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Subject:

Re: St. Teresa, sheep, and New Jersey nature poems?

From:

Rebecca Seiferle <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Tue, 25 Nov 2003 16:15:33 -0700

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (128 lines)

Yes, I think so too that "merely the facts" can strike the reader
as ironic, without any sense of irony being necessarily cultivated.

I don't know if "whatever we look at instantly converts to metaphor,"
perhaps this 'we' of the list. I was just thinking of my students so perplexed
by metaphor, how in reading To the Lighthouse, they have difficulty
comprehending how when Lily asks Andrew what his father's books
are about, he says "subject and object and the nature of reality" and
then when she says oh goodness, what is that, he says "think of
a table when you're not there." So of course, being an artist, she does,
envisioning the table, a table, in the branches of a pear tree. If I say
"oh that's a metaphor," to explain, it explains nothing! It has made me
wonder more than once if thinking metaphorically is a vanishing state
of mind.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Nov 25, 2003 11:42 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: St. Teresa, sheep, and New Jersey nature poems?

The issue, I think, is to remember that the landscape includes people and
their waste, historical and otherwise, which I guess is what you're saying.

Whatever we look at instantly converts to metaphor, but it's possible to
resist for the sake of understanding what we in fact live with--are a part
of--and to an extent see without symbolic content. Seen objectively, to the
extent possible, and to move in the direction of further noticing one's
unconscious interventions. All of which are also part of the landscape, but
only part of it.

So the irony that intrudes can approach becoming merely the facts on the
ground, which may in fact strike the reader as ironic.

Deer have always been creatures of field as well as forest--the field is
more dangerous but has better fodder. The overabundance of deer  (there are
more deer in New Jersey now than there were in the 18th century) and their
seasons of starvation have less to do with habitat destruction than with
the elimination of predators other than man and the sentimental limitations
placed on human predation (of course there have to be limits, but the ones
in place have little to do with reality).

Black bear herds is a terrifying image. Fortunately they're solitary
creatures, with territories in the northeast of a half to a square mile.
They're also more abundant than they've been since the eighteenth century.

Mark


>Your earlier note made me think of something it's easy for me to forget
>because of the familiarity factor. I live directly across the street
>from the Atlantic Ocean. Theoretically, I could write sea sonnets and
>revisions of Masefield's "Sea Fever." Shoot me now. Maybe some
>neo-Victorian reflections called "Sea Bright Beach" addressed to an
>invisible woman by my side (yes, I'm delusional but not that bad yet).
>Sorry, but Anthony Hecht ruined "Dover Beach" for me years ago by
>laughing at it. Yeah, right. Some of my personal associations with the
>ocean are of getting sun poisoning on the beach in Queens when I was a
>kid, of sport fishermen parking their conversion vans in No Parking
>zones across the street next to our house ("Police have been called"),
>and of our summer day-trippers who leave empty bottles, dog waste, used
>condoms (amor vincit omnia?), and baby diapers all over the sand. New
>Jersey beaches, recall, are the place where New York City hospital waste
>used to wash ashore: the contents included blood bags--God knows what
>the blood contained--and hypodermic syringes.
>It would be interesting to be able to write unironically and
>reflectively about our local countryside if it triggered reflection.
>Well, actually it does--the issue is reflection tending toward WHAT? We
>probably have a few crumbling abbeys that aren't called Tintern.
>And yes, we DO have some real countryside--horse farms, an ostrich farm
>(yes), lovely farmlands out in the western part of the state, we even
>have deer (see below) and black bear herds, which periodically invade
>back yards, trashing people's trees, flower gardens, and garbage.
>Reflection? We--humans--have encroached on Nature like the wanton
>troopers riding by, but that doesn't change the fact we need to live
>someplace. So did the troopers. Some people today will shoot anything
>that moves but most will not. Others will let the carcass rot by the
>roadside like the pitiful doe I saw this morning on Route 33, bloodied
>head and all. Yes, I thought of the Marvell "The Nymph Complains"--but
>it was a truck this time, not a musket ball. Marvell's "crossroad" was
>a climate of man's violence invading a mythical pastoral realm: ours is
>two conflicting versions of reality, the natural and the I GOTTA GET TO
>WORK SO GET THE F--- OUTTA MY WAY.
>It is hard to think of writing lyrically and unironically about New
>Jersey unless you're trying to win a competition for State Poem. After
>Amiri Baraka's problems, the poem had better sound more like Joyce
>Kilmer's "Trees" (Kilmer WAS from New Jersey, you know) than "Who Blew
>Up America?"
>The material is there. The more I read of this discussion the more
>impossible it seems to me that we can ever, in the contorted universe in
>which we live, hope to "do Pastoral" without somehow accounting for
>where we are. I could not write a poem about a forest without somehow
>thinking of Katyn in Poland or the hundreds of acres of charcoal I saw
>in the Black Hills of South Dakota in February 1992. Everything closes
>in on everything else. And I'm rambling. Maybe running my mouth is my
>version of Pastoral. Or this is:
>IN PRAISE OF HAUNTINGS: WAYNE, NJ
>Where the tract houses face the last woods,
>the deer materialize through sunrise mists,
>weeping for vegetation. Seen
>fleetingly from cars, their substance
>is stealth and disbelief: a doe and her fawns,
>apparitions of fading forest memories,
>oblivious to tort or damage,
>fight back starvation in someone's front yard
>with graceful, mindless theft.
>Persistent, spooked and beautiful, they
>cannot learn the customs of come-lately highways,
>step instead into semis making 80 on the downgrade.
>Frozen in the speed lane, run to ground, they are yours,
>meat and reproach. Stop to check the damage
>to the chrome: the other deer drift silent
>from the woods, stare through great shining eyes.
>KTW/7-12-96
>--
>Kenneth Wolman
>Proposal Development Department
>Room SW334
>Sarnoff Corporation
>609-734

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