,” “in which every name is said, and all time begun again.” It may be what Hopkins meant by “the dearest sweetness deep down things.” Some speak of ecstasy, from ex stasis, a standing beyond oneself. But it feels to me more like a sudden (but eternal) a dwelling much deeper in.
33.
This may be where Emily Dickinson was going with her “spell so exquisite.”
34.
Perhaps what we call the real is comprised of infinitely complex sets of frequencies, vibrations of matter and consciousness. And some of the frequencies at which life plays are lyric. They play all the time, but generally deeper than awareness the way most of a river runs well underneath the river, under its bed. Music recollects these frequencies. Love, at its lonely offices, bundles them and gives them form. So, too, poetry. More humbly, more vitally, since its art is speech and we are the mammals who live in language.
35.
“The virtue of precision is not just that it allows greater accuracy, but that it requires self-discipline. True self-discipline is a form of homage to what is not self.” Jan Zwicky (213)
36.
In piece in the New Yorker some years back, a reflection on the history of psychiatry and the uses of the talking cure, Jerome Groopman, who holds a chair in medicine at Harvard and writes on neuroscience for general readers, wrote this: “Words can alter, for better or worse, the chemical transmitters and circuits of our brain, just as drugs or electroconvulsive therapy can.”
36.
In piece in the New Yorker some years back, a reflection on the history of psychiatry and the uses of the talking cure, Jerome Groopman, who holds a chair in medicine at Harvard and writes on neuroscience for general readers, wrote this: “Words can alter, for better or worse, the chemical transmitters and circuits of our brain, just as drugs or electroconvulsive therapy can.”
37.
So, it matters how we speak and write. And what matters is not what we choose to write about, so much as how. To write lyrically is to be concerned, in one’s turns of phrase, one’s images and rhythms and tone, to do justice to the lived experience one records and to work an alteration on the circuits of one’s reader’s brains that is more likely to heal than to harm. More likely to do justice than to do violence. Harm happens when we use language that is inhumane, mechanical, ugly, abstracted, colonising. The poet who would make a difference might best consider the kind of change they would like to work on those chemical transmitters, on the molecules of self, in any given reader’s body. The frequencies of complaint and outrage are unlikely to work the lasting change, the deepening or awareness, the enlargement of self, poetry is for.
38.
The change poetry makes is not social or political. It is more important than that, and prior to that and beyond it. The change it works it works on our molecules, on how it is we feel ourselves alive. All social change is likely to depend on the change that happens to who we are, how we know ourselves and what we feel connected with. Social revolutions begin with molecular change. Lyric poetry is an agent of such change. Poetry that waves banners is likely to be an inadequate form of protest and is doomed to contribute nothing much more than a rush to the remaking of anyone who ever reads it.
39.
“Life’s infinite variations are essential to our life:” Wittgenstein. Poetry is a way, not ever to hope to capture some of “life’s infinite variations,” of form and way and character and cadence, but to gesture toward them, to attend to them, and so enrich and revivify human life—one’s own, the lives of all who ever read you, the lives of the infinite variations of life toward which your poem leans and bows. To attend lyrically to any life is to enliven all life, in life’s infinite range of autonomies of being, each implicated in each other.
40.
William James was a pioneer of psychology, back when it had not been colonised by neuroscience and was less to do with the brain and more to do with the mind (even the soul), and the (smarter, older) brother of Henry James. James proposes somewhere that we think too narrowly of the Self if we think of it atomically, in its solitude. We are not finished, Barry Lopez once wrote, at the skin. Think of one’s being as a constellation, James suggested, of all that one is attached to. Think of the Self as a network of connection, all the trees in the forest, all the lives at work somewhere and their pattern of inter-relationship, an ecology of affection (and trouble and desire and trauma and grief and hope).
41.
One is not a star; one is a constellation—the stars and the patterns of connection discernible among them. Write that. Write as that. For that. The more we discover about consciousness and identity, the less like the contents of the ego or the head Self appears to be. So, who we are is where we are, and how we love and whom, and whom we are touched by. And how we suffer when we fall into depression is radically out of contact with that small universe of things and thoughts and places and birds and books and cousins and friends and others and tunes that we always knew, and inhabited, as (the country of) our self.
42.
“I am what is around me,” wrote Wallace Stevens. “These are merely instances.”
43.
One Sunday late in autumn, I walk the quarry track in rain.
I’m free, for the most part, and well past the middle of my years.
Listen: each song in the wood sings the same bird. Each life, all lives.
44.
“To render precisely is to engage in a form of meditation.” (Jan Zwicky, 213)
45.
To pay close and tender attention is to sometimes divine—to join and promote—the lyric frequencies at which the actual world (or that part of it which is the country of oneself, or a moment of that world) plays, the regenerative frequencies of deep existence. And to join those frequencies in lyric poetry is to acknowledge and share and perpetuate them. And all of us. Who depend on them.
46.
We think too much in fences, and we think too little in fields.
Across the river in turmeric light, horses graze summer
Pasture. Where it ends, the Divide picks up. On the wind, two hawks.
47.
All morning before I sat to write this, I was sad, for no reason I could name. Making notes, answering emails, making coffee, walking the dogs, apologising to others for their high spirits, which can look like ill-will and poor training, unless you know my dogs, and in my impatience at the checkout, my soul dragged my feet. The whole morning in its heavy robes was sad. Later at my desk, my friend texted with news that Barbara Blackman, whom we both had known and loved, had died overnight. Sometimes you grieve before you know why; we Are, in fact, more than we think we are; we are larger; we are plural; we are manifold. A good poem always seems to me to know that and to grieve like that—ahead of all parting, as Rilke put it, aware that all this passes, and that the passing makes room for the living on, the starting over, which a poem also sings. And that, though one part has passed, the rest remains. And the rest implies and perpetuates the part that is lost.
48.
Or something like that. Because no poem, no lyric gesture, should ever be too sure.
49.
What works best in poetic language is a clarity not too simple, and a simplicity not too clear. Just don’t ever forget this is speech you are attempting. If it is no longer organic, if it falls out with the syntax native to speech, and if it utters too much platitude and piety and pomp, too much plastic abstraction, it will fail to thrive, it will fall well short of the country it ought to hope to steward, the humanity it ought to hope to nourish.
50.
Life is short and holy; don’t waste it on revenge and cant. Conserve with your words the wildness and vivid particularity of life as it is embodied in each of us and any of us equally. As it shows up vividly grief and delight and loss and the rush of an escapee gelding along the lane, in flannel flowers in a vase, in a dirty pink supermoon, in the hummingbird hover of the black shouldered kite, its plunge.
51.
Even in retrospect, there is no arc. There is no storyline. Except in glaze of sentiment, life is not a narrative. Life runs scene-by-scene, and most of it falls between the frames. Poetry knows this, loves this, respects this, and refuses the fallacies and false pretenses of narrative. The very idea of arc.
52.
Most of the river flows underground. Nowhere is this more true than on this dry continent. The natural state of most Australian waterways at most times is a chain of ponds. So it is with a life. There is not love, I have heard it said; there are only acts of love. The rest is silence and imagination, memory and desire, hope and grief. What we call a life is an irregular succession of moments, ponds, and tracts of indeterminate space between. It is what the ponds imply.
53.
The lyric runs the way the rivers run, that true lives go: intermittent, episodic, discontinuous. Constellated. Mythic. It is not the years that last; it is the moments. Life is phrases, lines, spaces, lines, stanzas, cantos. Life does not run in plotlines. It is made of pieces. And poetry has for aeons been how we say them, and say that.
54.
And most of what’s important is small: a touch, a vase, a name, a syllable, a table, the whipbird’s call and the koel’s response, the scent of daylight’s first loaf, a phone call late, ice on glazing the bird bath at six.
55.
“All that’s important is the ordinary things,” says Robert Gray’s speaker in his great early poem “To the Master, Dogen Zenji.” “Things as they are are what is mystical,” he writes in a late poem “Testimony.” “Those who search deepest are returned to life.”
56.
“We are given the surface again, but with renewed awe.” Robert Gray again in “Testimony.” This may be the lyric work of poetry: to return us to self and earth, to know that it is, no matter how flawed, enough, and to ask us perhaps to perpetuate that which makes living good and returns others to the habitable, deep, and adequate surface of the things in themselves, our own selves among them.
57.
Robert Gray is on my mind because I have loved his work all my writing life, and his own life is ceasing to be very habitable these days. “We wear down,” writes Atul Gawande, “until we can’t wear down anymore.”
58.
So that Robert, worn down by Parkinson’s, might know that his life of letters has mattered (an instance of the essential work lyric poetry performs), we made a book for him: Bright Crockery Days: The Poetry of Robert Gray (5 Islands Press). We launched it in Sydney on 28 September, without him. But he knows what we’ve done, and that feels right. It is right that we remember our elders; it is right that we don’t trash the past, including the poetries of the past, but find in it, as Robert did, what is wiser than we may know and worth carrying on, and adapting, into the hard days ahead.
59.
Some words I wrote at the end of the book for Robert might do to land these thoughts, this loose lyric manifesto.
60.
“Poetry, which pays for so little, costs so much. But ah, how richly it yields, how much good work it does—for so long and so many. It deepens and sharpens the experience of being alive on the earth a while; it even seems to raise the earth back up from the dead. So, it is with the poetry of Robert Gray, which he has dedicated his life to and found delight in—but no guarantee of health or wealth of fame. His work has improved all our lives, asking us to ask more of them (our lives) and find more resonance in our days, and it leaves the world, itself, more learned, more in tune, somehow, with itself.”
© Mark Tredinnick
Mark Tredinnick, the author of twenty-five celebrated works of poetry and prose, is the author, most recently, of House of Thieves, One Hundred Poems. His books on the writing craft have touched the lives and works of many. He runs What the Light Tells, an online poetry masterclass, and teaches at the University of Sydney. His edited collection of essays for Robert Gray, Bright Crockery Days, is just out from 5 Islands Press, whose managing editor he is. Mark lives and works southwest of Sydney on Gundungurra Country.
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