Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Over the Mountains and Waters, short essay and a poem by Jordan Smith.
Over the Mountains and Waters
Last month, a friend of almost four decades—twenty years as colleagues sharing an office suite, twenty separated by the Atlantic, with too-brief reunions in the happily off-rhyming Galway and Schenectady—sent me his takes on classic Chinese poems. A literary biographer and critic, he doesn’t identify as a poet, still less as a translator; like Robert Lowell’s Imitations, his poems are versions, derived from other translations that are somehow unsatisfactory, at least when compared to the writer’s more personal idea of what the poems could be.
That’s what I look for as a reader or at least what I hope to find. Not the poem as it is, but what I can make of the way the writer’s sense of possibility interacts with my own. The poem is not the repository of encoded meaning as much as it is a check on the possibilities of significance I can bring to it, which is the sum of my knowledge and experiences refracted through the words of the poem. It engages my qualities of mind while adding its own. In this way it is like “the world, this shadow or other me,” which, as Emerson wrote, “lies wide around.” In this way it is like friendship.
There’s an old word for this, sensibility, the sum of what any of us brings to bear on what bears on us, a style of resistance and invitation, perhaps more visible to others than recognizable to ourselves. The reader becomes the book, as Stevens wrote, and the book also becomes the reader. If this sort of interchange isn’t all that makes literature and friendship possible, it is what makes them revelatory. And to encounter a friend’s particularity of mind in a poem, concentrated as poems should be, and informed by absence as much as by memory, is to balance recollection with the elisions of the present. I don’t need a poet’s construction, or really any words at all, to show what’s there. But to show what’s not?
Here’s an opening stanza, after Liu Yu, from my friend’s McGregor Bay sequence
At the lakeside, I pass the day in tranquillity.
The mirage of ambition lifts. I see what’s around,
Mind empty. I am getting old. The days return
When I first came here—left the car behind,
And set out by boat through the islands.
This is at once familiar and not. I’ve spent days by lakes, but as they involved the pleasures and distractions of family, I never had a day simply to pass; there were always things to be done or avoided. (Later in this poem, it turns out that a son and a grandson are along on the trip, but somewhere out on the water where they emerge only as possibilities rather than interruptions.) And I’ve known the mirage of ambition, but I haven’t known it to lift, not fully. Nor, aware of how hard my friend has worked, and how difficult the subjects he has tackled and how he has continued despite the sometimes fierce responses his writing has provoked, am I sure that he has. But the metaphor–ambition rising like the mist, to reveal the waters, islands, shores of a presence minding its own business, which is also ours, and also no business at all, not Emerson’s shadow-self but everything that projection is not–is so apt as to be believable, if not as illumination than as the desire for it.
It’s no easier to be sure that the speaker’s mind is empty (there are words in it, after all) or whether that emptiness is enlightenment or the drifting of age. But an old mind is no more likely to be empty than to be full, even sinewy, either with experience or with resistance to it. (“Sinewy” is a word I thought I remembered from Gary Snyder’s tribute to old minds in “The Sweat.” It isn’t there—“tough” is Snyder’s choice—but when I reread the poem, I still imagine it, and now both words and Snyder’s poem are part of my gloss on my friend’s rendering.) And as the poem continues, more and more contents impinge on its consciousness: a story of origins that echoes the continent’s European exploration, and in the next stanza, an island that reminds the speaker of his absent wife’s sleeping profile; further along there will be memories of academic strife, a reference to a hip replacement, the search for a book and a working pen, until finally the poem comes to rest in the gaze of a turtle “looking back at me.”
As I shift between what the poem says and what I think it wants, my reading self moves between what I know of the Chinese poetic tradition (not nearly as much as I should, given how important it was to the generation of poets who were my models), what I remember of what those American poets made of what they found in the Chinese originals, what I recall of my friend’s stories of his time teaching in China before we met, our conversations about the Tao when we both taught it to first year students at a small college in upstate New York, his descriptions of the cabin he purchased in McGregor Bay, the woman he met and married in Galway, and, before that, the son running around the living room with his sister in Glenville, his emails about the near-crippling pain that led to his surgery. If I want to go further into this valley of associations, I can, but by then I’ll have gone well off the rails that the poem has laid down.
I like the opening of Kris Kristofferson’s “Love Is the Last Thing to Go”: “The angels were singing a sad country song. It sounded like something of yours.” What’s moving is the recognition of a singular sensibility informed by a shared tradition. But you might as well substitute experience for tradition, since that’s what a tradition (the ballads, the three-chord country song, the sonnet) encodes and creates at once. When I hear Kristofferson’s song, I think of my poet friends whose voices I believe I would know anywhere. We’ve been sending poems and letters back and forth, over the mountains and waters (the phrase is from Carolyn Kizer’s epistolary poem to Robert Creeley, “Amusing Our Daughters,” which also cites a Chinese original) for a long time, each poem a presence, each poem a stay against absence:
Taking leave of Wang Wei
I’ve put it off more than one day.
Now I really must go.
The journey would be a pretty one,
Old friend, if it didn’t mean goodbye.
The rulers of our time were not our sort,
Even the schoolroom got strange
In the end.
I must turn for home,
I will say no more. I will close
The garden gate behind me as I go.
(after Meng Haoran)
It’s the presence I remember and the absence that I recognize, even as I shy away from it, the possibility of the mind at last truly empty, the gate closed. It’s the poem that is the gate left, with gratitude, a little ajar.
The World’s Worst Taoist
Give up learning and put an end to your troubles…
He kept a copy under the driver’s seat,
So he could pull it out and read a verse
When he was stuck in the bottlenecked
Traffic on the Twin Bridges where Rt 87
Crossed the Mohawk, and even after
He figured out the work-around (Rt 9
And then a left just before the county
Landfill and then along Cohoes Falls
And the abandoned hydroelectric plant,
And down the hill past the textile mills,
Gutted out for condos coming someday,
And behind it the brick tenements
Where the workers lived) he still read a line
Or two before he even left the driveway,
Maybe just the first (The Tao that can
Be told is not the eternal Tao), enough
To keep his mind in check when the words
He dealt with all day seemed to supplant
Any world he knew, and once, curious,
He drove behind them mill to an alley
Of rowhouses, expecting the usual
Pre-gentrification emptiness, but surrounded
By kids on bicycles (sturdy, Pound said,
Unkillable) who clearly wanted him
The fuck out of there in his SUV, he
Pulled around the block past
The gangway to the loading ramp
Where he’d stopped once, years ago,
To photograph the brickwork, and
As he accelerated down Mohawk Avenue
Towards the interstate, remembered
The reassuring weight of that old Pentax
Slung from his neck, as if it were enough
To record the world’s attritions, and
Never realize that you moved through
Them as they moved through you.
© Jordan Smith
Jordan Smith is the author of eight full-length books of poems, most recently Little Black Train, winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Prize and Clare’s Empire, a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare from The Hydroelectric Press, as well as several chapbooks, including Cold Night, Long Dog from Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press. The recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations, he is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.