Everything

The poet warns us not to "expect a catalogue of grace" which makes it weirdly difficult to quote one bit that doesn't run into the specific particulars of some observed realty. But here goes with a bit of jumping:

Everything is in the light of everything [...]
with an unfolding plenitude we are [...]
Everything, before everything, is yours
and none an island — no, none, none, not one
but is the others'. We possess ourselves
only so far as others lean to us
and draw us, moving, into their stirred house
as easily as air, only so far
as everything remains itself and sings.

It is a poem that seems to transcribe mutability in its lines and yet there is a core of material resistance. If this sounds esoteric. It is. "Everything" is by the poem's end almost a metaphysical principle. But it withdraws and "remains itself and sings." We have Robin Skelton and his editors to thank for carrying this poem over into In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton. Just close your eyes and repeat "everything" and you will get a sense of the effect. But you will miss the particulars. For that you need the poem as whole. But beware. You will begin to see everything as not just anything. Stein's anyone and everyone, anyone?

And so for day 922
22.06.2009

The House by Robin Skelton

Quoting in full and risking copyright infringement of this poem by Robin Skelton. It opens In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton edited by Harold Rhenisch. Very fitting for the beginning. It is entitled "The House"

This is the house
in which the words

are walls, are furniture,
are doors and cushions,

and in which the paintings,
chairs and rugs

are words, and all the words
stand in a circle

round the changing moment.
But when you enter,

opening the rhetoric
of the door,

seeing round you
vocabularies of sculpture,

libraries of sound,
do not assume

this is exclusively
a house of language;

think rather that it is
a place where love

has struggled to discover
what it means

and made these words
to hold you till it knows.

I was particularly taken by the "vocabularies of sculpture" and the "libraries of sound" and of course the final gesture of holding some one assumes beloved "you" in the matrix of the expressed.

And so for day 716
28.11.2008

Forest Sorcery

Robin Skelton, particularly in Landmarks, offers us poetry which is laden with wonderful West Coast atmospherics and sly transmogrifications. One striking passage describes flora in a manner attuned to how simple particulars seize imagination all the while making us brave as danger is inscribed with familiarity. We find a tree:

tattered with green hanging moss,
and roped with vines,
and fanged with shaking fern

I do like that injection of animal incisors and the trembling motion. Short space. Big story.

And so for day 342
21.11.2007