by Zack Kopp

Steven Dunn’s first book, Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016), introduced readers to his spare, powerfully evocative voice. The novel, about growing up poor and Black in Kimball, West Virginia, proceeds in elliptical fragments as opposed to a continuous narrative, giving it a timeless quality. Yet despite the universality of his writing, Dunn is often pigeonholed because of his race. For example, he tells me that “a photographer for a magazine (I don't want to say who because the magazine handled the issue immediately after I told them about it) wanted me to put my hood on and ‘make a mean face like when I'm doing my jam poetry.’ I think he meant slam poetry. On top of that, I get emails every January from white organizers in Denver asking me to be a featured slam poet for the Black History Month event. I used to direct them to actual slam poets, but realized that was messed up of me to put that on real slam poets, sending these insincere organizers their way who probably just want to make themselves feel better for having ‘diversity.’ Man, and this type of shit got worse during the pandemic/recent police murders of Black people. Often, white organizers ask me to come on podcasts, magazines, etc., to talk about ways I've experienced racism, but they haven't read my work or know much about me as a writer.”

Potted Meat was succeeded two years later by Water & Power (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018), Dunn’s fictionalized account of his service aboard a nuclear submarine, where he was relegated to rations stamped UNFIT FOR PRISON USE. Water & Power is delivered in a similarly spare, evocative style, and includes, unlike Potted Meat, a series of reproduced, official documents exemplifying bureaucracy and war profiteering at the expense of soldiers’ lives. “Water & Power's political statement is largely anti-war, and a statement against singular heroic military narratives that are often created and glorified by straight, white men. I feel somewhat responsible to my Blackness as a writer, because I'm the writer I am because of a community of Blackness, legacies of Blackness, inherited Black culture, and a wide spectrum of Black arts. I always think about what those things have given me: beauty, joy, lamentation/celebration, a sense of belonging, ugliness, a love for the discarded and decayed, Black imagination—and I try to also return those gifts the best way I know how. In a way, I'm always creating out of Blackness, and I hope the impact I have on Black writing is one of reciprocity.”

Where white writers might spend years attempting a writing style comfortably accessible by people of all races, genders, and educations, this feeling of statelessness is born of advantage, from never having had to uphold their cultures. Dunn says, “I still don't strive for or know what's universal. I'm always torn on the idea of what's accessible writing because readers are so wide. Years ago, at a reading, Fred Moten was asked about accessibility, and he said, ‘It's not a good idea to assume someone else's ability to understand.’ That stuck with me and complicated everything I thought and continue to think about universality and comfortably accessing writing. I read a lot books by queer women, and it's not comfortable for me to access because that's not my lived experience, and I don't think it should be comfortable for me to access because I should be doing the work to listen and try to understand. I think this idea of ‘universal’ is a very white thing and a very male thing and a very upper-middle class thing and a somewhat U.S.A thing. I say that because as a student/reader in the world, it seems that most books that get talked about as being universal are written by who I described above. I've heard The Great Gatsby, and the like, praised for their universal qualities. Whiteness (and a lot of white people, for the most part in the U.S.) has had a long history of self-imposed importance and arrogance that leads to the ideas that their concerns are universal, that their voices are neutral, that their version of English is standard, and that their skin tone is what ‘flesh colored’ is for commercial products like band-aids and stockings and shit.”

As a reader, Dunn prefers writing that makes him feel like he is part of the story’s unfoldment, and that includes “a lot of children's books, especially Berenstain Bears Get in a Fight (because I had a younger sister), and Beverly Cleary books (because I grew up running around in the woods too). I also feel acknowledged by architectural books because I wanted to be an architect, and still do, so I read a lot about it. About my philosophy on good writing: I don't have one, but I love writing that makes me feel like I'm participating in the creation of it, and where I'm able to use my full spectrum of senses to feel my full spectrum of emotions. I don't like being led along mostly; I like to feel like I have the agency to explore. But that's not always true because I love Fast & Furious movies and that's totally being led along [laughs]. Oh, and another thing about good writing, I love writing that shakes the shit out of me, that breaks me open. I know that's pretty abstract and broad, and there's a lot of ways to go about shaking the shit outta somebody, but I like that broad and open idea because I get to keep cataloguing ways it's done. Examples where I feel like a co-creator: Selah Saterstrom's novels, The Pink Institution, The Meat & Spirit Plan, and SLAB; Nikki Wallschlaeger's Houses; Khadijah Queen's I'm So Fine; Gail Scott's The Obituary and My Paris.”

Dunn’s current writing project is a book on Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones (aka Nas), the hip hop artist from Queensbridge widely considered one of the greatest rappers in history. “I don't have a title yet, none of my rough titles even sound that good. Maybe I'll have a title by the time I finish the book. I haven't been putting together soundtracks for each chapter, because most of the chapters are based on one song, or a few of the songs that have common themes and narrative structures. The interplay of rap and writing for me is 1) Rap is literature so they're not that separate. 2) I just wanna write some shit that I been joyful about, had fun with, and studied my whole life. 3) Part of it is questioning this idea that in order to be a writer you have to have read or currently read a lot. I read one book from ages 12-21, and I turned out to be a writer. But I listened to a LOT of rap, and that's the first shit I went to ‘read’ when I started trying to be a writer. So what the fuck is reading? Is it listening, is it reciting rap lyrics for decades?”

“The one book I read from ages 12-21 was The Old Man and the Sea, which I really like. I haven't thought much about how that book affects my writing today, other than it being a short book, which I write short books, so maybe there's something there. I don't see any threads with that book and my book about rap, but I'll think about that more. That's a good-ass question! You know, because Hemingway is an old white dude that's in the canon, I've been resistant to even think about how that book affects my writing about rap, which is a traditionally marginalized form of literature made mostly by marginalized people. I didn't realize that until you asked the question. I'm not placing a value judgment on my resistance, but there's something there in terms of what is accepted literature and who is allowed to write it. So I don't know, I'll keep thinking: does Hemingway's book affect my writing about rap, should I allow it to if it doesn't? When writing about Nas, am I inspired to a higher degree of cultural identification as usual? I haven't thought about that. I don't think so, because I've had a lifetime of identifying with that, so that's taken care of, and I think I'm inspired to honor rap and the ways we often discuss it, listen to, and play with it in our communities. Shit, I guess that is culture identification. Okay, the answer is yes [laughs].”

My would-be universal perspective in writing, uncorrupted by cultural imperative, has always been tempered by the range of my experience. For all my years of self-immersion in Black arts, I remain fundamentally, separately white. When the cops show up, I worry maybe I’ll end up in jail, not be murdered. “I think it's a very white act to assert or imply the idea of transcending race, which is definitely writing out of whiteness,” says Dunn. “I'm not saying you, or people who think like that, are being malicious, but it's a result of whiteness/white culture. All of that ties into my response to your question about writers having a political responsibility. I think it's all political; our very existences, what jobs we have, who we live around, what types of characters populate our books and how they behave, is all political. It's a political act to assume a non-racialized set-up, or to feel politics don't belong in art, because it's already there. So I'm opposite in the belief that politics don't belong in art, and I do think writers could have more of a political responsibility. Like me (or anybody writing about Black people), I think we have a responsibility to show a full range of humanity within Blackness, because we aren't afforded that privilege in a lot of other areas outside of art, and that's a political act.”

“I love watching popular movies, the ones I love and even the ones I hate, like Star Wars, just to see what they're up to narratively and socially, and just for plain ol' fun sometimes. I actually learn a lot about storytelling from watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians and other reality shows. I think Moonlight is a political movie because it addresses systemic poverty and shows gay, Black men being joyful, experiencing pain, being tough, and being tender. I also think Star Wars was political, because there was only one Black dude, Finn, in a galaxy far, far away, with no Black family, but his job is to help a white lady hero. And I think stuff like that is a result of white writers unintentionally overlooking, or intentionally ignoring their political responsibility. In the Star Wars writer's imagination, there is one Black person in the future. To me, that's a real horror movie.”

Dunn maintains the responsibilities of a husband and father while holding down a day job in Denver and embodying a presence in the local spoken word scene. “My family is great—we support each other in whatever we're doing. It takes a lot of flexibility for them to support me as a writer, like me traveling to do readings and getting my MFA, or giving me some space to write and do homework. I know writing takes up a lot of space in our lives, so I try not to take too much. Like, I don't write much when everyone is awake, I'll try to save it for my own time.”

His clear-headed, deliberate approach has resulted in a well-deserved deluge of acclaim, including the filmic adaptation of Potted Meat in 2019. The result, entitled The Usual Route, directed by Cory C. Warner, met with praise at the Los Angeles International Film Festival. “I'm glad it was filmed in my hometown and that everyone in the movie is from my town. Oh, and we'll be releasing it online in November for free, probably on YouTube.”

Amid wildfires resulting from climate change, an erratic egomaniac at the nation’s helm, and in the time of COVID, when everything feels possible and powerful and unexpected and fertile, and when white artists might feel dazed by some imagined ultimacy of purpose, Steven Dunn is practical and sensible in every observable measure. My conversation with him has deepened my respect for his work; he is skilled at moving minds and manners with a few well-chosen words.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2020-2021 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020-2021

by Timothy Walsh

There has never been anything quite like the poetry of Deborah Digges. Search all the labyrinthine byways of contemporary poetry, and you will not find anything to match the preternatural clairvoyance Digges can conjure in her poems. Searingly luminous, intensely lyrical, often oracular, her poetry is paradoxically both rooted in the modern world, yet somehow timeless. Many of her poems seem almost like translations of things written millennia ago, the legacy of lost civilizations. A strange, otherworldly light pulses through her work so that in her greatest poems—which are many—you have the uncanny feeling that the surface of creation has been momentarily peeled back, allowing a glimpse beyond.

Some of her better-known poems, like “Winter Barn,” are poems of hair-raising revelation—a distillation so potent, so rare and concentrated, that the reader is transported through the ladder of her couplets to an alternate sphere of consciousness, coloring our perceptions of ourselves and the natural world long afterward:

Sparrows sailed the barn’s doomed girth, forsaken,

therefore free. They lit on rafters crossing the west windows
that flared at sunset like a furnace fed on stars.

Other poems, like “Telling the Bees,” have an incantatory, oracular quality that builds a participatory incandescence in the reader, so that you feel palpably the state of mind of the poet. Still other poems, like “Broom,” manage to encapsulate an entire spiritual autobiography into a meditation on house and family by focusing on a plain, everyday object—in this case a broom, that tool by which we sweep away the detritus and clutter from our lives, renewing ourselves in the act of renewing our abodes.

Despite having won many prestigious awards—the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Prize, Guggenheim and NEA grants—Digges is still not as well known as she should be. Digges published four collections of poetry between 1986 and 2005—Vesper Sparrows (Atheneum, 1986), Late in the Millennium (Knopf, 1989), Rough Music (Knopf, 1995), and Trapeze (Knopf, 2005). Digges’s untimely death in April 2009—deemed an “apparent suicide” by the authorities—was followed by the posthumous publication of her final collection, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart (Knopf, 2010). Here we find work of such visionary intensity, so supercharged with grief yet simultaneously lifted with an ecstatic, celebratory sense of wonder, that the best poems in this final collection truly represent the culmination of Digges’s genius. As Philip Schultz succinctly put it, “There is nothing like this book in our language.”

Now, ten years after the publication of that landmark collection, is an opportune moment to reexamine this final work of a poet who is arguably the most original and distinctive voice of the past fifty years.

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As the “Editor’s Note” to The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart explains, most of the poems in the collection had been revised for publication in book form, with clean copies prepared by Digges. Other poems, though, still existed in multiple versions with marginal notes about possible revisions. At the time of her death, a few newer poems had not yet been added to Digges’s working table of contents, so it can’t be certain she would have included them.

For readers not already familiar with Digges, it would be impossible to read the first four poems in The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart and not realize you were in the presence of a great poet, a voice authentic as thunder, images stark and powerful as lightning strikes. It is a voice unapologetically rhapsodic, suffused with a supercharged, grief-haunted lyricism:

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round

The predominantly elegiac tone of the poems in The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart continues the pattern of Digges’s previous collection, Trapeze, where a majority of the poems center on loss and bereavement—the death of her father and—most pivotally—the death of Digges’s third husband, Franklin Loew, to cancer. The effect is far from morose, however—the impact of the poems going far beyond simple sadness, grief, or sorrow. Rather, the intensity of the bereavement becomes a vehicle granting access to a deepening perception of the fragile and evanescent beauties of this world as we pass through it.

The poems of loss in The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart assume an almost Olympian perspective, grief having transmogrified into something visionary, even ecstatic. For example, in the opening lines of “Haying,” the dense musicality and rough-hewn rhythms propel the progression of sharply etched images that, characteristically, return to the theme of loss and bereavement:

Scythe to root cut, rolled backwards into time,
the hut-round ricks lashed down four-square with linen
like bonneted and faceless women.
Timothy and bromegrass so lately harvested
for yield, tripoded, teddered in sunlight, brush-hogged.
And here on frozen ground, great bales of hay
hacked free, alfalfa, oats in clover woven, pitchforked
from truck beds for the horses.
We watched them for years, their grazing.
Heartbreaking now such symmetry,
which kept our earthly house
that you or I would ever cross the windrows
of a field ripe for the haying, one or the other lost

The pangs of loss intensify with an image of the poet fashioning a shroud made of harvested hay, following her beloved into the netherworld in order to be reunited:

I’d try on death to find you, gown made of grasses
harvest time, early, the loose hay drying in the mow,
or knit from stores of birdsfoot trifold . . .

Here—as elsewhere in Digges—the fractured syntax mirrors the fracture of loss. The poem culminates with a merging of the grasses and the grave, united by the dark and mysterious earth that dictates the life cycle of pasture grasses as well as the inexorable arc of our own lives:

I have lain down across such orchard grasses on your grave
smelling the deep that keeps you, tasting snow,
something gone out of me forbidden, beyond birdsong
or vision, mantle trivial worn by the living . . .

In the poem, the remembrance of idyllic times spent together in pastures and hayfields is juxtaposed with the present, death having claimed the beloved and exchanged “our earthly house” for a house of earth. Like so many of Digges’s poems, “Haying” blends an autumnal reverie with vividly remembered scenes rendered all the more sharply through the magnifying lens of loss. The consolation—poetically speaking—is that the shattering intensity of the bereavement becomes a catalyst for intensified vision which would not otherwise have been possible.

This pattern is even more powerfully rendered in “The Birthing,” which recounts a time when Digges and her husband—the former Dean of Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine—stopped en route to a formal banquet to help a cow struggling to give birth in a field—a “front leg presentation” that, without some intervention, would probably prove fatal to both mother and calf:

A fatal sign he said while rolling up the sleeves
of his dress shirt, and climbed the fence.
I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet-to-be, where I imagined holy sparrows scattering
in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands just to make way.
With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one’s shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.

The cow gives birth to a bull calf in a “whoosh of blood and water.” Rubbing the calf dry with his tuxedo jacket and her green velvet cloak, they leave the calf suckling her mother, then—in an act of spontaneous and passionate joy—they make love in the car:

we huddled in the car.
And then made love toward eternity,
without a word drove slowly home. And loved some more.

This breathtakingly dramatic poem presents a primal scene of birth in an open field while the brooding presence of death hovers in the air like a dark angel. The compassionate intervention of the human couple saves the day, holding death at bay for the time being. The intensity of the experience overflows, almost involuntarily, into a passionate scene of lovemaking—the closeness of death and the miraculous birth precipitating a deeper awareness of the precariousness of life and of all human attachments.

The poem ends on a lovely, life-affirming note—but this joy, too, is bittersweet, tinged with the knowledge that you can only cheat death for so long. The entire poem is, in fact, a remembrance of a day long gone, colored by the stark, intervening fact of the husband’s tragic death, which accounts for the ceremoniously elegiac first lines of the poem: “Call out the names in the procession of the loved. / Call from the blood the ancestors here to bear witness . . .” The poem crystallizes all these powerful emotions into a single, elemental scene where dramatically opposed forces are suspended concentrically—birth and death, compassion and bereavement, joy and anguish. The principle tone may be elegiac, but the emotional palette is extremely complex.

Once again, the compensatory aspect of loss is the heightened realization of the hidden nature of things, including the fragile beauty of experiences that exist now only as memories. Seen through the lens of loss, the deepened significance that the remembered events acquire coalesces into the poem itself, an artifact that is at least a partial victory over the inexorable forces of death and decay, a temporary stay against the relentless onrushing of time.

In this way, Digges transmutes loss into higher awareness through the catalyst of the poem, an almost alchemical process that has been at the heart of literature since time immemorial. From The Odyssey to Paradise Lost, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to The Waste Land, loss has been perhaps the most omnipresent theme in poetry through the centuries, subsuming as it does an endless catalog of particularities.

Through all these works, the pivotal transaction involves a two-way thoroughfare whereby loss often paradoxically transforms into gain. In Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” for instance—where the poet mourns the loss of childhood vision, with its heightened immediacy and direct emotional response to the splendors of nature—the compensatory aspect is the great Ode itself, which could not have been written by the younger person of pure and unsullied vision celebrated in the ode. It is the loss that grants the higher perspective, and the poem itself stands as the crowning testament to this process. This is the essential paradox of loss, its dual nature—the anguish and grief of loss become a catalyst for deeper vision that would not otherwise have been possible.

This dual nature of loss is a key to a full appreciation of Digges’s poetry, where loss is often the mainspring of the poem as well as its originating impulse. Many of Digges’s poems also contain, like Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, remembrances of more idyllic times from her childhood, burnished days growing up on an apple orchard in Missouri, the sixth of ten children. As recounted in Digges’s poignant memoir, Fugitive Spring, this was no ordinary upbringing. Besides the apple orchard, her father also ran a cancer clinic. For the children, beekeeping, apple picking, and rural chores were the norm—as well as working at the clinic with cancer patients while attending to the legions of lab rats. Keenly observant of nature and of the cancer patients, many of them terminal, Digges’s early life intertwined the pastoral with the medical. Death was never far, nor was Eden. Whether dealing with lab rats injected with tumors or beehives overflowing with honey, Digges absorbed everything. All this filters up into the poems in subtle and not so subtle ways.

Also key to an understanding of Digges is noticing the focus on shelters, abodes, and dwelling places that runs through her writing and her life—the family’s sprawling Dutch Provincial house and their various barns and farm buildings, the fallout shelter her father builds for the family, the cancer clinic converted from a pre-Civil War estate, the innumerable bird nests that so fascinated Digges, and, later, the many, many houses where she lived after leaving Missouri. As she writes in “Broom,” “More than my sixteen rented houses and their eighty or so rooms / held up by stone or cinderblock foundations.” For Digges, the act of constructing and inhabiting a dwelling place, creating a shelter, becomes a bulwark against time, an antidote against loss, albeit a temporary one.

In this respect, the two “house” poems in Digges’s final collection are in many ways the culmination of her work. Like the cornerstones of twin arches, both “The House That Goes Dancing” and “The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart” take up this central imagery that runs through all of Digges’s work and bring it to a fitting apotheosis.

Both poems have to do with the destruction of houses, houses pulled off their foundations, dwelling places that break loose and careen self-destructively through the elements. For Digges, the destruction of a house is the central metaphor, image, and relic of loss, as the descriptions of abandoned houses and farms in her two memoirs testify.

There are also many premonitions of these two poems in Digges’s earlier poems, where descriptions of disintegrating structures—especially houses and barns—are strewn throughout. In “Guillotine Windows,” to take just one example, there is the central vision of “a house taken out to sea”:

See those young selves waving back at shore,
see them running, calling to you, as the walls of the house
break up, pulling from the foundation while the roof
slides sideways, gone, and the windows shatter

It is an arresting image of departed friends and family vanishing along with the house that used to shield them. The language is ceremonious, the mood autumnal and bittersweet.

“The House That Goes Dancing” is very different in mood, a brisk triple-time waltz that careens across the page:

Not always but sometimes when I put on some music
the house it goes dancing down through the yard
to cha-cha the willows or up into town
to tango the churches.
The neighbors, appalled, they call the police.
The dogcatcher chases my dogs up the street.

But this breezy waltz quickly modulates to a minor key:

love’s house she goes dancing her grief-stricken dance
for his unpacked suitcases, his detritus, his hair, his hairbrush,
his glasses, his letters, his toothbrush,
his closets of clothes where I crouch like a thief
when the house it goes dancing

The seemingly spritely idyll of the first lines turns even darker as the shadow of death further intrudes:

We are shaken and dragged, we are rattled
and whirled past the ending, his passing,
who waltz out of town,
all our mirrors well shattered, our china, our crystal,
our lightbulbs, our pictures have crashed from the walls.

This is a dance of dissolution, not of celebration, and yet it is that, too, in the characteristic double dance of loss: The destruction of the house, our human shelter, mirrors the death of the loved one, the body gone back to earth, with only scattered belongings and detritus left whirling. Yet the import of the poem—not directly stated—is this outpouring of love and grief, and it is through the poem that the full extent of this love is realized. The poem may be about death, dissolution, and loss, but the poem itself is a constructed edifice that counters the forces of dissolution it describes. It is in the act of constructing the poem, of building this shelter, of fabricating this house made of words, that redemption and recompense is found.

In “The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart,” there is a swirling, madcap dissolution of a house once again, but this time the association of the house as shelter and the body as the “house” of the soul is explicit:

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round

The wind careens through the rooms, and the house spins—rather like the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz—but all the images register doubly since we read everything through a dual lens, reading simultaneously from the perspective of house-as-body and of body-as-house (two sides of the same coin, but not the same thing):

. . . the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through my rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love. And my dresses
they are lifted like brides come to rest
on the bedstead, crucifixes,
dresses tangled in trees in the rooms
of my heart.

All this commotion and the tumble of images leads up to the poem’s pivotal statement: “It is not for me to say what is this wind / or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.” The irony here is that this poem does attempt to say what this wind is, to describe the ineffable source of inspiration by analogy through the medium of words, and it does succeed as much as words can, despite the denial.

Characteristically, this poem, too, modulates to a meditation on loss and mortality, but in this case there are no particular departed loved ones to lament, just the cold fact of death:

Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead
the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,
no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.

In the final lines, it becomes a poem of lament, of resignation—but also of defiance, demonstrating the dexterity of the poet to weave this complex analogy into something cogent and powerful despite our powerlessness to escape death. The poem escapes, and the lived moment, the heightened awareness captured in the poem, survives.

An earlier uncollected poem by Digges, “Enjoy the Wind Catcher,” can provide an illuminating context for “The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart.” Here is the poem in its entirety, as published in the August 1999 issue of The Cortland Review:

Enjoy the Wind Catcher

I died and came alive in a field after a rain.
I knew myself as song, as haunting,
a child’s dress hung like a scarecrow
in a garden, bright words painted on a banner.
My dogs ran out ahead of me across the fire grass,
the flats of rain tracking the sky.
This was my last life, my destiny
who called, “Enjoy the wind-catcher!”

It is a beautiful, enigmatic poem, somewhat uncharacteristically succinct for Digges, and with a puzzling final line. Why would her destiny call to her to enjoy “the wind-catcher”? A wind catcher is an architectural device—also called a wind tower or a wind scoop—for catching a breeze and channeling it through a building for ventilation and to cool the interior. They have been in use since ancient times. For Digges, it is also an apt image for the poet, sifting the wind for inspiration, capturing and channeling the winds. Significantly, this image also involves a built structure. “Enjoy the Wind Catcher” most likely recalls a day long before in Texas when Digges first started writing poetry on an impulse, inspired by Emerson’s essay “The Poet.” As described in Fugitive Spring, she was then living in Lubbock while her first husband, Charles, was training to be an Air Force pilot.

Now, with “The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart”—probably the last poem Digges ever wrote—this image comes full circle. Here, she literally becomes the wind catcher, the wind whirling through the capacious rooms of her heart.

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When Deborah Digges climbed to the top of McGuirk Alumni Stadium at UMass Amherst, watched the Temple University women’s lacrosse team practicing on the green grass below, then plummeted to her death, she left no note. After investigating, the authorities deemed it an “apparent suicide,” though some, including one of Digges’s sons, questioned this at the time, since Digges often exercised at the stadium.

Digges left no note, but she did leave the manuscript of The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart on her desk. This collection had been slow to come together. About a year before her death, Digges met with her editor at Knopf, Deborah Garrison, to go over an early draft of the upcoming collection, then tentatively titled The Dance of the Seven Veils. As related by Garrison to me in private communications, their conversation was lively and productive, but Garrison told her plainly that she didn’t love the proposed title. Digges readily agreed. “I think the title poem has yet to be written,” Digges said, and they left it at that.

After her apparent suicide, her son Charles found the folder with the manuscript on her desk. He opened the folder, and there was a new first poem in the collection, “The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart.”

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Ever since Digges’s “apparent suicide,” there has been a pronounced tendency for critics to sift through her poems and interpret them retroactively through the lens of her suicide. This is especially true of the last poem in her final collection, “Write a Book a Year.” With this poem, it is perhaps understandable, given the facts of Digges’s death and the poem’s arresting beginning:

Well the wild ride into the earth was thrilling,
really, scared as I was and torn and sore.
I say what other woman could have managed it?
My life before then
picking flowers against my destiny
what glance, what meeting,
who was watching, what we don’t know we know,
the hour we chose and we are chosen.
And suddenly the dead my mission,
the dark my mission.

This final poem of Digges’s last collection could indeed be read as a suicide note—but the editors, not Digges, chose this as the last poem for the collection, and “Write a Book a Year” was written at least two and a half years before her death (as confirmed by Garrison). It is certainly a fine poem, a strong poem, and a fitting poem to end the collection, but it is not a suicide note. On the contrary, the final lines of the poem are about rescue, rebirth, and reawakening:

We are pulled forward by our hair
to be anointed in the barren garden.
I want the dark back, the bloody well of it,
my face before the fire,
or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way
to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander.

The closing lines suggest rebirth through a cleansing ritual—new life, not death. The image of being “pulled forward by our hair” is especially striking, and in fact it recalls a formative childhood incident in Digges’s life. When she was eight, Digges fell through the ice on a pond where the children skated. As she wrote in Fugitive Spring:

The ice gave way under me . . . until it simply opened up like a door. I don’t remember being cold or afraid that I might die, but rather the way the sun looked from under the ice, like a dirty paper lantern over a weak bulb. . . . Each time I grabbed for a hold, the ice came off in my hands, as though the ladder I climbed were sinking, rung by rung.

Luckily, her father was nearby and crawled out on the ice on his belly:

He reached down into the hole and pulled me out by my hair. I had a little cold afterward, my mother would say, but that was all. In the spring we found my boots floating like small boats on the pond.

Similar references to hair and being pulled forward by the hair abound in Digges’s poetry. In “Write a Book a Year,” the movement is from an initial fall from the heights—a “wild ride,” if not necessarily a death leap—to a closing image of rescue, of being saved and resuscitated so that the speaker can “wake clear and wander.” The poem certainly has overtones of a death wish, but, if so, it is more of a katabasis, a descent to the underworld, as with Orpheus or Ishtar, both of whom return. In this sense, “Write A Book A Year” also reads like an extension of “Haying,” with its image of the poet’s descent to the underworld seeking the beloved.

There is another layer to the poem, though, that explains its otherwise puzzling title, and which at first seems out of sync with what’s being described. Like many of Digges’s poems, there is a pivot point midway through “Write a Book a Year.” Here, the pivot point is the enigmatic line, “He’d find me pounding out the hours”:

And suddenly the dead my mission
the dark my mission.
He’d find me pounding out the hours.
Spring is for women, spring clawing at our hearts.
We are pulled forward by our hair . . .

Though it provides the merest whiff of a context for the poem, this line is what pulls the whole thing together. The line describes the poet being found working late on her poems—probably by her husband, Frank—“pounding out the hours” as she painstakingly transcribes the midnight tremors into her art. (Elsewhere, Digges describes how the house would echo with the “banging of the typewriter” from her room.) Retroactively, we realize that the “death leap” described at the beginning of the poem is actually a description of the poet descending into the underworld, into the trance of creation, in order to fashion her poems.

In this sense, the title “Write a Book a Year” is ironic, especially since Digges came nowhere close to writing a book a year. This also accounts for the poem’s initially glib, slightly sarcastic tone—“Well the wild ride into the earth was thrilling”—as if to say that the poet’s descent into the underworld to excavate and retrieve these poems were an easy matter.

Fittingly, the poem ends with an image of fire: “I want the dark back, the bloody well of it/ my face before the fire.” For Digges, fire is complex, double-edged like the theme of loss. An earlier poem, “My Life’s Calling,” begins:

My life’s calling, setting fires.
Here in a hearth so huge
I can stand inside and shove
the wood around with my
bare hands . . .

The main import here is of the poet’s vocation as an incendiary act. The poet sets fires, destroying our quotidian equivocations and our bland confidence that we actually understand the facts of our existence and the world we live in as it whirls through space.

But, like loss, fire has a dual nature. Fire destroys, but when harnessed it gives light and warmth. The same fire you cook with can also burn your house down. Fire is destruction and loss; fire is boon and blessing. Both are true.

It is the same way with loss. Loss is negation, death, dissolution, yet loss can also be life-giving, the warmth generated in its aftermath capable of fueling new creation that would otherwise not have been possible. Just as with the antithetical nature of fire, embracing contradictory opposites, the theme of loss that runs through Digges’s poetry cuts two ways.

And it is the countermotion of poetic creation that reveals the full dual nature of loss: Ourselves and our shelters will decay into nothing, but we can spin a saving chrysalis out of thin air that enlarges our awareness so we can perhaps see loss in a larger context, a more cosmic context, in which the coming and going of individual lives, flashing briefly like so many lightning bugs, is no longer cause for alarm.

Profound loss brings profound grief, which can trigger the compensatory creative act of writing, of constructing poems from the bric-a-brac of our lives, building them as shelters, as dwellings, as houses. Digges was a builder, like the birds and their nests that she so admired. Her poems can get under your skin like no others—the tone sometimes intimate and whispering, sometimes bardic and ceremonial. They pulse with a dangerous, seductive allure. Digges invites you in, ushers you in, knowing you, too, seek shelter: Poem as nest. Poem as a house we wander through, the poet a wind catcher.

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Lawrence Fixel
edited, with an introduction, by Gerald Fleming
Sixteen Rivers Press ($22)

by John Bradley

If there’s one line that best captures the spirit of Lawrence Fixel’s poetry and prose, it’s this one from “Truth, War, and the Dream-Game”: “The closer we look, the more massive the ambiguity.” Fixel (1917-2003) is best known for his prose poems, in particular his parables, which were often mysterious, paradoxical, and philosophical. (While Fixel tried to differentiate between his prose poems and parables, he confessed that the two really “shifted and narrowed” until they were indistinguishable.) Fixel’s Collected Poetry and Prose (a hefty 571 pages) firmly marks him as one of the most unique and accomplished practitioners of the prose poem.

Before discussing Fixel’s prose, the reader would do well to review a parable by Franz Kafka, a major influence on Fixels’ writing along with Borges, Kierkegaard, Brecht, and Heralictus. Kafka’s “Leopards in the Temple” can conveniently be found in the Collected (no translator is credited) as Fixel uses it as an epigraph to a poem with a near-identical title:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.

If a parable is meant to be “a usually short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle,” as Merriam Webster says, Kafka, and subsequently Fixel, turn it on its head. In their hands, the parable becomes an instrument of creating uncertainty and ambiguity. As Fixel puts it, “The ancient and modern parable often involved the overthrow an expectation: the reversal of some deep-grounded assumption or explicit belief.” We come away from the parables of Kafka and Fixel more unsure of the world than before. Here’s the closing line of Fixel’s “The Leopards/The Temple”: “Is it any wonder then that—whatever we desire or fear—we can no longer tell whether a Leopard, a Unicorn, or the neighbor’s child is even now standing before the door?” This conclusion undermines even the identity of the leopards.

Fixel’s originality, however, stems not only from his use of ambiguity. His parables almost always utilize a number of sections, each with shifts in perspective. This constant shifting often feels dreamlike, as in his parable “The Career of Hands,” which consists of three parts. The first section seems to be rather mundane:

Seated at the desk, I wait with hands poised above the keys. Usually I get a signal, a clue on how to proceed. This time, however, only some vague suggestions, impossible to follow. My choice then to lower the hands and make contact is arbitrary, without direction. But for a while, just the sight of letters becoming words is reassuring. . . .

It appears that a writer, waiting for a “signal,” has yet to feel inspired, and yet the feel of the fingers on the keyboard offers some consolation. But, as in a dream, the setting shifts in section two:

. . . Under a shaped beam of light, I see the bench, the polished, curved wood of the piano. The stage is immense; the audience a silent, weighted mass. Coming forward, I resist the impulse toward panic and flight. Since I am here, I tell myself, my destination is also my destiny. Yet I cannot be sure whether I am worthy of the instrument, or whether I can perform the prescribed music. . . .

How quickly the writer has gone from reassured, in section one, to anxious. It seems the awareness of an audience has led to this anxiety. The third section makes an even more surprising leap, though the focus on hands continues:

. . . As I enter the crowded chapel, heads are turning, being raised toward the huge panorama on the ceiling. Bending back to look there, I find the familiar images of God and Adam somehow distorted, out of focus. . . . I turn then toward the walls, the curved arches that support the ceiling. What of the mason, the laborer, who put the stones in place? No clue as to what brings the urgent question. No possible answer. Above us the extended arms, the groping fingers continue to miss connection. . . .

The speaker seems to be in the Sistine Chapel, in this last section, looking at its most famous facet, though the image is “somehow distorted.” Rather than focusing on the artistic image of hands, the speaker wonders about the hands of the anonymous laborers who built the chapel. Though there’s “No possible answer” as to who these workers were, the answer is not necessary. For Fixel the question is all-important.

While Fixel’s work contains a strong sense of the absurd and a wry sense of humor, there is no real comparison with the prose poems of Russell Edson. They exchanged many letters, Gerald Fleming states in his introduction, and they must have enjoyed each other’s work. Edson’s prose, however, pushes absurdity to the fore, while in Fixel’s prose it lingers in the air.

Another writer who promoted the prose poem in the U.S. early on, along with Fixel and Edson, is Robert Bly. Fixel’s The Scale of Silence: Parables was his first major work, a chapbook published in 1970 by George Hitchcock, the editor of the celebrated poetry journal Kayak; Hitchcock also published Bly’s prose poem chapbook The Morning Glory that same year. Rooted in sensory detail, Bly’s poems offer metaphorical transformations, with associative leaps that seemed to gain power from the close observations. The leap from the caterpillars legs to “nine soft accordions,” for example, in his poem “A Caterpillar on the Desk,” makes a surprising comparison, and yet feels grounded in physical observation at the same time.

Fixel’s Collected may surprise readers who know him through his prose, as it offers over 130 pages of Fixel’s verse as well. The poems, much more concise than the prose, demonstrate Fixel’s versatility as a writer, yet display at the same his fondness for myth, paradox, and ambiguity, as can be seen in “Notes on a Doppelganger,” here in its entirety:

Mister it was you
whose face stalked through endless windows
in the city of bronze horsemen:
white hands and bony head
the gift of race and culture:
that privileged intensity
at home among the books—
while I ate bitter bread on dusty stairs.

The reader is not told where this event takes place, other than it’s a city with “bronze horsemen.” In a Fixel poem, whether in verse or prose, specifics drop away for the more important mythic situation to be limned. It’s the doppelganger that commands the speaker’s attention, this double who is fond of culture and who contrasts with the speaker located on the “dusty stairs,” and who apparently isn’t comfortable with privilege. And yet, the poem leaves the reader wondering if this “double” isn’t the other side of the speaker. The influence of Borges can be felt.

Like the parables, Fixel’s poems move “beyond the cage of reason.” It appears, however, that the poems came before the prose. One poem in this collection, “What the Wastebasket Tells,” was composed in 1940. In another poem dated 1954, “Assault on the White Frame House,” the prose voice can be heard emerging in the verse: “We sent a small force to isolate the garage / and reduce the strongpoint of their sandbox; / then with gophers encircled, we began / the frontal din of our synchronized watches.” This is only a short step away from the parable.

In addition to the prose and poems, the Collected features a section called “Words on Lawrence Fixel.” Short essays by Peter Johnson, Christina Fisher, David Lazar, Donald L. Soucy, Edward Mycue, Sharon Coleman, and Peter Money praise Fixel’s work and provide personal glimpses of the man and his workplace. One of the most insightful comments comes from Coleman’s “Parable, Parabola, Possible: On Lawrence Fixel,” where she states: “There’s never a lesson or a truth [in Fixel’s writing] but the dream of the pursuit of truth—and the questioning of the pursuit itself.” Any certainty only creates more possibilities and more questions for Fixel and his reader. While the essays on Fixel justly praise this talented writer, they raise a larger question: Why not use these pages of encomiums for excerpts from Fixel’s correspondence? Gerald Fleming mentions there are letters to “more than a hundred writers,” including Andrei Codrescu, Jack Gilbert, Michael Heller, Raymond Carver, Jack Marshall, Mary Randall, George Oppen, Laura Ulewicz, and Russell Edson. The reader can only hope that Fleming or another editor will soon publish a volume of Fixel’s correspondence.

The prose poem has become so popular, so ubiquitous, that it’s hard to remember a time when it was frowned upon by many editors. It’s also easy to forget who the pioneers of the prose poem were. Lawrence Fixel was one of those early practitioners, and as the Collected shows, his work still resonates decades after they were composed. With humor, with wonder, with paradox, Fixel’s parables seem ageless.

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by John Toren

As Covid-19 forced us all to spend more time indoors last spring, I found myself drawn more than ever to simple, earthy prose. Homespun descriptions of rural life offered an effective counterweight to daily death tolls and the homicidal plotlines of standard streaming fare. I steered clear of the environmental harangues that are so common these days (important though they may be), and I also avoided narratives of wilderness adventure, which tend to focus on human endurance and close calls with disaster rather than the supple and harmonious interactions of living things.

Perhaps I'm isolating a narrow slice of experience here, but I had no trouble finding things to satisfy the need, from children's books (Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson) to fiction (Jean Giono's Blue Boy) to reappraisals of agricultural history (James McGregor's Back to the Garden: Nature and the Mediterranean World from Prehistory to the Present) to memoir (Swedish entomologist Fredrik Sjoberg's wide-ranging essay The Fly Trap.) But the book that perhaps offered the most satisfying read was Hal Borland's Beyond Your Doorstep: A Handbook to the Country.

Alfred Knopf published the book back in 1962, but I spotted a pristine copy of the first edition just last summer at Beagle and Wolf Books, a small but well-stocked shop in Park Rapids, MN. The front endpaper carries an inscription to “Alice and Hamlet, from Plummer and Ida, Dec-25-1963,” written with a fountain pen in elegant cursive script that resembles my mother’s handwriting—and that of many other women of her time. Although by 1962 Knopf had been sold to Random House, the book is decorated with the same sort of wing-dings we find in earlier Knopf editions stretching from Sigurd Olson's canoeing essays back to the famous works of Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather, and Thomas Mann.

To judge from the lack of wear, I don’t think Alice and Hamlet ever got around to reading the book. Borland describes it in the foreword as a handbook rather than a field guide. His goal is “to indicate what to look for and where and when.” If he inspires the reader to move on to guide books for details, then Borland will consider his purpose to have been fulfilled.

Perhaps he was being modest, but such a précis fails to account for the intrinsic value—I’m tempted to say the “poetry”—of the prose itself, which draws on both the author’s vast knowledge of the natural world and his relaxed, slightly folksy New England tone. Though he wrote regularly for the New York Times, Borland spent much of the year on his farm in northwestern Connecticut.

Borland makes it clear early on that he knows the names of the trees, the bugs, and the fish, how they interrelate, and where they’re likely to be found. Excluding genuine wilderness from his purview, he focuses on phenomena that anyone in the eastern United States might easily come upon during a two-hour hike down a country road or fifteen minutes in a barn. To dip into any of the first six chapters, which range from “Pastures and Meadows” to “The Bog and the Swamp” and “Flowing Waters,” might be the next best thing to actually taking such a walk.

Come mid-April and the shadblow blooms in the riverside woods like tall spurts of shimmering white mist among the leafless trees. I first knew shadblow in the high mountains of southwestern Colorado, which simply proves how broad is the range of this cousin of the apple. But I knew it there as serviceberry. In the Northeast it gets the name shadblow or shadbush because it comes to blossom when the shad come up the streams to spawn—or did come when the streams were habitable for shad, not heavily polluted. It blossoms in tufts of small, white, long-petaled flowers before the leaves appear.

As an aside, the name “serviceberry” also has a New England derivation: The tree blooms in the spring at just the time when the ground has thawed enough to make it feasible to conduct funeral services and bury those who had died the previous winter.

At a few points later in the book, Borland’s attention veers off in less personal directions, as if his editor had told him, “Hal, you’ve got to write a chapter on the night sky. And how about one on foraging? And poisonous plants?” We don’t need to be told that the five major planets are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, for example. To his credit, in the section on foraging Borland describes quite a few edible plants, one after another, but doesn’t shrink from admitting that most of them taste terrible or are not worth the effort required to gather them.

The chapter on birds also seems a little weak, though it runs to twenty-eight pages. Borland clearly knows his birds; he mentions that in the course of a given summer he is sometimes able to distinguish between five individual Baltimore orioles on the basis of slight variations in their song. But he spends less times sharing his encounters with the warblers, vireos, flycatchers and raptors in the woods around his farm than assuring readers that birding isn't as hard as it may seem, and encouraging them to buy binoculars.

All the same, there are a few things to be learned or enjoyed on nearly every page of this welcoming and erudite ramble across the New England countryside. And near the end of the book, Borland draws upon all the lore he's been sharing to take us through a brief tour of the passing seasons, month by month. As a wrap-up, he devotes an entire chapter to the issue of common versus scientific names, and provides a long list of equivalents.

Shadblow? Serviceberry? We’re talking here about the Amalanchier canadensis.

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Monica Barron
Golden Antelope Press ($15.95)

by Andy Harper

The first collection from a seasoned poet of place, Monica Barron’s Prairie Architecture is particularly good pandemic reading. To write the rural Missouri college town where Barron is a professor of English and to live in the era of distancing both call for the patterns of observation ingrained in the form and voice of these poems.

A distanced intimacy unites the collection, introduced by the speaker of the opening poem, who listens over coffee to

 Gerry
in the screen-porch playing cello
to a cornfield yellowing fast . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the dogs covered in dust
that someone bellows for or maybe it’s to
out of anger that yellows his dried-up life.

Barron conjures the essayistic idler figure, listening from diners, fire pits, and hair salons, notebook at hand. This quiet intimacy resists the trite observation of small towns (that everyone knows everyone’s business), invoking instead an ethic of witness. Histories overheard in gas stations or at parties mobilize communal grieving, share warnings and fables of imperfect justice. In “Hunting Song,” the speaker muses,

If only the river had taken Audrey under
its mighty wing. She might never have shot
her husband in the kitchen after close.
The sign still says Audrey’s Place, but
how empty, how silent the place with her gone.

Barron makes of this roadside edifice an impromptu memorial, as she does elsewhere with a grain bin, an open field. In doing so, she acknowledges dual truths: that to belong to a place is to pass daily through these ghosts of history, and that their lessons are always contingent—legible more in hypotheticals than in certainties.

Prairie Architecture displays an appropriate nonchalance regarding structure, allowing us to slip with Barron into the comfort both of form and of a small Midwestern town without allowing repetition to stifle. Form remains loose, breaks down in improvisation, adaptation. “Meditation from West of the River” introduces a rule for repeated lines around stanza breaks—

Crossing the Mississippi late at night
I saw the ground fog rising to cover the road.

I saw the ground fog rising to cover the road
give way to frost. Say what you want about love

—then allows that rule to become lax:

I want to help you live, to finally find
the synapse that connects the heart and mind.

Whatever it is that connects the heart and mind
it’s at the mercy of memory.

Here again is Barron’s commitment to ambiguity. Here, too, and elsewhere, the author invites us into the process and prehistory of the poem. In some pieces, numbered segments mediate a range of historical and cognitive chronologies, charting how observation and meditation together mobilize meaning. Throughout, segmentation and circularity highlight patterns of life from small talk and travel to climate change and resource extraction.

This book is lucidly aware of its moment. In one of a handful of poems departing Kirksville for Barron’s annual trip to New Mexico, the speaker observes,

Before the border walls
there were mission walls.
At Tumacacori they crumbled
to Sonoran sand
and the fossilized pits
of Fr. Kino’s peaches.
Jesus replants the mission
orchard with the oldest
root stock he can find.

The double meaning that here collapses Christ with a farm worker plays throughout Prairie Architecture, but “Jesus in Three Movements” keenly renders the collection’s commitment to returning to our foundations—old walls of the past—to revive and reclaim an ethic of care with which to re-/build the psychic infrastructure our present moment demands. Near the end of the book, “Looking for Democrats in Novinger, MO” processes the 2016 election, offering gratitude to “older Black feminists” and Leonard Cohen, to old friends and “those younger who want our knowledge.”

Barron offers no blueprint for living through this pandemic; she not only tolerates but celebrates ambiguity and the constructed-ness of things. If these poems do offer any model, however, it is one for observing, for bearing witness, for gratitude and friendship. What we will do in these rural college towns is what we already do best: keep on caring for each other. This is the architecture of community and the politics of place.

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