Residence on Earth (New Directions Paperbook) (2 page)

Man’s nebulous
impurity can be perceived in them: the affinity for groups, the use and obsolescence of
materials, the mark of a hand or a foot, the constancy of the human presence that
permeates every surface.

This is the poetry we are
seeking, corroded, as if by acid, by the labors of man’s hand, pervaded by sweat
and smoke, reeking of urine and of lilies soiled by diverse professions in and outside
the law.

A poetry as impure as a suit
or a body, a poetry stained by food and shame, a poetry with wrinkles, observations,
dreams, waking, prophecies, declarations of love and hatred, beasts, blows, idylls,
manifestos, denials, doubts, affirmations, taxes.

The sacred law of the
madrigal and the decrees of touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing, the desire for
justice and sexual desire, the sound of the ocean, nothing deliberately excluded, a
plunge into unplumbed depths in an excess of ungovernable love. And the poetic product
will be stamped with digital doves, with the scars of teeth and ice, a poetry slightly
consumed by sweat and war. Until one achieves a surface worn as smooth as a constantly
played instrument, the hard softness of rubbed wood, or arrogant iron. Flowers, wheat,
and water also have that special consistency, the same tactile majesty.

But we must not overlook
melancholy, the sentimentalism of another age, the perfect impure fruit whose marvels
have been cast aside by the mania for pedantry: moonlight, the swan at dusk, “my
beloved,” are, beyond question, the elemental and essential matter of poetry. He
who would flee from bad taste is riding for a fall.

(translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)

How is an ordinary mortal to look at this statement? I am
reminded that at the Hard Luck Ranch on the Mexican border where I have a little studio,
a number of cows died of thirst several years ago in clear sight of Lake Patagonia
across the fence. Neruda ran through every fence he encountered except Stalinism over
which he tripped grotesquely. But earlier in his life, in his twenties, when he began
Residence on Earth,
he was trapped in a variety of minor consular posts in
the misery of Rangoon and Burma and other remote outposts. It is lucky for us that he
hadn’t been dispatched to a place he would have loved like Paris. He was lonely
well beyond desperation but with an energetic anguish that sent him on the inner voyage
of
Residence on Earth.
There was no ballast for him except the next part of
this long poem. In every line you trace with great difficulty the bruised consciousness
that produced it because, unlike most poetry, it proceeds from the inner to the world
outside the poet.

Of course I’m not an astute critic. Perhaps
Residence on Earth
is one of
those very rare poems you must drown in. You don’t understand it in discursive
terms, you experience it. To read
Residence on Earth
is to take a long
exhausting swim across the Mindanao trench, which is said to be the deepest part of the
world’s oceans. In other words, the territory could not be less reassuring or
secure. For me the poem is the most palatable and grand of all work immersed in
surrealism, lacking as it does the French hauteur of intellect. It always returns to
earth.

Once, in my thirties, I thought I had invented a brilliant definition of metaphor but
then I misplaced it and decided recently that nothing is worth searching the contents of
seventy cartons of papers. Boris Pasternak inferred that metaphor is the shorthand of
the gods, those who with overfull mental plates must move in leaps rather than walk like
other mortals. When midway through
Residence on Earth
you read “Ode to
Federico Garcia Lorca,” you are startled to discover that it was written a year
before Lorca’s execution because the metaphors so perfectly illumine and presage
Lorca’s death. In the past century there is no poet so profligate and exquisite in
the realm of metaphor than Neruda. Neruda haunts our bodies on an actual Earth with the
same power that Rilke haunts the more solitary aspects of our minds. Rilke holds no
one’s hand, while Neruda, like his idol Walt Whitman, attempts to hold
everyone’s.

There is a troubling matter when we re-read Neruda’s apologia in “Some
Thoughts on Impure Poetry.” In my own lifetime our country had reversed the
quotient of seventy percent rural and thirty percent urban. In an interview with Robert
Bly in the 1960s, Neruda joked, “Perhaps I am a foolish writer of nature like your
Henry David Thoreau.” In recent years I have noticed that two Buddhist magazines I
read have largely abandoned their traditional dependence on the language of nature in
favor of nounless abstractions. It is less pronounced, but I have also noticed this in
the language of poetry in my own lifetime. I recall as a teenager in reading Robert
Graves’
White Goddess
how young poets under the tutelage of a female
Ollave, a witch of poetry, would learn all the names of trees, plants, flowers, birds,
and animals. Once in reaction to the anemic MFA programs I’ve come in contact
with, and while being banally prescriptive in the manner of northern Midwesterners, I
conceived of a program where poets would work for a year in the country, then a year in
the city, all the while keeping journals and studying the perhaps three hundred central
texts of world poetry, and after that a third year at the university. Our bifurcated and
predatory culture crushes and strains the economically non-viable language of earth from
our lives. In contrast, Neruda, in his monumental
Residence on Earth,
superbly
and sincerely translated by Donald Walsh, tells us to break down all barriers of
language, that there are no poetic subjects per se, and that we aren’t romantic
soloists on this sky island of earth.

For more years than I clearly remember I have had photos of Faulkner, Dostoevsky,
Whitman’s tomb, Rimbaud, and the stunning Jill Krementz photo of Neruda holding an
immense chambered nautilus on the wall of my home studio. They belong together.

Jim Harrison

January 6, 2004