The Enlargement Art Brings Us | Mark S. Burrows
When is a leaf more than a leaf? This is not, presumably, a question a crow would ask—unless, of course, it was building a nest. It might also be a far reach for us when we find ourselves swept along by life’s relentless pace. A poem, though, might invite us to pause. To linger with what is close at hand. To imagine the leaf as an opening, connecting us somehow to the larger web of life. Good poems startle us into sensing unexpected convergences, the kind that shape our lives even when we fail to notice them.
The poet Jane Hirshfield, this year’s keynoter for the upcoming Camden Festival of Poetry, opens one of her essays on poetry entitled “Strange Reaches, Impossibility, and Big Hidden Drawers: Poetry and Paradox” with such a musing: “The word ‘leaf’ in a poem means ‘leaf,’ and yet it means something else also—it cannot help but be also green or dry, carry life or dying, connection to or isolation from the larger branch. Things are fully themselves, and as surely are not only that” (in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World).
A simple observation, but one that quivers with insight, suggesting that things might be more than they initially appear. “Strange reaches,” as it were, which is what poems help us remember: “A book of poems, a painting,” she goes on to say, “is small, a liftable object located outside the self—words are weightless as illegible dust, paint is ground minerals and oil, daubable onto stiff cloth. Yet what is in them enters a person and becomes, as we say, ‘large as life,’ and life’s waistband suddenly needs letting out.”
Her suggestion, of course, is shaped by metaphor. Only a thorough-going literalist would be confused by her claim since gazing at a painting or lingering over the lines of a poem will not fatten us up, at least not physically. Such attentiveness, though, might deepen us in ways that alter our perceptions—of ourselves, of others, of our world. And that altered way of seeing meets our natural yearning to discover the “more” that is in every “thing” we live with. Including leaves.
Hirshfield’s own poems are like this: they often begin with something so utterly ordinary and familiar that we no longer see where it might lead us. Take her poem “As a Hammer Speaks to a Nail” (in The Beauty. Poems [2015]) which opens with what seems a dark reckoning:
When all else fails,
fail boldly,
fail with conviction,
as a hammer speaks to a nail,
or a lamp left on in daylight.
Reading these lines, we find ourselves in the realm of impossibilities—that bespeak failure. Hammers don’t speak to nails, or to anything else for that matter. And what about the call to “fail boldly,” a
thought strangely out of sync with our “success-at-all-costs” culture. What might be behind such an imperative? Is this the musings of a “loser”? If the poem ended there, this might be a valid conclusion to draw.
But Hirshfield carries us further as the poem continues:
Say one.
If two does not follow,
say three, if that fails, say life,
say future.
What a startling sequence of apparently unrelated things. What would it mean, if the order of numbers is broken, to “say life”? To “say future”? To realize that failing, when it happens, is not final? That even failing has a “life”? And a “future”? The poem goes on from here to muse about how we might return to say “one” when all else has failed, but this time saying it “with greater conviction // as a nail speaks to a picture, / as a hammer left on in daylight.”
On one level, the poem edges into that landscape of the impossible, at least on the surface of things. But what happens to us when we discover that things are more than they appear to be? When they enlarge us through that “more” and the attention we bring to them—and to our lives, our world? Hirshfield continues in her essay to say that “[i]nclusion of the impossible, the unsayable, and paradox is some part of how the enlargement art brings us is made.”
This is the heart of what poetry is and why we need it: it invites us, through words, into the realm of the “unsayable.” It calls us to live into the “enlargements” that art offers. To realize that our lives are richer than we often assume, alive with convergences and connections we often fail to see. Hirshfield’s poems do this the way medieval alchemists sought to do, transmuting a common thing like lead—impossibly—into something precious like gold.
Join us on Friday, May 16, for Jane’s craft talk at the Camden Public Library, “Information, Invitation and Insight: Transitions in Poems,” 2 – 4 pm (paid registration required). The Craft Talk has a few seats available to attend in person at the Camden Library, and many more over Zoom.
And on Saturday, May 17, she will invite us, in her keynote address, to consider “Living by Poetry.” The Festival is free and open to the public. Her talk stands as the capstone of a marvelous afternoon, beginning at 1 pm, that opens with readings by area poets and performances by singer-songwriters, with workshops on the craft of poetry and a book fair, concluding with Jane’s address at 4 pm.
Mark Burrows is a poet and translator, scholar and speaker. He is well known for his academic and popular work on medieval mysticism and as a translator and interpreter of Rainer Maria Rilke's writings. He lives and writes in Camden, ME, where he is the co-founder and co-director, with Meg Weston, of the Camden Festival of Poetry. www.soul-in-sight.org
