Dec 30, 2009 0
Literature is love
I begin my bio with, “I want to be an academic specializing in H.D., but instead I work on a farmstead dairy.” There are not words to describe the fierce passion I feel for this author. I don’t even have my own copy of Sea Garden, although I read its poems obsessively. There’s just some ineffable quality….Susan Stanford Friedman calls it “an austere sensuality, an erotic dimension of repressed yet explosive sexuality” that permeates the landscape of the sea garden H.D. describes (Penelope’s Web, p. 58). I wake up some nights, caught by the beauty of her lines, and have to scramble for light and my close-kept notebook of poems to read over and over some verse.
Much of Sea Garden focuses on thriving in bitter environments–praising the sea rose, in the poem of the same name, for its “harsh,” “sparse,” “marred,” “meagre,” “thin,” and “stunted” stature, which speaks to an acceptance of her/our own harsh, sparse, marred, meagre, thin, and stunted self/selves. Sea Garden holds a kind of worship for the broken, lost, awkward, and ugly. I revel in it.
When I say I love poetry, I mean the lines that grab me by the throat and shake: the lines that stop me dead in my tracks, breathless, tears welling up because of the fierce, sharp edge of truth they wield in my direction. When I was young and they were trying to indoctrinate me into Christianity, they said that you had to be a living sacrifice to a god (as opposed to a dead one) because it meant that, over and over again, every day, you had to choose to lie down on the altar. That’s the kind of surrender I’m talking about when I say that poetry is my religion. I won’t submit to a deity, some anthropomorphic personification of higher consciousness, but I joyfully give myself over to the words that open me, soften me, heal me, inspire me, and wake me up.