"A Living Poem"
from
The Wild Braid:
A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden
by Stanley Kunitz
with Genine Lentine
photos by Marnie Crawford Samuelson
I am not done with my changes.
— "The Layers"Is it ever possible to have a poem as glorious as this gentian blossom? It would be difficult. I heard someone say once, "I'd rather look at a painting of a sky any day than the sky." I have to say that's one of the more preposterous things I've heard. Sometimes I walk out and see the sky in all its changeability – especially here on the Cape – and recall that statement. It's like saying you'd rather read a love story than be in love.
"an image that flows"
On some level, when I was looking at that sloping sand, I had a vision of my garden as it is now, certainly in terms of its composition, structure, and form.
What I wanted was to heighten the image of a garden that seems to have taken over a steep hillside, something at rest and in motion at the same time.
The colors of flowers have different vibrations, akin to what Rimbaud spoke of when he referred to the colors of vowels. Rimbaud was one of my very early influences, so that would be a natural alliance here in this garden. There is an internal motion, a sense of timing arising out of the nature of this particular garden, of the plants growing and blooming and fading and falling away. And there is the natural motion that comes from the wind itself.
There are so many expressions of what we call "beautiful." The sand dune that was originally there had a beauty of its own, with its reminiscence of the great dunes along the borders of the sea in Provincetown, but this was not suitable for a domesticated situation. The plan was to bring the wild beauty of the dunes into a different context and transform it into a habitat teeming with organic plant life.
When I'm away from the garden, the image I have of it is an image that flows. Mainly I don't picture it as individual plants, but as a multitude.
Stanzas
I conceived of the garden as a poem in stanzas. Each terrace contributes to the garden as a whole in the same way each stanza in a poem has a life of its own, and yet is part of a progressive whole as well.
The form provides some degree of repose, letting our mind rest in the comparatively manageable unit of the stanza, or terrace. Yet there is also a need to move on, to look beyond the stanza, into the poem as a whole.
Often, when you finish reading a poem, the impulse is to revisit the beginning now that you've been all the way through it, and then each subsequent trip through the poem is different and colored by having seen the whole thing.
Once you have perceived the garden as a whole, the individual tiers of the garden take on a different form because you have seen them both as a part and as a whole. One of the mysteries of gardening is that the garden reflects the viewer's own state of being at the time, just as your response to a poem lets you know something about your preoccupations or your susceptibility as you read it.
The garden communicates what it shows to you but you also contribute to the garden some of what you are seeking in terms of your own life, your own state of being. One reason a garden can speak to you is that it is both its own reality and a manifestation of the interior life of the mind that imagined it in the beginning.
The Gate to Hell
In naming the area I call "The Gate to Hell" I was playing on the verbal concept that this was the dead end of the garden. That set up an image that then translated to its being the gate to the underworld. After I started calling it that, it became that in my imagination, and then it became a burial spot. Our cat Celia is buried there.
I don't find it unfriendly, in any way. Actually, my curiosity draws me to it rather than persuades me to stay away. I have an image of labyrinthine caves starting there, and secrets that are kept from anyone here on earth, except in imagination. It seemed just the right place for an underworld passage to start.
It's the area of deepest shade in the garden under the cryptomerium and the yew hedge. The plants that flourish there now – lamium, hostas, ferns, ivy, and the delicate epimediums with their heart-shaped leaves – are what remain from all sorts of experiments in survival. That area has such a different feel from the boisterous second tier, with its cosmos and salvia and roses, all growing in full sun.
The selection of plants in one tier conditions what will go into the others. The rhythm of the garden is a form of motion, actually. The connection between flowers at different levels of the garden makes a bridge between the different parts of the garden, and the eye, in motion, responds. For example, the platycodon below, and the thalictrum in the tier above it, have a definite relationship. They vary in every possible way you can think of, including the size of the flower, but they have a connection in their color. The blues have a strength of character that makes them particularly effective in the planning of the garden. The pinkish blue of the thalictrum is a modification of the deep blue of the platycodon. The eye responds by bridging the space between the two, making a single visionary action that embraces the different tiers of the garden.
And they both have a delicacy and strength. Considering the height of the thalictrum, it's remarkable that they stand so upright. We could say the platycodon is rhyming with the thalictrum. Repetition can unify an experience; it's very comforting, reassuring, which brings us back to the stanzaic concept. The garden as a whole is full of plants that echo the plants one first perceives from the bottom tier. It's not only a question of color, but of height, and of contrasting foliage, bearing in mind that no single plant must dominate the area, that there is a harmony. That is a first consideration in the selection of the plants. So while hollyhocks were just right in my farm garden, they were disproportionate here. That's why it's so hard to fit cannas in a garden in this region, even if they look perfectly at home in a more tropical setting. In their grandiose way they are beautiful, but they don't blend in here, they're show-offs. And the garden is not only an ornamental place, but a habitat and a civilization.
In a poem as well, when there is a word or line that calls attention to itself and not to the flow of meaning, this can be deadly. The poem has its own laws about what it can contain and what it needs to exclude. You have to trust the poem. The garden, too, will tell you, usually rather quickly, if you've planted something in the wrong place.
"a garden that dances"
I'm drawn to variegated foliage. It has less density than a monolithic plant and catches the sunlight in a way that a uniformly green leaf does not. It brings a certain degree of surprise. Halfway between a green leaf and a flower, it intimates bloom itself.
There are some gardens, for example, that seem almost stationary because of the repetition of one color. I like a garden that dances; variegation of the leaves and variation in color of the bloom and in texture all keep the garden alive.
There are areas where you want the garden to suggest the variability of the emotional life. Too many gardens I've seen seem to express only one mood or one state of being. There is a dependence, a reliance on the effectiveness, let's say, of a single color, as though it were the only state of being that corresponds with one's concept of the beautiful.
"the underlying song"
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. As when a flower is preparing to bloom, or after it has bloomed, when it is suspending its strengths and its potency and is at rest – or seems to be, its mission to flower and to produce seed having been fulfilled.
There's that sense that unless something's in bloom, nothing is going on; it's dead in the garden. People talk about a plant being "done" – "the salvia's done for the season" – as if blooming is all a plant has to do. That's a complete fallacy and limitation.
There are areas in the garden that are in no way reliant on bloom. For example, in the lower garden, there is a large planting of Sieboldiana hostas. Their broad waves of quilted, glaucous foliage create the effect of water. That's an area that always comforts me. It has a kind of assurance, a sense of well-being.
Hostas can be difficult to work into a garden because they have a tendency toward a kind of pride, a self-assertion that can be offensive. Part of that effect comes from their wide flat leaves, but also they seem so much more physical than other plants, muscular: the heavyweight champions of the garden. I've given them space so they're not interfering with any other growth there. They've taken over that area and they're so comfortable down there, they're not so concerned with dominating. This is their country.
• • •
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 apparent 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.
"never try to explain"
There were no paths; I had to create the paths. There was a question of where they should be. I finally set them along the front because I wanted the view of the garden looking up. It seemed to me the right way of looking at the garden. I wanted a winding path to the steps in front of the house instead of a straight path. I avoided straight lines as much as possible.
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 understanding 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.
In the poem, there is an impulse that moves from line to line, from image to image, but complete revelation is not achieved until the poem arrives at its terminal point, at which time what has been secret before the poem begins to reveal itself, and you have to really meditate on the poem. It's like someone removing a garment slowly, slowly. What bothers me about so much contemporary poetry is that there is none of that secrecy; it is all exposition, all revelation. I find that to be a diminishing factor.
Poetry is a secret language. It is not the language of the day. It is not the domestic language. It contains within it the secret sources of one's own life energy and life convictions. And it is not immediately translatable. That's why a poet has to accumulate a body of work before we can even understand how to read the poems. If Emily Dickinson had written three or four of those poems – even her best – they would have disappeared, but there is a life there and it is embodied in that language.
• • •
Thinking of a new season in the garden feels different from imagining a new poem. The garden has achieved its form; it doesn't have to be new each year. What it has to do is grow. You're not going to uproot the entire garden and start all over. The poem is always a new creation and aspires to a transcendence that is beyond telling at the moment when you're working on it. You know you are moving into an area you've never explored before and there is a great difference.
• • •
I wonder if those birds ever tire of their song – I wonder whether a bird ever thinks, "Today I'll try a new song."
*
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
The Wild Braid:
A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden
by Stanley Kunitz
W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London
Text copyright © 2005 by Stanley Kunitz and Genine Lentine.
Photographs copyright © 2005 by Marnie Crawford Samuelson.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by Stanley Kunitz:
The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden — Hardcover
The Collected Poems — Paperback
