42opus

is an online magazine of the literary arts.

2 June 2004 | Vol. 4, No. 2

The Poem: Balm for Twenty-First-Century Wounds

My subject is the poem (more fully and accurately speaking, the American, the Turtle Island, poem) and the place of poetry in it. Poetry is everywhere outside and inside the mind (Gk: metis), the world, and the mind-world, a synthesis and evocation that clears confusion, gives pleasure, and relieves pain. The outside is the inside in poetry and the poem. How can this be? How is this possible when the poem is a shape and form containing something made by words? Boundaries, the inner life come to a pattern shaped by an edge, other edges. And in the middle, poetry, the edge and the center that the maker makes (Gk: poietes). The maker makes sounds, which become words. Words include and derive from grunts, clicks, glottal stops, consonants, vowels and, in them or behind them, the howl. In and shaping the howl: animal-world need made into a sometimes terrifying pattern of sound, sometimes soothing, sometimes electrifying, but always a call to attention, to hear, to listen, to respond. So need shapes the call into its going out and never escapes that need. Desire for validation, asking for help, and seeking balm for a wound shape its edge such that the inside becomes the outside, the circumference the center, pain-trauma turned inside out and objectified where the form is what it contains even as the one who cries out and the one who listens are linked, the one the other and the other one.

In our world after so much history, so much culture, two-legged creatures look to and for a way to understand, resolve, and trans-value (though not transcendently) all they experience and know, all that is given them by their predecessors, all they inherit. Nearly drowned by what has already happened, all of history, the sea of materialism, the money-flood, human and life suffering, their unique and individual traumas, all these great cataclysms, two-leggeds have at least one recourse, to cry out and call. And when they do they learn or can learn to listen, to themselves, to space in which others are calling, animals, plants with their leaves shivering in the wind, the stillness of a subzero winter's night when lake ice cracks shore to shore, the ocean with its breakers continuous in rolling waves, can finally, after learning to listen, hear. All because they are driven to cry out, call, make the inside of their being the outside from the outside in. Everyone, millions, two-leggeds all over the globe are driven to call, to find deeper and more full sounds everywhere until sometimes they give up and let others do the calling or until they choose to make their own calling as deep and full, as true and complete, as what they have heard called by those who have learned a greater skill.

Let me offer a little story, the beginning of which I learned from the Tsawatenok of the British Columbia Kwakiutl: Four wolves survived a great flood by climbing a mountain where they shed their skins and became people. They wanted to know if any others were still alive so the oldest donned a wolf skin again and howled from the mountaintop. On a distant island the oldest wolf heard an answering howl indicating at least one other being she immediately called 'Listened To' had survived the cataclysm.

This part of my story comes from the Tsawatenok. The remainder, which deals with the Twenty-First-Century Turtle Island poem, is my own, the story about how, after the wolves heard 'Listened To,' they put on their wolf-skins and howled from the mountain top and heard answering howls from a being or beings they in turn called 'Listened To.' Then, partly to celebrate their survival, all the wolves decided to resolve their howl-notes into chords, the dissonance of the howl into consonance and word-melodies. They called and sang and called again and heard answering and similar calls from other islands floating in the great sea-flood of materialism, history, and life suffering. They looked at each other in amazement and the youngest said to the eldest that you will be called 'Maker Of Word-Melodies' and we will be called 'Maker Of Word Melodies Again, And Again, And Again' and we will be 'Listened To' because we hear. After they came down from the mountain they discovered that other wolves and pups had survived by going to other mountains and now were gathered round the fire-circle in front of the den. They had shed their skins and become people and no one could tell who was 'Maker Of Word-Melodies' and who was 'Maker Of Word-Melodies Again, And Again, And Again,' who was 'Listened To.' But everybody knew that at least four wolf people had learned to make melody-words that call.

'Maker Of Word-Melodies,' perhaps, had learned most completely and most truly how to do this. So when the wolf-people asked point-blank what it means to call, 'Maker Of Word-Melodies' (no one could tell if it was a he or she) replied that "to call is to make a word-note that asks for response. It seeks reciprocity, both of what makes it up and is beyond and outside it, what is called to. In it's primal state, it's first manifestation, the call is a greeting: hello, good-bye, yes, no. In it's purest development it's what you wolf-people know as poetry, image-vibrations of what has been seen, heard, and felt which are poetry in the poem and the poem in poetry, the inside of poem-words and the outside of speaking-poetry-music."

Then all the wolf-people told 'Maker Of Word-Melodies' that his name