WRITING INNER AND OUTER LANDSCAPES
“The space between”: mediating between inner and outer worlds
This section explores how the
mediating between, and the fusing of, inner and outer worlds is an attempt to
mend the “broken drinking goblet like the Grail” (Frost in Edward Connery
Lathem 1979: 379) and how poetry can be the ‘space between’, a virtual place in
which writer and reader can explore and negotiate realities and identities.
Seamus Heaney explores this issue in his poem ‘Squarings’, drawing attention to
the fact that for a person living in one dimension, experiencing another can be
a wonderful, if dangerous undertaking:
‘This
man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’
The
abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They
did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out
of the marvellous as he had known it
(Heaney 1995: 203)
Discussing his poem, ‘Squarings’
and George Herbert’s poem ‘The Pulley’ in The
Redress of Poetry, Heaney observes that both his and Herbert’s poems “are
about the way consciousness can be alive to two different and contradictory
dimensions of reality and still find a way of negotiating between them.” He
also refers to Robert Frost’s poem ‘Directive’ stating “that the imaginative
transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and
comprehend it.” (Heaney 1995: xv). The
mythic, imaginative dimension of human experience is embodied in story, image
and symbol.
Frost’s poem, ‘Directive’ uses the
mythic and symbolic when, in the poem, his character imagines the Grail cup in
the form of a ‘goblet’, albeit significantly broken and the ladder road - with
its similarity to Heaney’s rope and anchor and Herbert’s pulley - as symbols of
how we mediate between the inner and outer worlds through the creative process
of poetry and how we attempt to fuse them. I would suggest that the symbol of
the broken grail cup symbolises the broken human, who needs to be so in order
to be made whole; or lost, in order to be found. This idea is at the heart of
my poetics and is explored in such narrative poems as ‘Aunt Lucy, Brooklyn’ and
is based on the concept of the spiritual pilgrimage, or “itinerant journey”
(Robert Faggen on Frost 2008: 147)
The first two lines of ‘Directive’ suggest
movement in and out as well as back and forth in time, as the narrator imagines
a time of (seeming) innocence and imagines too, how we walk in other people’s
footsteps along and down the passage of time:
Back
out of all this now too much for us,
Back
in a time made simple by the loss
Of
detail
His repetition of the word ‘Back’
creates the effect of pushing the reader back into their own memory, to a time
when the house was not the one inhabited by adults with all the cares, grief and
responsibility which accompany adulthood, but a house of make-believe, a
play-house that the children transform through their imaginations into a safe
haven. But, through time the ‘dishes’ of the children’s make-believe home
become ‘shattered’ ‘underneath a pine’ – anticipating the line further on in
the poem of the ‘broken drinking goblet like the Grail’ which the narrator
‘kept hidden in the instep arch/of an old cedar.’ Both cedar and pines are
evergreens and non-deciduous, keeping green perhaps the innocence of a child
into the experience of an adult. Frost’s poem uses very simple, homely symbols
to convey the complex message that in order to find ourselves we must first
become lost:
And
if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By
now, pull in your ladder road behind you.
(Frost
in Lathem 1979: 378)
For me, creating poetry is a way of
mediating and understanding levels of experience and other dimensions, real and
invented and how they connect, in order to explore identity. However, I find
that the process of becoming attuned to the inner world is aided by being
‘anchored’ to the physical world. For example, noticing the small: lichens,
beetles, bus tickets, bracken spores, as well as the large: mountains,
seascapes, skyscrapers and sky, my eyes constantly panning from one to the
other whilst simultaneously remembering past conversations, recalling people’s
voices and their stories.
I find walking a form of
meditation, for me the physical rhythm attunes to the interior one, past and
present merging in the moment I sit at this keyboard writing a poem into which
I draw rhythm of sounds, voices, memories and dislocated thoughts. I juxtapose
unusual images to allow myself the luxury of going with free associations that
eventually combine and cohere. The poem then becomes what Heaney has called “a
single walker, stepping into the procession of language.” I feel the need to
[as Heaney states] “get beyond ego in order to become the voice of more than
autobiography” (Heaney 1989: 148). But
how can we as humans communicate to others a “moment to moment experience” when
language, which mediates between our experiences, inner and outer,
paradoxically acts as a barrier? I am
aware of this paradox when writing poetry.
Geraldine Green 11.2.2013, taken from my PhD thesis: "An Exploration of Identity and Environment through Poetry" September 2011
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