Dear Readers:

 

It’s a commonplace among poets that as we write we’re momentarily made to feel “all seeing” — is not precisely what Keats meant by “negative capability” but close enough as we dwell in states that are open to extraordinary experiences. As a younger writer and a voracious reader this is what I was after. The lineage was clear: the Beowulf poet, the Kalevala, Tu Fu, Keats, Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, Bishop, Levertov, the love poems of Paul Éluard — a burying of self-consciousness over and over, the poets aiming for a vivid sense of life and its mysteries. Of course, a young poet would like this and finding it, admire. Kenneth Rexroth’s “The Signature of All Things” still astonishes me with its admiration for night skies. For whole moments we have a glimpse of what it might be like to be gods. And yet we cannot live this way. Growing older I saw that poets must do an additional thing — the word “mentation” comes to mind. For a poem to be good the poet must recognize the qualities of thought behind the poem. “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’— that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” is not fully satisfying, not after the twentieth century. When I first read “These-Green-Going-to-Yellow” by Marvin Bell I saw for the first time what I’m aiming to relate, a poem about wonder conceived in the middle of a tangled day which makes demands of the poet and reader. Here is Marvin’s poem:

 

These Green-Going-to-Yellow

 

This year,

I'm raising the emotional ante,

putting my face

in the leaves to be stepped on,

seeing myself among them, that is;

that is, likening

leaf-vein to artery, leaf to flesh,

the passage of a leaf in autumn

to the passage of autumn,

branch-tip and winter spaces

to possibilities, and possibility

to God. Even on East 61st Street

in the blowzy city of New York,

someone has planted a gingko

because it has leaves like fans like hands,

hand-leaves, and sex. Those lovely

Chinese hands on the sidewalks

so far from delicacy

or even, perhaps, another gender of gingko —

do we see them?

No one ever treated us so gently

as these green-going-to-yellow hands

fanned out where we walk.

No one ever fell down so quietly

and lay where we would look

when we were tired or embarrassed,

or so bowed down by humanity

that we had to watch out lest our shoes stumble,

and looked down not to look up

until something looked like parts of people

where we were walking. We have no

experience to make us see the gingko

or any other tree,

and, in our admiration for whatever grows tall

and outlives us,

we look away, or look at the middles of things,

which would not be our way

if we truly thought we were gods.

 

In his book The Religion of the Future, Roberto Unger writes:

 

Everything in our existence points beyond itself. We must nevertheless die. We cannot grasp the ground of being. Our desires are insatiable. Our lives fail adequately to express our natures; our circumstances regularly subject us to belittlement.

 

This is Bell’s “emotional ante” — to express one’s nature, to try and grasp the ground of being, to look beyond the middles of things. Or putting it another way: unable to grasp the ground of being we must still try.

 

Back to Roberto Unger:

 

We are unable to grasp the ground of being, the ultimate basis for our existence in the world as well as for the existence of the world. We cannot look into the beginning and end of time. In our reasoning, one presupposition leads to another and one cause into another. We never reach the bottom; the bottom is bottomless.

 

This is the sublime, and Ungar further breaks it down this way:

 

Consider two distinct aspects of this experience: speculative groundlessness and existential groundlessness. It is the latter that counts as an ineradicable flaw in the human condition. Its significance, however, becomes clear only when it is seen against the background of the former.

 

Ungar continues:

 

Speculative groundlessness goes to the limits of what we can hope to discover about the universe and about our place in its history. Existential groundlessness has to do with the limits to our ability to overcome the disorienting implications of an inescapable fact: we play a part—a tiny, marginal part—in a story that we did not, and would not, write. We can edit that story marginally, but we cannot rewrite it. In fact, we can barely understand it; we survey it only in fragments. Consequently, our decisions about what to do with our brief lives can have no basis outside ourselves. We are, in this sense, ungrounded.

 

Bell’s poem returns us to the ungrounded but argues for our place in the art of writing beyond our margins. Let us try to have a basis outside ourselves no matter how stacked the odds. Let us not be ungrounded without heart.

 

As a poet and editor, I fear being ungrounded without heart. I am not being sentimental. If the imagination can conceive of life as fragmented but potentially larger than preoccupations with the self then it manages something remarkable. Here’s a poem by Tomas Transtromer that does the same:

 

A Few Moments

 

The dwarf pine on marsh ground holds its head up: a dark rag.

But what you see is nothing compared to the roots,

The widening, secretly groping, deathless or half-

Deathless root system.

 

I you she he also put roots out.

Outside our common will.

Outside the city.

 

Rain drifts from the summer sky that’s pale as milk

It is as if my five senses were hooked up to some other creature

That moves with the same stubborn flow

As the runners in white circling the track as the night comes misting in.

 

— translated by Robert Bly

 

It has always seemed to me that poetry enters our lives by way of astonishment and not stealth. That there are art forms of stealth is certain, much of comedy depends on the aggregate absurdities of postural beings who live in a high gravity world. But poetry is another matter: poems are in part a demonstration of steadfast attention, a childlike insistence that if we stay long enough in the old boathouse, and peer down into the water with hopeful attention, we will see the old turtle who lives in the shadows of the pilings come out like a sorcerer from among the trees. And when she appears at last like a dark piece of crockery, we know that patience, forethought, and the beautiful absurd are all the same. I have always thought of this as comedy raised to a higher dimension, analogous perhaps to the playing of three-dimensional chess. Or simply chess by Marcel Duchamp’s rules. Have it how you will. Nonetheless we must imagine for whole moments we can be like the gods.

​

—Stephen Kuusisto