Harbor Lights: On Mark Strand

      Here are yet some more pieces from Mark Strand's marvellous volume Dark Harbor (1993), which I still esteem as probably the finest volume of poetry of the last twenty years. Unfortunately, my copy of the book disappeared some time ago, and it's been a bugger trying to find a replacement. The truly aweing thing about Strand's poetry is that he seems to appeal to all sorts of audiences, educated and uneducated, romantic and postmodern, conventionalist and innovator. His poetic voice is astonishingly distinct: there's no confusing a Strand poem with one by anyone else, in large part because he marries aloofness with closeness in a way that no contemporary poet can seem to do so gainfully. He is by turns wry, gentle, touching, absurd, ridiculous, hilarious, sombre, surreal, sensual, intellectual, ironic, and even inspirational, and at his best, as he is throughout Dark Harbor, he avoids lapsing into emotional slither or poetic pretentiousness. Sure, an educated reader is more likely to get more out of a Strand poem, but an uneducated reader, or even an educated reader with little disposition toward poetry, can still find many, even most, of his poems rewarding at some level. Let me know what any of you think.

   These pieces are culled from this site, but they're numberings are not as they appear in the final volume. The last piece (III here) is actually number XLV, the concluding poem to the volume. I should add also that, by the time he formulated the volume, all of these poems were rendered in tercets, in part, I suspect to affect an appropriate Dantean air of traversing mystical territory.

I

When after a long silence one picks up the pen
And leans over the paper and says to himself:
Today I shall consider Marsyas
Whose body was flayed to an excess
Of nakedness, who made no crime that would square
With what he was made to suffer.
Today I shall consider the shredded remains of Marsyas
What do they mean as they gather the sunlight
That falls in small pieces through the trees,
As in Titian's late painting. Poor Marsyas,
A body, a body of work as it turns and falls
Into suffering, becoming the flesh of light,
Which is fed to onlookers centuries later.
Can this be the cost of encompassing pain?
After a long silence, would I, whose body
Is whole, sheltered, kept in the dark by a mind
That prefers it that way, know what I'd done
And what its worth was? Or is a body scraped
From the bone of experience, the chart of suffering
To be read in such ways that all flesh might be redeemed,
At least for the moment, the moment it passes into song.

II

Our friends who lumbered from room to room
Now move like songs or meditations winding down,
Or lie about, waiting for the next good thing
Some news of what is going on above,
A visitor to tell them who's writing well,
Who's falling in or out of love.
Not that it matters anymore. Just look around.
There's Marsyas, noted for his marvelous asides
On Athena's ancient oboe, asleep for centuries.
And Arion, whose gaudy music drove the Phrygians wild,
Hasn't spoken in a hundred years. The truth is
Soon the song deserts its maker,
The airy demon dies, and others come along.
A different kind of dark invades the autumn woods,
A different sound sends lovers packing into sleep.
The air is full of anguish. The measures of nothingness
Are few. The Beyond is merely beyond,
A melancholy place of failed and fallen stars.

III

I am sure you would find it misty here,
With lots of stone cottages badly needing repair.
Groups of souls, wrapped in cloaks, sit in the fields
Or stroll the winding unpaved roads. They are polite,
And oblivious to their bodies, which the wind passes through,
Making a shushing sound. Not long ago,
I stopped to rest in a place where an especially
Thick mist swirled up from the river. Someone,
Who claimed to have known me years before,
Approached, saying there were many poets
Wandering around who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say
Words whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure. Then he joined a small group,
Gathered beside a fire. I believe I recognized
Some of the faces, but as I approached they tucked
Their heads under their wings. I looked away to the hills
Above the river, where the golden lights of sunset
And sunrise are one and the same, and saw something flying
Back and forth, fluttering its wings. Then it stopped in mid-air.
It was an angel, one of the good ones, about to sing.

The last piece, with the "shushing sound" of the angels recalls the description of the sea in Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order At Key West" that is "Like a body wholly body, fluttering / Its empty sleeves." (Stevens was a major influence on Strand.) But the glory of these poems is their fundamental simplicity. Sure, there are a number of nuances and complexities and so forth, but the poems do not depend on a poet-qua-poet's vocabulary; the imagery is simple, precise, direct, and intensely knowable, as if, in part, Strand were borrowing a page from the popularistic (and sometimes rustic) tendencies of Robert Frost. Even the allusions to mythology and art are not that complex, and easily resolved if one doesn't know them immediately. Notice, too, the exactitude of the enjambements. The breaks, the implied pauses, seem perfectly placed, and perfectly natural, to the point that-- perhaps again following Frost's famous dictum about poetic clarity rather than ambiguity, that a poem tells you how to read it, rather than letting you decide how to read it arbitrarily-- it's almost impossible to misread the poem orally. As such, his pacing is beautifully controlled, each line a clear phrase unto itself, before adding to or amending what's just been said. The effects are ones of accretion and accumulation, each line a next step in kind of progressive verbal waltz.

      I'd ask those of you bothering to read this to observe also some of the lovely little "incidental" phrases that seem to add so much. "One of the good ones," for example, is a beautiful little detail, affirmative without being pretentious, casual without being shallow, and it somehow adds a touch of joy to the anticipation of waiting for the angel to sing (which, of course, it doesn't do within the scope of the poem proper). "I'm sure you would find it misty here" is a nice touch as well, a bit wistful, a bit fond, and even a bit epistolary, though the place itself is left almost entirely to one's imagination; this is a place, it seems, of mists and shades and auras, but the tone of the line is so casual and informal, that it seems to engender a memory of familiarity, of a remaining link to a more immediately tangible reality. Sometimes, it's stunning what a truly fine poet can do with a simple phrase, not necessarily anchored down by ambiguities and suggestions of semiotic alterity, with mere denotation. Placed in the right context, measured in the right syllables, such phrases can sing beyond initial meaning. Some other phrases are just as "right," examples of les mots justes. "Soon the song deserts its maker" rings of the fact of abandonment without mourning over it; it's a fact, a somewhat sad fact, but not one to be ring one's heart over. "Not that it matters anymore" has both a touch of sadness and a touch of humour to it, the kind of reminder of reality that helps to keep the poem from lurching into metaphysical self-purchase. That it follows the line about "Who's falling in or out of love," subtle in its humourous invocation of gossip, the tinge of wry dismissal somehow affects a note of loss (that even great loves and partings eventually cease to matter, in the practical sense) while at the same time it grounds itself in the awareness of historical inevitability, that such loss is not necessarily something on which to wax elegaically but to be accepted this side of stoicism as part of the inescapable entropic pull of time.

      But these examples speak to one of Strand's great gifts, the ease of his speech; he is fluid, he is direct, he is, one might say, plain without suffering from plainness. While these poems might have melancholic or elegaic propensities, they don't simply surrender to those propensities; just as the poem seems to tip slightly in one direction, the poem counterbalances itself, as if to regain its composure, and the result is a lilting effect, a sombre but not entirely sad verbal ambulation. In a way, if you'll pardon the metaphor, Strand's voice here is tied to a kind of self-aware gait, and if you'll accept (and ideally agree with) that metaphor, the synchronicity, and the apparent ease of that synchronicity, resonates with intimacy, something most contemporary poets shrink from in terror. This in itself marks Strand as a poet of greater calibre than just about any of his surviving peers, with the possible exception of Seamus Heaney. Yes, these poems have a dreamy, airy quality to them, but at the same time they seem more real, more vaguely tangible than most poems that essay to trunk themselves in the familiar and the everyday.

      Here is another piece from Dark Harbor, again, in part a response to Wallace Stevens ("Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu"), that somehow wrests poignancy and affirmation from an idea that might otherwise seem an endstop, an endstop Strand's poem doesn't entirely deny, but which he seems to see as having an un(der)explored dimension to it. Here's the poem:

It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,

It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.

Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans
Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting,

Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being

Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans' wings,

The density of the palms' shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end

Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon's ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.

And the imagery is beautiful, isn't it? "The weight of the pelican's wings," "the backs of bathers," "the moon's ripening," "the temptations of sleep," and the gorgeous concluding image of "the wine as it waits in the glass" -- there's a richness of vitality and sensuality to these images, as everything seems to proffer, to grow, to live in its own way, from the moon's maturing to the waiting of the wine. And the imagery seems unembellished, gloriously natural, as if these qualities of living are intrinsic to these things and merely not normally seen. There's a pseudo-romantic fecundity here that is, in the Modern period, rarely apparent, except in the poems of Wallace Stevens, and, like Stevens, he carefully steps around the trapdoors of hokeyness and soft-mindedness. This is a poem of surreal beauty rather than surreal disjunction or surreal ugliness-- and, as such, it speaks to, and touches, with a kind of mature sensuality, not unaware of death but astonishingly alive with the idea of death.

      I should tie this up shortly, but I mentioned Strand's humour earlier, and I fear none of the poem's I've offered really demonstrate that quality (even though Strand's earlier poetry waswell-known for it: see "Eating Poetry," for example). I'll end this discussion with a cheeky little play on naming (remember Strand's first name) and self-awareness, number XIX from Dark Harbor:

I go out and sit on my roof, hoping
That a creature from another planet will see me
And say, "There's life on earth, definitely life;

"See that earthling on top of his house,
His manifold possessions under him,
Let's name him after our planet." Whoa!

It's devilishly clever, and it's postmodern to the bone in the best sense of that possibility. In a way, this strikes me as a poetic version of a Far Side cartoon, even funnier for its undercurrent of serious possibilities, though the surface is pure stoner comedy. Leave it to Strand to do more with six lines than most could do with a chapter, and leave it to Strand to end a poem with "Whoa!" and still pull it off.

      Read Dark Harbour, my friends. It's a magnificent little volume, a mere 46 poems, none, I think, more than thirty-six lines. He deserves to be more widely read than he currently is.