#the wild braid

[love-and-shadows]

This book changed the way I think about both poetry and gardening. If either or both of those things interests you, check it out!

[love-and-shadows]

"There's something very important to me about having a kind of relationship, with plants and animals, that can be transacted wholly without language. The warmth of one's body is a form of communication. The stroke of one's hand is a means of communication. In the garden those forms are heightened. I have a tendency when I'm walking in the garden to brush the flowers as I go by, anticipating the fragrant eloquence of their response. I get a sense of reciprocity that is very comforting, consoling.

There are forms of communication beyond language that have to do not only with the body, but with the spirit itself, a permeation of one's being. I strongly identify with Henry James when he wrote, in answer to a letter asking him what compelled him to write, "The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life..." One of the great satisfactions of the human spirit is to feel that one's family extends across the borders of the species and belongs to everything that lives. I feel I'm not only sharing the planet, but also sharing my life, as one does with a domestic animal. Certainly this is one of the great joys of living in this garden." - Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid

[love-and-shadows]

Some quotes about poetry and gardening from The Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz: "In so many instances, the poem is muddied by too much explanation, too much exposure. What one is aiming for is the indication of an energy, or a spirit, below the surface, in the secret vaults of the self, that somehow withers under too much exposition or explanation. That's why I've always believed that so much of the energy of the poem comes from the secrets it folds into what we would call, in a flower, its crown. The height of the beauty of a bloom is its folded state, rather than when it's fully opened. The rose when it is just about ready to unfold is at its most beautiful.

We tend to consider bloom to be the ultimate gift of the garden, but the structure is just as important. For example, the phlox is beautiful in its mass of foliage, even before the blossoms emerge.

In a poem, the secrets of the poem give it its tension and gift of emerging sense and form, so that it's not always the flowering in the poem and the specific images that make it memorable, but the tensions and physicality, the rhythms, the underlying song.

The high spots of a poem could be said to correspond with the bloom in the garden. But you need the compositional entity in order to convey the weight and force of the poem's motion, of its emerging meaning.

And you need the silence. So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn't say as much as in what it does say.

[...]

Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature's tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame your garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.

In a poem, the danger is obvious; there is natural idiom and then there is domesticated language. The difference is apparently immediately when you sense everything has been subjugated, that the poet has tamed the language and the thought process that flows into a poem until it maintains a principle of order but nothing remains to give the poem its tang, its liberty, its force. Once the poem starts flowing, the poet must not try to dictate every syllable.

[...]

One of my principles is never to try to explain what a poem is about. That's a straight line to me. The path to the understand of the poem is for me always circuitous, it's a winding path, and I think of the garden as being a winding garden. The poem holds its secrets and keeps its tensions by closing out the opportunity to explain. The fact that it is so secret is what makes it so immediately touching and searching. It is not like explanatory prose that tells you exactly what you have to do to work that refrigerator.

Art conceals and reveals at the same time. Part of the concept of the garden is that you never see it all at once. This I got from my understanding of Japanese gardens, that the way to see a garden is by circling it, by walking through it.

You don't see the garden as a whole from any point, but you begin to know it by making a tour around it. Then it becomes a garden in the mind, and you become the instrument that defines it, just as you have to create the wholeness of the poem in your mind. Though you learn the meaning of a poem, the sense of a poem, word by word, in the end what you have is a fusion."

[thoughtsunderlined]

Poetry as a meta medium –  Metabolic, metaphoric, metamorphic –  Articulating shifts of being, changes and transfer of energy.

~ Stanley Kunitz in The Wild Braid

[thoughtsunderlined]

In a sense, all creativity is a process of giving meaning to what is on a universal scale meaningless.

Stanley Kunitz in The Wild Braid