T D Carroll

 

Sometime around 1970 -- yes, that long ago! -- Marshall McLuhan, the influential Canadian media and technology theorist, published a subscription newsletter, in which he wrote about current research interests and divulged up-to-the-minute information and insights -- "early warnings", as it were --  reflecting his current thinking. That newsletter was only available by postal or "snail mail" in those days, and would occasionally arrive packaged with some very interesting, non-print materials. One of those adjuncts was a deck of playing cards, which McLuhan titled "Distant Early Warning". Each card in the deck was printed with an image, along with a brief, pithy quotation from the musings of the master himself – something on the order of his book, War and Peace in the Global Village. One of those cards – now lost to time and to multiple household relocations -- featured an image, long forgotten, and was decorated with the following text: "Where the hand of man never set foot." This was likely intended as tongue-in-cheek, but it expressed a profoundly important idea regarding the not-altogether-salutary impact of homo sapiens on planetary well-being, then and now.

 

Flash forward to the present moment, when in Tai Chi class one day a student asked the teacher, "What do I do with my thumb?" I believe that any practitioner of Tai Chi would understand the significance of this seemingly innocuous question, and it did indeed prompt an interesting (and helpful) peroration from the teacher. Who noted -- summarizing here -- that the thumb is, for the most part, the root of evil in the world, enabling, as it does, the grasping hand -- the hand that plunders, the hand that "taketh away". Which is to say, the very hand that McLuhan was invoking that many years ago. In Tai Chi, rather, the thumb is deemphasized, the hand open, not clenched, throughout much of the form. In Tai Chi, the more appropriate analogy is the infant's fist, which conveys softness -- and receptivity.

 

It may be helpful to know that Tai Chi is grounded in the Dao, and more specifically, in the Dao De Jing, the profoundly significant Daoist work produced during China's Warring States Period (roughly the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE). That text is attributed to the mysterious Laozi, about whom not much is known outside of legend, except that he was contemporary with Confucius, may even have met and conversed with the better-known sage, and thus was likely active on the front end of that highly significant historical period. Alongside Tao Chi practice per se, there is a system of hand or finger signals associated with Daoist religion, and more specifically with Daoist magic. The illustration reproduced here depicts four of these gestures, or mudras. Note that the thumb is not prominent, or is suppressed, in at least three of the four frames (with the possible exception of the one in the bottom left quadrant).

 

With these mudras in mind, consider the following couplet from Cheng Man Ch'ing, a Tai Chi master, from a book titled The Essence of Tai Chi Ch'uan:

 

The whole body is a hand

and the hand is not a hand.

 

An alternative, possibly, to McLuhan's epigram! Then the foot enters the scene, also thanks to Master Cheng, who takes the next step, as it were:

 

When the foot wants to advance

first shift backwards.

 

Samuel Johnson's dictionary offers the following definition of 'thumb':

 

The hand is divided into four fingers bending forwards, and one opposite bending backwards, called the thumb, to join with them severally or united, whereby it is fitted to lay hold of objects.

 

This entry does not align with Tai Chi philosophy (or with McLuhan), but I do like Johnson's reference to the "backward tilt" of the thumb. (There is another word, "pollex", which is the more formal anatomical term for the thumb. There's no entry for "pollex" in Johnson.) I also like the blunter sound of the word thumb, which I think is the key word in the following poem. When I first wrote the words down, they struck me as a sort of nonsense verse, on the order of Edward Lear, perhaps. But I suspect they may mean other than that. 

 

There is current interest in something called "walking Tai Chi", just as several decades ago, "walking meditation" was in vogue, popularized by the late Vietnamese monk Thich Nach Hahn. There's also "walking breath", yet another meditative practice, with breathing adjusted to rhythmic stepping. I had none of these in mind when the following poem came along. But I've long been interested in "walking poetry", a centuries-old tradition in Japan (think Matsuo Basho). This is a deeply-rooted practice, possibly not unlike the others mentioned here. I interviewed a chainsaw carver a decade or two ago, and wrote a profile of him for a museum exhibit and catalog. In that piece, trying to grasp the deeply integrated nature of his work, I wrote, "Standing barefoot amidst the dust and danger of the spewing saw, he acquires a rough patina of chippings, embodying his own process." This may be what the Japanese walking poets do: embody their process; their poiesis. And I think this poem may gesture towards that embodiment, among other possible entanglements.

 

One foot

Next foot

Where foot go?

 

Foot go together

Foot go apart 

Foot go somewhere

Foot go nowhere

 

Mean something

Mean nothing

 

One word

Next word

Where word go?

 

Word go together

Word go apart

Word go nowhere

Word go somewhere

 

Mean something

Mean nothing

 

Foot

Word

May be same

 

But word have thumb

 

 

 

 

 

There are several interlocking themes in the following, none of which can be treated coherently here. Meanwhile, I'll put this up as a draft, an 'anthology' of sorts, to return to later. To begin:

 

There is a chapbook published by Ugly Duckling Presse in New York, called Lines of Flight by Madhu H. Kaza, on the theory and practice of translation, where the author invokes and briefly explores the translation of color terms, moving on to consider Greek translation, most famously, translations of color words in Homer: 

 

The ancient Greek of Homer, for instance, famously has no single word that means what we mean by "blue." In the epics, we encounter the bronze sky, the wine-dark sea, violet sheep, blue-haired Poseidon, bright-eyed Athena, the dark eyebrow of Zeus. 

 

Kaza surmises that, "There must be a word in the original that can cover both green and blue." These may not be translation issues per se, but more likely a matter of word choice by the ancient writers. That aside, Kaza returns to the mountains, noting that "If you've spent time with mountains, you might understand that they won't be the same the next time you look." And she follows this with a passage from Dogen:

 

The green mountains are always walking…Mountains' walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains' walking even though it does not look the same as human walking…Because green mountains walk, they are permanent. Although they walk more swiftly than the wind, someone in the mountains does not notice or understand it. "In the mountains" means the blossoming of the entire world. 

 

The above is a translation of the Dogen sutra by Arnold Kotler and Kazauaki Tanahashi. Kaza next quotes a different translation of the same passage, but this time the mountains are "blue". Puzzling over this, Kaza suggests that "there must be a word in the original that can cover both green and blue."

 

There is, of course, more to the Mountains and Waters Sutra (Sansui-Kyo) than Kaza needs or uses for her purposes. Here is more from that source:

 

Priest Daokai of Mt. Furong said to the assembly, "The green mountains are always walking; a stone woman gives birth to a child at night." 

Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains' walking. 

Mountains' walking is just like human walking… 

 

There's an interesting passage in this sutra which may link back to Lucretius (I've momentarily lost the source in Lucretius): 

 

You should study the green mountains, using numerous worlds as your standards. You should clearly examine the green mountains' walking and your own walking. You should also examine walking backward and backward walking and investigate the fact that walking forward and backward has never stopped since the very moment before form arose, since the time of the King of the Empty Eon. 

 

There's also the following, which may also relate to the "koan" about the stone child which opens the sutra: 

 

Yet the characteristics of mountains manifest their form and life-force. There is walking, there is flowing, and there is a moment when a mountain gives birth to a mountain child. Because mountains are Buddha ancestors, Buddha ancestors appear in this way. 

 

Extending this now, to identify correspondences, I want to quote from an interesting interview published in The Brooklyn Rail (May 2025) by Ginerva DeBlasio with the Italian artist Enzo Cucchi. Here, I think, is the relevant portion:

  

EC: ...Every day, you do the same things. Like walking. If you walk, it doesn't mean the trees in your walk are always the same, right? But every time you see them, it's clear that each time is different for a thousand reasons, you see? There's the wind that changes everything, right? It's like when you said things change. Of course, they much change, right? It's the wind that takes care of that, and the important thing is that it changes them, and that you encounter that change every time.

 

Cucchi also has interesting things to say about color, and the materials he works with:

 

Rail: Many of the works currently on view have both ceramic elements and painting, right? Which in some ways makes them both painting and sculpture at the same time — 

 

EC: No — sorry to interrupt you. More than being painting and sculpture, it's not quite like that. These are simply materials that sometimes belong to what we call "sculpture." Because they are material in that sense. In reality, it's simply an additional image: a strong, external projection. It's a mark driven by other marks, so it's still an image, understand? The issue is always related to the image. The materials get involved in this, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm doing sculpture, nor does it necessarily mean I'm doing — I don't know — something else, understand? 

 

Rail: Yes, like painting, sure. You are very attached to ceramics though. Where does your connection stem from? 

 

EC: Ceramic, you know, like all things, being a very ancient and primitive thing, is a material that is really congenial to the artist. Like when you say, "What are you talking about?" — it's like the word for a writer. Ceramic simply has a problem with light. Like when you do frescoes, you're not painting green, blue, pink. That thing doesn't exist; what exists is the light of that thing. The light of the blue, the light of the pink. 

 

Mosaic is the most special tool because it filters this and gives you that type of quality. Ceramic likewise has this type of value. It's a noble material, like a fish — a tuna in the middle of the sea, which is a noble fish — unlike some fish that don't have any particular nobility or selection.  

 

This is interesting in multiple ways, but parenthetically, it reminds me of the fisherman I met in Maine while doing fieldwork there, who lived in a small cottage on a cove somewhere Downeast. I think he might have retired from fishing by the time I met him, and was spending time carving miniature fish and birds, and I think building model fishing boats. At one point he told me that he was especially interested in capturing, in paint, the iridescent colors on the belly of the tuna. This coloration begins to fade as soon as the fish is hauled from the water. He showed me one of his tuna carvings, running his forefinger along the belly of the fish, which made me wonder, was he trying to stoke that color back into the wood?

 

Meanwhile, there may be something useful here, some sort of adumbration, in the diary notes of Taneda Santokā, a Japanese poet-monk, as translated by Burton Watson:

 

the deeper I go 

the deeper I go 

green mountains 

 

And: 

 

I go on walking 

higan lilies 

go on blooming 

 

And: 

 

drizzly rain 

only one road 

to go by 

 

And:  

 

all day 

in the mountains 

ants too are walking 

  

In The Ferryman and His Wife, by Frode Grytten, there's a page or so on mountains, as realized along the Norwegian fjords, with the protagonist, ferryman Nils Vik, reflecting on the experience of an avalanche (landslide), and on coverage of the incident in the American press, where the fjords are represented are characterized as beautiful, but also "most dangerous". As the Ferryman explains,

 

You had to learn to live with the mountains, to recognize when they're calm and when they're starting to slip and slide and creak and groan. He's stared up at those mountains for so many years. Mountains that can vanish in the fog days before suddenly reappearing. Mountains that change slowly as you sail across the fjord, but which are always worth keeping half an eye on. Mountains that shoot up from the water, to be framed by the virgin snow and glaciers high above. Mountains with their own rules that must simply be respected, with their cracks and crevices, their chasms and voids and murderous intentions. (34) 

 

Here, the color is white, as Nils noted in his logbook after watching the event replayed on television: 

 

All that snow, like watching a white wig come slipping down the mountainside. 

 

How do mountains move? Let us count the ways! The  Literary Activism group published a poem recently by the Indian poet Vinad Kumar Shukla, who died last year on 23 December:

 

'This year too in these plains...' 

 

This year too in these plains 
there are no mountains. 
For centuries the mountains have stayed in one place; 
it's time they moved. 
The Vindhyas, for instance, should come closer 
to the bus stand and law courts, 
and the Satpuras should go behind 
the village school or farm. 
The Himalayas seem unfair 
to a place that doesn't have the Himalayas; 
this maidan seems unfair 
to a place that doesn't have a maidan; 
Tatanagar seems unfair 
to a place that is not Tatanagar. 
This year let this level ground be displaced 
not to the Terai but the Himalayas, 
the ground's highest point rising like a Himalayan peak. 
Let's have Bhopal this year 
near Bakal and Paniajob, 
Varanasi on the banks of the Mahanadi, 
Gariaband near the Ganges, 
Chandigarh near Sanchi, 
Nandgaon near Faridkot, 
and Madras next to Moradabad. 
All places should be displaced 
and brought near all other places, 
so that every place is near every other place 
and not a single person is displaced 
because of drought, terrorism, or war 
from the village this year. 

 

Translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. 

 

Concluding this rather lengthy meander for now, here's something from an essay by Monika Vrečar, recently published in the online magazine Asymptote: 

 

The conception of reality that most closely resembles the idea of poetry I am attempting to approach here is given by the Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte, in a segment where he discusses the concept of the "ecological imagination" with McKenna. Whyte starts by dismissing Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenological notion of reality as unknowable in itself: "He put his finger on the tree, and he said, 'Life is absurd because I cannot understand that tree, because I cannot become—I cannot get my soul into that tree.' . . . And you weren't supposed to get your consciousness into the tree. You were supposed to pay such tremendous attention to the tree that it came to find you." And yet, I believe Sartre's own conception of poetry is involuntarily mystical, for in relation to Mallarmé he proclaims that the poet uses words as things rather than as signs. That is, the poet intentionally alienates words from their habitual symbolic uses and meanings, and turns them into a "thing," something—remember Sartre's Nausea—that unmistakably pulsates with being. This shift from words to pure presence of things is precisely what Zen masters call detachment: a mystical state in which deep attention to what simply is creates the portal towards the divine, or the identification with the whole universe. The mountain as nothing but a mountain, unabated by its symbolic significance that is fleeting and unstable, pretentious and context-specific; the river as nothing but the river. And yet it is not the thing itself that is at stake here. It is the fact that the thing acts not only as a portal to existence itself when you pay undivided attention to it, but also as a revelation of the ecology of things in which they are enmeshed. 

 

At risk of crowding this post yet more, I'll give the last word to Basil Bunting, from a 1949 poem:

 

There they are, you wlll have to go a long way round

if you want to avoid them.

It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

 

More later....

 

...later...

 

In An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, his novella about the German landscape painter Johan Moritz Rugendas, César Aira offers yet another series of reflections on mountains. First, a brief meditation on Aconcagua, a mountain in the Argentine Cordillera, within the Province of Mendoza:

 

Yet it was not so simple to capture the form of Aconcagua, or any given mountain, in a drawing. If the mountain is imagined as a kind of cone endowed with artistic irregularities, it will be rendered unrecognizable by the slightest shift in perspective, because its profile will change completely.

 

Aira then shifts the perspective, from the precipitous peaks of the Cordillera to the eternal spread of the pampas. He invokes images of the colossal carts used to carry goods and people across the Argentine pampas, from Mendoza in the west to Buenos Aires in the east. His description of these carts is provocative, as seen through the eyes of Rugendas, his protagonist:

 

These were contraptions of monstrous size, as if built to give the impression that no natural force could make them budge. The first time he saw one, he gazed at it intently for a long time. Here, at last, in the cart's vast size, he saw the magic of the great plains embodied and the mechanics of flat surfaces finally put to use…He watched them setting off on their long voyages. Their caterpillar's pace, which could only be measured in the distance covered per day or per week…Because they only had two wheels (that was their peculiarity), they tipped back when unloaded and their shafts pointed up at the sky, at an angle of forty-five degrees. The ends of the shafts seemed to disappear among the clouds.

 

Aira extends the metaphor: "And one day, suddenly, the carts set off…A week later, they were still a stone's throw away, but sinking inexorably below the horizon." (ellipsis in original) And yet more: "A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star." Pampas carts like mountains? Leaving Mendoza for the voyage across the pampas, Rugendas and Robert Krause, his associate, hired an experienced guide and another helper, a boy to serve as cook. As they move along toward the east, the land flattens, leaving Rugendas to assume that they must by then have entered the vast domain of the pampas:

 

A casual remark made beside the campfire provoked a rectification from the old guide: No, they were not yet in the renowned Argentinean pampas, although the country they were crossing was very similar. The real pampas began at San Luis. The guide thought they had simply misunderstood the word.

 

Rugendas is taken aback:

 

Were the "pampas," perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane? And yet the old guide assured them that it was so, with a satisfied smile rarely seen among the members of his grave company…After three weeks of assimilating a vast, featureless plain, to be told of a more radical flatness was a challenge to the imagination. It seemed, from what they could understand of the old hand's scornful phrases, that, for him, the current leg of the journey was rather "mountainous." For them, it was like a well-polished table, a calm lake, a sheet of earth stretched tight. But with a little mental effort, now that they had been alerted, they saw that it might not be so.

 

Aira shines a light; "flat" can be "mountain" too!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At a meeting put on by the League of Vermont Writers recently, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with Toussaint St. Negritude, a poet now at work in the Northeast Kingdom, arriving by way of Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, and other locales. Before leaving the meeting, I got hold of a copy of his book, Mountain Spells, published by Rootstock Publishers, Montpelier, in 2024. At home that evening, I read the poems, which are quietly compelling; and sometime later went to bed. But I awoke in the night, the meeting now attending me! And with Toussaint's poems still calling, my hand made two couplets:

 

These poems flow,

like breath.

These poems mean,

like bone.

 

Two sessions were of special interest that day, the yoga workshop and the end-of-day genre session, with two other poets (Toussaint St. Negritude and Liz Gauffreau). The genre group was especially meaningful. At one point, we addressed one of the prompts provided by the event organizers: name an influential poem or collection that's remained important or influential. Liz chose T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and its continuing influence on her work. She also mentioned writing haiku every day for a year, which I understood was part of a generative poetic practice. I should say that Eliot has been, and remains, a touchstone poet for me. (Liz's website can be accessed here.) I chose William Carlos Williams's Paterson, adding that in addition to the poetry, Williams's use of contemporary materials, such as newspaper articles and local histories, ground and situate (and deepen) his text, incorporating a vernacular dimension. Toussaint chose Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a poem he hadn't paid much attention to, he said, until he had the experience of reading the poem aloud, while walking across the Golden Gate Bridge with a friend. Toussaint spoke to the significance of Ginsberg's effective use of lists of everyday things in Howl, embedding them into the flow of the poetry. By the way, Ginsberg and Williams were natives of Paterson, my hometown.

 

Interestingly, each of us chose a foundational text first discovered long ago. Which put me in mind of writing by dharma poet Hank Lazer: the closing paragraph from his reflections on The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (edited by Andrew Schelling, published 2005):

 

As one gets older, the desert island game becomes less fanciful and more exactingly pertinent: if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island, and you could only take three books with you, which three books would you pick? Those of us who have many demands on our time play the game in a less definite way every morning and every day. Increasingly, the mad rush to read and read and see what's new and read it all gives way to a deliberate return to those books, poets, poems that matter most to us. Perhaps fortunately, it is not at all easy to figure out which books these are. That's why we look at our bookshelves and have trouble each morning deciding what to read and why. I wish that the climate for critical prose writing in our time encouraged greater consideration of how and why these few key books matter to us. It is not an easy thing to discuss truthfully.

 

I like this passage for its evocation of books or poems long held close, but more especially for the enigmatic last sentences. What did Lazer mean? When I think of Eliot, for example, or Yeats (or Frost or Pound), poets who've meant quite a lot to me, I'm disaffected by the conservatism that overtook them as they aged -- but I continue to benefit from their poetry. Even so, I suspect that this doesn't capture Lazer's meaning. (More on that some other time; meanwhile, find Lazer's essay here.)

 

Moving on, the workshop titled "Yoga and Creativity: The Art and Practice of Breath, Flow, and Creative Expression" was convened by Joy Cohen, a playwright, who led guided breathing exercises followed by writing prompts, suggesting one-word responses to each prompt. To "Who (or what) would you like to dance with?", I answered, "sky". Thinking it over in the night, one of my recent poems came to mind, also written in response to a writing prompt given at a meeting earlier this year; also featuring yoga -- and sky. My poem was inspired by a longer poem, or rather two linked poems, collectively titled Not Quite Noon, by another dharma poet, Paul Naylor, reflecting on his experience climbing a challenging mountain, then returning to that mountain twenty years later -- less successfully the second time up. Here's the relevant passage from Naylor's poem:

 

Calm and agile -- llamas make their way along

the trail with little thought of what they aren't.

Or so I assume. I can be calm, but agile's in my

past. No amount of yoga or tai chi's bringing

that back. It's now about losing ground as

slowly as I can.

 

My poem initially strove to replicate haiku, though it finally submerged and abandoned that form. I'll note that mine is fundamentally a distillation, and does not engage the rich complexity of Naylor's:

 

Shoshoni Sky

 

Gannett Peak

Wind River Range

Shoshoni sky

 

The poet scrambled up

The poet scrabbled down

 

Yoga

Tai Chi...

...he did them all

 

Yet...

 

Climbing the mountain

Twenty years later

He stumbled

 

Suwakkawai*

 

*a Shoshoni word meaning "no breath"       

 

Before closing, I find that I have yet another "sky" poem to offer here. This one came while thinking about a poet's oeuvre: the little sheaf, the life's work; enduring; unenduring:

 

Sky Burial

 

Riverrun

Reflecting

Beclouding

 

Poems gather

Sheaving

Concatenating

 

As lichen will

On stone or tree

Or as condensation will

 

On glass...

...or sky

 

I'll close with an excerpt from an interview with poet Richard Siken at The Academy of American Poets website, who responds to a question with a brief discourse on words:

 

Poetry is how we make meaning. We compare a known thing to an unknown thing and gain insight. We howl or murmur to express ourselves. We have the Socratic method and the scientific method. We also have the associative method. That's what art does. I guess I fell in love with poetry when I realized that I could use the tools of conversation for not-conversation. I guess I fell in love with Gertrude Stein, with the idea of surface delight, that we could evoke instead of mean.

 

'Evoke instead of mean'. Suggesting yet another couplet:

 

These poems summon,

like sky

 

Breath percolates, suffuses.

 

Bone. Breath. Sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some time ago, most likely during the 1980s, I listened to an interview on the radio with an Englishwoman from Kent, who reported a visit by aliens. I don't recall the details, but I was impressed or otherwise affected, and right away wrote the following poem:

 

"The Kentish Woman is Visited by Aliens"

 

the ship came to me as in a dream

the men were green and their eyes

were stars

I rose from my chair like morning

but the night was amber

and the purple eye of the cat

roamed the sill

I tell you

sometimes I think I am the butterfly dreaming

but I shall never cease to turn

my dreams to coin

they were here

they beheld me

then receded like fire into the night

at morning, you know

there was ash in the hearth

and embers winking

 

For some reason I tend to remember the title of this poem opening with the indefinite article: "A Kentish Woman", rather than "The Kentish Woman". I chose to use the definite article when I wrote the poem to establish her singularity, but whenever I misremember the title I suspect that the difference might be diversely significant but can't say why. No matter; that's not why I opened this post.

 

Instead, I want to set down a comparison of sorts with a poem by another writer, which strikes me as having an uncanny resemblance to my poem. I don't recall ever reading this other poem, and the likeness is probably more slope than plane. This other poem is by Denise Levertov.

 

Levertov's poem is titled "Caedmon", and is reprinted in Barbaric Vast and Wild, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman, the fifth volume in the "Poems for the Millenium" series. Here's the part that struck me as akin to my Kentish Woman poem:

 

The cows

munched or stirred or were still. I

was at home and lonely,

both in good measure. Until

the sudden angel affrighted me -- light effacing

my feeble beam,

a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:

but the cows as before

were calm, and nothing was burning,

nothing but I, as that hand of fire

touched my lips and scorched my tongue

and pulled my voice

into the ring of the dance.

 

We know Caedmon (7th century CE) through Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (8th century CE), whence Caedmon, who according to Bede was a Northumbrian peasant gifted with poetic speech by God, is generally recognized as the first English language poet whose work has been preserved. Caedmon's Hymn appears in various documents and in varying dialects of Old English, which is largely unintelligible to the contemporary English reader. Levertov's poem is a reimagining of the Caedmon legend, as recorded by Bede.

 

In their Old English Grammar, Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson argue that Caedmon's significance may lie in his adaptation of the earlier heroic literature to an emergent Christian literary tradition:

 

Bede's account in his Ecclesiastical History of how the illiterate cattle-herd Caedmon suddenly began singing of Christian subjects in the old heroic measure seems to capture that moment in history when two cultures began to merge. To the Anglo-Saxons, Caedmon's miracle was his instantaneous acquisition of the power of poetic composition through the agency of a divinely inspired dream. Modern readers familiar with the widely documented folk-motif of people suddenly acquiring poetic powers through a dream may dismiss Bede's story as essentially fabulous, but the nine-line Hymn itself attests to a minor miracle of literary history that cannot be denied: in these polished verses Caedmon demonstrated that the ancient heroic style was not incompatible with Christian doctrine and hence was worthy or preservation. (A Guide to Old English, 7th Edition, p. 232)

 

Back to the future, our two poems, mine and Levertov's, differ in subject matter and details but I think share essential features: Levertov has cows; I have a cat. Caedmon is visited in the night/a dream by an angel; the Kentish Woman is visited in the night/a dream(?) by aliens. Caedmon symbolically joins "the ring of the dance"; the Kentish Woman (symbolically) witnesses the ashes "winking" (dancing). Levertov's poem has fire; my poem has stars. Both Caedmon and the Kentish Woman are alone when inspiration dawns. In Levertov's poem, Caedmon's poetic speech is liberated; the Kentish Woman's speech is broadcast.

 

In a recent podcast from The London Review of Books, Marina Warner speaking of Franz Kafka says,

 

Yes, this is why he's philosophically so much of our time, and so important to what turned out to be his future. Because the causality in his fantasy fictions or the causality of the strange occurrences in his fictions is never, as I've just said, never actually identified. Whereas in fairy tales, it's fairies, and in other forms, in religious fables, it's God. And the supernatural is explained in that way. Or it's in science fiction, speculative fantasy of science fiction, it's something scientific. So here we are in a world, an intermediate world, in which the causality is never, never ascribed.

 

I think this may reflect the hidden dimension of my Kentish Woman poem -- that causality will likely be ambiguous in poetry, and can't be ascribed. Still, both poems feature a subject depicted as aspirational, glorifying God in the one instance, "something scientific" (or supernatural) in the other. Each enmeshed in the seamless web of poetry. 

 

I'll leave this post unfinished for now. But I might emphasize in closing that any resemblance of my poem to Levertov's poem is unintentional, and most likely serendipitous.