"Bullied by words the poet struggles to escape. He picks up a stone and is
silent.[..] Until the next seizure. When he becomes so word-stoned that
hundreds of butterflies leap out of his mouth and he pins them all into his
notebook." When Harriet Zinnes (a long-time member of poetryetc) wrote these
words in her book of prose poetry *Entropisms* (1978) she was in the full
bloom of her poetic career - she had published a first big collection in
1966 (*An Eye For An I*), then *I Wanted To See Something Flying* (1976),
*My, Haven't The Flowers Been* (1995) and another *Drawing On The Wall*
(2002) - which also reprised in a different order the poems in the wonderful
chapbook *Plunge* (2001) issued by Randolph Healey's Wild Honey Press, my
personal introduction to her work and the volume I take off the shelf most
often when I wish to dive into her poems again, then *Whither Nonstopping*
(2005), in which her line is stripped down, with an almost sibylline note.
Her poetry is always marked by observation of the paths & vagaries of
perception, wit or quizzical mockery, inconsolable curiosity, elegy - as in
"Viewer" (from DOTW): "Ah, great bird/ Staring from a tablet/ In ivory /
Worked by a Byzantine craftsman. // Still, not even the eye in movement./ A
center, a shadow along the lines of stone,/ That circular stoppage without
time. // In time, now, as you, also silent, / Stare with two eyes/ So soon
to be closed." Impossible not to think of Goethe's "Warte nur, balde/ Ruhest
du auch" here - and as with Goethe, the sound and the sense are inextricably
fused. (I tried once to translate a few of her poems into German - she hated
it, "that doesn't sound like me" she said.) Always the stress on (and in)
the Now - and the feeling for absence or limitation, the deferral of
finality. In her early mid-60s poem "Shoebox" she was already writing "Here
I am/ an old woman/ living in a shoe/ my heartbeat,and all my toes/ and that
sunk-in feeling through and through", but in the very next poem *Cybele* she
calls out "(All the old curses)/ The infant waxeth green/Tell us tell us
tell us." That old woman, that green infant - the scope and riches of whose
work I cannot begin to adumbrate in a brief e-mail - is now, today, ninety
(90) years young. I don't know if she is/will be reading these words any
time soon, but I wish her many happy, green returns of the heartbeat we hear
in her poems, those "stones" of which she wrote a week or two ago "Even the
stone I pick up/ holds the burden of ages." - Tell us, Harriet, tell us,
with your Ahs and Ohs.
Martin
P.S. A new volume is coming out any day now - *LIGHT LIGHT OR THE CURVATURE
OF THE EARTH*
Wenn die ganze Zivilisation zum Teufel ginge - ich würde es nicht bedauern;
nur um die Musik tät' es mir leid.
Leo Tolstoy
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