imagination ||craft: "What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water."
On rain, duende, spells, and earth
It’s raining in New York City. A lot. The reading I traveled here for is cancelled, and I’m holed up in my friend Sean’s house looking at books and online news of flooding.
Sitting down to think about poems and rain, the phrase “what a small song …” comes into my mind. It’s from Roethke’s multi-section poem “The Lost Son.” Here’s the section I’m thinking of:
3. The Gibber
At the wood's mouth,
By the cave's door,
I listened to something
I had heard before.
Dogs of the groin
Barked and howled,
The sun was against me,
The moon would not have me.
The weeds whined,
The snakes cried
The cows and briars
Said to me: Die.
What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water.
Hath the rain a father? All the caves are ice. Only the snow's here.
I'm cold. I'm cold all over. Rub me in father and mother.
Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the stones.
What gliding shape
Beckoning through halls,
Stood poised on the stair,
Fell dreamily down?
From the mouths of jugs
Perched on many shelves,
I saw substance flowing
That cold morning.
Like a slither of eels
That watery cheek
As my own tongue kissed
My lips awake.
Is that the storm's heart? The ground is unstilling itself.
My veins are running nowhere. Do the bones cast out their fire?
Is the seed leaving the old bed? These buds are live as birds.
Where, where are the tears of the world?
Let the kisses resound, flat like a butcher's palm;
Let the gestures freeze; our doom is already decided.
All the windows are burning! What's left of my life?
I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!
Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going,
I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
I run, I run to the whistle of money.
Money money money
Water water water
How cool the grass is.
Has the bird left?
The stalk still sways.
Has the worm a shadow?
What do the clouds say?
These sweeps of light undo me.
Look, look, the ditch is running white!
I've more veins than a tree!
Kiss me, ashes, I'm falling through a dark swirl.
(You can find the whole poem on this page.)
I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to teach for my upcoming prose poem workshop “Through the Veil” (on Zoom Saturday 10/28) and thinking about this kind of poetry, the “What a small song. What slow clouds. What dark water” kind. How do such poems work? It’s through a combination of lulling sounds, somewhere between the incantatory, the murmured, the lullaby, and the nightmare. I began thinking also about Martha Zweig, who writes a wonderfully witchy sort of poetry. Here’s one from her book What Kind (2003):
I love Zweig’s sounds and that spell-like quiet urgency they create. Then I began thinking of “Under the Maud Moon” by Galway Kinnell, from The Book of Nightmares (1971), a favorite book of mine. Here’s the first section of that poem:
1 On the path, by this wet site of old fires— black ashes, black stones, where tramps must have squatted down, gnawing on stream water, unhouseling themselves on cursed bread, failing to get warm at a twigfire— I stop, gather wet wood, cut dry shavings, and for her, whose face I held in my hands a few hours, whom I gave back only to keep holding the space where she was, I light a small fire in the rain. The black wood reddens, the deathwatches inside begin running out of time, I can see the dead, crossed limbs longing again for the universe, I can hear in the wet wood the snap and re-snap of the same embrace being torn. The raindrops trying to put the fire out fall into it and are changed: the oath broken, the oath sworn between earth and water, flesh and spirit, broken, to be sworn again, over and over, in the clouds, and to be broken again, over and over, on earth.
So, what is “this kind” of poetry? We can think about it in terms of the category of “Deep Image” poetry, a term coined by Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly, influenced by Lorca’s “deep song.” I was thinking about duende, too. In “Theory and the Play of Duende,” Lorca discusses duende in terms of the music and dance of Andalusia, but he explains that it appears elsewhere, too. Lorca explains,
All through Andalusia, from the rock of Jaén to the snail’s-shell of Cadiz, people constantly talk about the duende and recognise it wherever it appears with a fine instinct. That wonderful singer El Lebrijano, creator of the Debla, said: ‘On days when I sing with duende no one can touch me.’: the old Gypsy dancer La Malena once heard Brailowsky play a fragment of Bach, and exclaimed: ‘Olé! That has duende!’ but was bored by Gluck, Brahms and Milhaud. And Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife spoke this splendid sentence: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there’s no deeper truth than that.
Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’
(You can read the entire essay here.)
Duende is connected to death and darkness and deep feeling, to “a mysterious force.” But Lorca cautions us not to associate it with with “the theological demon of doubt at whom Luther, with Bacchic feeling, hurled a pot of ink in Eisenach, nor the Catholic devil, destructive and of low intelligence, who disguised himself as a bitch to enter convents” (!). Rather, duende is aligned with the Greek daemon: “The duende I mean, secret and shuddering, is descended from that blithe daemon, all marble and salt, of Socrates, whom it scratched at indignantly on the day when he drank the hemlock, and that other melancholy demon of Descartes, diminutive as a green almond, that, tired of lines and circles, fled along the canals to listen to the singing of drunken sailors.”
The poems I’m thinking of today are connected to rain and ineffability, to death and the earth, to other ways of knowing that can come through in poetry, in flamenco, in American blues, and in Nietzsche, Bach, and Cézanne. I wonder, too, about other traditions connected to Lorca’s idea of duende— how it emerges in fairy tale and theater, folk art and children’s songs passed down through generations.
And what is the connection between the knowledge and stories of old wise women and witches and the duende that emerges in some of our contemporary poems? How is it related to trances, spell work, channeling, and ghost stories? When we listen to earth and the dark and the rain, when we find ways to express what comes that bypass the “rational” ways of communicating, what do we learn? What do we hear? The rain has much to tell us, but have we listened enough?
I’ll leave you with one more poem by Martha Zweig, from her collection Monkey Lightning:
If you’re interested in exploring “other ways of knowing” and their connection to the prose poem, there are still spaces in my October 28th workshop, “Through the Veil: A Prose Poem Workshop.” Early bird price is $50 (through October 1st).
This is a terrific post. Long ago I read Edward Hirsch's book on duende, "the demon and the angel," and I found a used copy of it at a library book sale last month. I've been meaning to reread it. And read my Roethke and Bly.