Sunday Poetry XLII -- Never the Same Twice :: Lisel Mueller

“  When I am asked

    how I began writing poems,

    I talk about the indifference of nature.  ”

Alone, these words are fantastic.  Right?  Brilliant.  Sure.  Genius?  …

(See?  I’ve got this thing with “genius,” going back, as far as I can tell, to the day I learned my dad prayed that none of his kids would be one.  (Dad:  prayer answered.)  I guess I bring it up again because there seems to be this indelible connection between the definition—at least in practice—of genius and that of art—art being, or any work thereof, as difficult to define as genius is to identify or, maybe more so, explain.)

…  But it’s the rest of the poem that brings this thing really around to make a glorious connection I didn’t anticipate.  Perhaps it’s this convergence—or the millions just like it that happen all over the world all the time—that drew me in and bubbled up that word—“genius”—again from its little locker back there.

Here’s the poem:

When I am Asked

by Lisel Mueller – Pulitzer Prize winner, 1996

When I am asked

how I began writing poems,

I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,

a brilliant June day,

everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench

in a lovingly planted garden,

but the day lilies were as deaf

as the ears of drunken sleepers

and the roses curved inward.

Nothing was black or unbroken

and not a leaf fell

and the sun blared endless commercials

for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench

ringed with the ingenue faces

of pink and white impatiens

and placed my grief

in the mouth of language,

the only thing that would grieve with me.

It’s those last three lines, right? —that metaphysical power of words—particularly for those who know how, even a little, to really use them?

So I picked out the book, Mueller’s Alive Together, just an hour or so ago from a box of my books I picked out from a mountain of them out in my garage.  (I think this is the benefit of having sold all my bookshelves: I can’t just pick out all the same old books because I have no idea where they are.)  This is another of the books I inherited back at the Saginaw Arts and Sciences Academy from my predecessor.  Unlike the others, this one is full of that teacher's annotations.  Normally, this would bother me, particularly as I’m generally so averse to writing in books that it took me three-quarters of a semester before I started highlighting my law books.

Anyway, by way of the poem above, the experience of reading by way of another reader’s reading, and an interesting thing I heard at church this morning—remarkably apropos—I think I’m a step closer to understanding the confluence of genius in art (if nowhere else).

Hugh Nibley, a once religious studies and linguistics professor at Brigham Young University, was the source of the quotation that caught my attention.  I don’t have the quotation in front of me, nor have I found it online, but here’s the gist of it:  That scripture isn’t the words before us, penned by the prophets, but the experience of reading those words.

That’s pretty big, particularly religiously—well, if you’re one who happens to read scripture, anyway—but nearly as much so for the reader of literature, the viewer of art, and, most approachably, the listener of music.  When I’m trying to pin down why it is I think a certain work, or a certain artist, is genius, it usually begins with not the substance of the art itself, but the ineffable experience that blooms or emerges or ka-pows right there in that intangible space somewhere between my senses and the work.  Even afterward, trying to rationalize it, trying to objectify it, remove that emotional response, I can never separate myself from that initial experience, which brings me to the next of the poems from Mueller:

A Farewell, A Welcome

               After the lunar landings

Good-bye pale cold inconstant

tease, you never existed

therefore we had to invent you

               Good-bye crooked little man

               huntress who sleeps alone

               dear pastor, shepherd of the stars

               who tucked us in               Good-bye

Good riddance phony prop

con man moon

who tap-danced with June

to the tender surrender

of love from above

Good-bye decanter of magic liquids

fortuneteller par excellence

seduce  incubus medicine man

exiles’ sanity       love’s sealed lips

womb that nourished the monstrous child

and the sweet ripe grain Good-bye

               We trade you in as we traded

               the evil eye for the virus

               the rose seat of affections

               for the indispensbile pump

we say good-bye as we said good-bye

to angels in nightgowns                 to Grandfather God

Good-bye forever Edam and Gorgonzola

cantaloupe in the sky

night watchman, one-eyed loner

wolves nevertheless

Aae programmed to howl             Good-bye

               forbidden lover good-bye

               sleepwalkers will wander

               with outstretched arms for no reason

               while you continue routinely

               to husband the seal, prevail

               in the fix of infant strabismus

good-bye ripe ovum        women will spill their blood

in spite of you now          lunatics wave good-bye

accepting despair by another name

Welcome new world to the brave old words

peace    Hope     Justice

truth Everylasting             welcome

ash-colored playground of children

happy in air bags

never to touch is never to miss it

Scarface hellow we’ve got you covered

welcome untouchable     outlaw

with an alias in every country

salvos and roses               you are home

our footprints stamp you mortal

***

I was going to put up one more of her poems (this one inspired by Martin Gardner, no less!), but I think I’ll leave it here.