This weekend in a conversation with a friend/reader, they mentioned that they read the columns every week (thank you kindly) even though it may not all be understood. This weighed on my mind, so I put the tome I was working on aside to try to help this process for my friend and in turn gracious readers like you.
Literature is what you make of it. While I may spend a lot of time pointing out writing styles, patterns of word choice, assonance, and more - it is only to highlight the fireworks that one might find on a page. Reading about the most unfamiliar surroundings brings them to life in the garden that is your mind. However, just like a garden, we all do not harvest the same crops from the soil. In 2023, I feel fortunate to have been able to read and pass along several great works to you. However, the empathetic moments may not appeal to you. You may be more enriched by mystery, history, and other genres. To reiterate my thesis, I thought long and hard (away from the original choice for the week) and found a poem I hope that everyone can all draw some inspiration from.
Poetry is not meant to be perilous. It is a bit like a mirror. What one sees in it reflects the view of your life without dimension. When you parse the items you see in the mirror, you see them differently. You see them for their traits, their colors, and their textures. In studying the acting Method, actors are charged with creating a piece where they eat an orange. It is amazing how a task as simple as this is not painted in the predicted broad strokes (holding the round shape, smelling the skin before eating it.) It emanates from the actor’s illuminated face resulting in our seeing similar expressions as our own that lead to that actor mirroring our behavior. When you achieve that in writing or acting, a single word can blossom into a paragraph in your fertile mind.
James Dickey’s “The Strength of Fields” is a “small-town” poem that derives its “mirroring” from the images it conjures in our brains. The farther back Dickey reaches into our past memories, the more vivid our reactions to his chosen words.
On paper, it is a challenging poem. Written in free verse and with unorthodox spacing (split-line, which we tried to reproduce) and pagination, it stands far out from your other reading. However, this is not Ezra Pound. Dickey is out for a walk and the night is leading him to ask a lot of questions.
What field-forms can be,
Outlying the small civic light-decisions over
A man walking near home?
His pondering is purposefully verbose. Dickey is working something out. It is not meant to be clear. His nouns are meant to feel alien. He feels alien. He and the town are not in sync with each other.
The solar system floats on
Above him in town-moths.
Tell me, train-sound,
With all your long-lost grief,
what I can give.
The earlier use of “Moth-force” becomes clearer now. “Town-moths” are like the stars in the sky. As moths flutter about in a variety of frequencies and patterns - they are only searching for light. Our narrator (like all of us) is also on the same search. It also reveals the narrator’s appetite for clarity. “Train-sound” is familiar to us. Very familiar. He hears it bellow like a grievous moan and it awakens in him a need to both listen closer and comfort.
Dear Lord of all the fields
what am I going to do?
So he prays. Even as he finds his connection to being truly honest and genuflect, he still has to shake off the double-words that can confuse. However, they start to become clearer.
By moths, in blue home-town air.
The stars splinter, pointed and wild.
The narrator has separated the moths and stars. He now sees the layers of the universe that everyone sees. Below it is the real source of these unfamiliar words and oscillations - home, conveniently cordoned off from a word that too often is affiliated with talking about a visit or an event from the past.
Why would Dickey purposely make all of these familiar images seem so fuzzy with descriptive appositives? Perhaps because the return to this old world awakens confusion. Ezra Pound said that some words in poetry need to be “uncounterfeitable.” So maybe Dickey is choosing these two-word phrases not to obfuscate but to make us as readers look at that item in the aforementioned mirror not for what it is - but what makes it what it is.
Now perhaps what is the best line of all:
The moon lying on the brain
as on the excited sea as on
The strength of fields.
Lord, let me shake
With purpose.
Dickey has reached the connection where he flutters with the moths, gleams with the stars, and understands the train’s mighty roar.
More kindness will do nothing less
Than save every sleeping one
And every night-walking one
Of us.
Having reached the desired wavelength like a moth he can now soak up the light. And the word that pours through leaves him in a state of complete humility. Kindness. What we all need to both give and receive. What there can never be enough of and a resource that saves every one of us. With that, the buzzing, whirling night walk ends with Dickey at peace
My life belongs to the world.
I will do what I can.
Here is a poem to tackle like a puzzle that was sourced from an emotion we all share. When we as readers sift through the confusion of spacing, word choice, and patterns of speech, we discover what speaks to us. Your interpretation of these lines is better than mine. A poem like this is about discovery. Your discovery. Yet, together we discover that we all speak the same language - even when we do not think that we are.
—
Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
