As a teenager, I often went after midnight to fish, by lantern light, the slack tide on Oregon’s Newport Bay from the Army Corps jetty. Waves crashed over the riprap behind my friend and me, and sculpins attracted by our lanterns brought larger fish within the range of our flies. One night I pulled from the dark water a tremendous lingcod, a prehistoric fish with a massive eye that shone spookily in the light of our lantern. There we were, my friend and I, far enough out on the human-made jetty that the elegant arc of the highway bridge over the bay glimmered miniscule in the distance, scared, almost, to touch this creature thrashing madly in the water lit by our kerosene lantern as if it might put the lantern out and leave us exposed to the stars. It was not until I read Robert Hass’s poem, “On the Coast near Sausalito,” about catching a cabezone, a similar ancient ocean bottom fish I had also caught in the waters off of Newport Bay, that I could find words for the significance of my moment with the lingcod: “creature and creature, / we stared down centuries” (49-50).

“On the Coast Near Sausalito” is spiritual poetry in Denise Levertov’s sense, as expressed in her essay on Pacific Northwest spiritual poetry “Some Affinities of Content,” in that it conveys a “conscious attentiveness to the non-human and…a more or less conscious desire to immerse the self in that larger whole” (5). The cabezone is allowed to be simply a cabezone in the poem, but it also inhabits the vastness of “centuries” with the speaker, the slimy rocks, the sea. “On the Coast Near Sausalito,” is spiritual in that, like most of Hass’s poems, it unites intellect—“But it’s strange to kill / for the sudden feel of life” (39-40)—with sensory experience and the emotions that attend such experience—

            Holding the spiny monster in my hands 
            his bulging purple eyes  
            were eyes and the sun was 
            almost tangent to the planet 
            on our uneasy coast. (44-48)— 
        

to evoke a wonder at some larger mystery (“we stared down centuries”).

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I was keenly aware of the destructive power of human interferences in the environment: the clear-cutting of forests that kills owls and silts streams, the dams that grind salmon smolts to pulp, the oil spills that coat and kill shore birds. Nevertheless, I felt a strong sense of mystery and wonder in the presence of the remaining forests, rivers, and mountains. Indeed, I spent as much time as I could in “non-urban nature” as Levertov characterizes it, often alone, or fishing with a friend (5). Wading icy rivers that cut through walls of sheer rock, or casting from igneous crags into the crashing Pacific turned me inward, towards contemplation of and awe at the vastness of geologic time and the multiplicity of life-forms and landforms I was miraculously contemporary with.

I often felt the enchantment Jane Bennett characterizes as a subtle sense of fear that widens perception rather than shutting it down: “…fear cannot dominate if enchantment is to be, for the latter requires active engagement with objects of sensuous experience; it is a state of interactive fascination, not fall-to-your-knees awe. Unlike enchantment, overwhelming fear will not becalm and intensify perception, but only shut it down” (5). When I encountered the poetry of the Romantics, I was astonished that others had felt similar wonder in the face of natural objects. It would be hard to convey the sense of relief I felt that I was not inventing such feelings. Later, I discovered a deep kinship with West Coast poets like Gary Snyder, Richard Hugo, William Stafford, and Robert Hass, who brought the landscapes of my youth back to me when I lived across the country.

In fact, there was a time when, living in Chicago, I felt the work of these poets to be one of the few things in my life keeping me sane. After living in Portland and Seattle, two hilly cities that offered endless new vistas of mountains and waters, in which the street where you bought your coffee might end in a switchback trail through woods leading to a fifty-mile view, I found Chicago’s flat grid absolutely oppressive. None of my friends who grew up there understood my complaints. They thought I was being melodramatic, or they took offence that I couldn’t recognize the greatness of their city. “If you want to see nature, look at the lake!” they would say. I walked to Lake Michigan and found it slobbering on its concrete-toothed revetments. There was no place in the city from which to see the lake except immediately next to it, in the crush of runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers, skateboarders, picnickers, kite flyers, dog walkers, yachters, plastic umbrellas, sunbathers, tiki shacks, etc. There was no solitude for me out in that city, so I stayed home reading poems about the West.

After two and a half years in Chicago I had a chance to house-sit for six weeks for a former professor in Port Townsend, WA. Six weeks would give me time to find a job in Seattle. When I had an interview in Seattle, I drove from Port Townsend and spent the night on a friend’s couch in his tiny studio above the bookstore in the U-District where he worked. His studio had just enough room for a hide-a-bed when it was pulled out, a couch, a bowl the ceiling leaked into, and three crammed bookshelves. After work, he sat across from me on the bed and read this:

God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. They are but the blunt and low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual, — that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood, — things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are never wanting, and never repeated, which are to be found always yet each found but once; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given. These are what the artist of highest aim must study; it is these, by the combination of which his ideal is to be created; these, of which so little notice is ordinarily taken by common observers, that I fully believe, little as people in general are concerned with art, more of their ideas of sky are derived from pictures than from reality, and that if we could examine the conception formed in the minds of most educated persons when we talk of clouds, it would frequently be found composed of fragments of blue and white reminiscences of the old masters. (Ruskin 79-80)

Then he uncongealed some cold, well-seasoned grease layered in a cast-iron pan and made us eggs.

I started a new journal that month, writing in large letters in the flyleaf: The Book of Uncommon Praise. On the facing page I copied the quote from Ruskin that my friend had read. Over the next year Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Hopkins crowded in my handwriting onto that page. I was thrilled to be in Seattle, and was preparing a space for my own “soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul,” as Emerson characterizes prayer (276).

Right now, something in me, some words charged magnetically, want to form this genteel request for your forgiveness. What, after all, after Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Althusser, Jameson, Baudrillard, could be more naïve than prayer or praise? But some stronger repellant pole overcomes those tiny attracting motes to say: don’t forgive my praise. Rather, consider the difficulty for the deeply skeptical of praising in a way that convinces. Consider if there is a difficulty more worthy of scratching pen across paper for. I think there is not.

Contemporary poetry, especially poetry that considers itself experimental, often seems to be written in defiance, if not fear, of naïvety, whether formal, linguistic, political, or philosophical. But Gaston Bachelard’s definition of naïvety is not synonymous with gullibility or stupidity: to him to be naïve is to be receptive—receptive, specifically, to the poetic image. This definition is brave because receptivity implies openness, and openness vulnerability. For Bachelard, the poetic image is a case of language with a special significance: “Because of its novelty and its action, the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own; it is referable to a direct ontology” (xvi). In other words, the poetic image, when received with uncompromised openness, does not refer only to objects or ideas, but inaugurates in our souls a way of being.

Yes, I actually said souls, and Bachelard does too, without wincing or winking, but with a footnote that offers a genealogy of the word “soul” and its cognates leading back, “among nearly all peoples,” to the physical breath (xvi). In this sense, soul is not so metaphysical as it might have come to appear to us—it is grounded in inspiration, inhale, breath—in the one place that our bodies, quite literally, touch the entire earth, each cell replenished by molecules that may have once been part of a fir in Siberia or a stone in Ecuador.

My writing in The Book of Uncommon Praise would be commonplace as breathing. In its pages, the scraps of my days could be heaped without judgment. Maybe poems would grow from the heap, but more than poems, I wanted this practice of daily writing in and of itself to make my life richer by focusing my attention on the world around me.

At the market, a woman is pouring a thread of sun-struck honey jar to jar.

We hiked until the footprints stopped at a high outcropping, above a steep snowfield, and sat to rest. Far down the snowfield a great black alpine crow landed on the white and flew off again. I made a snowball and rolled it down to the place the crow had been. The hill was so steep that the ball rolled fifty yards down the slope, gathering mass to five times it original size and standing up with a sudden cap of snow, like a miniature totem. We made a game then of rolling snowballs down the slope to see who could come closest to the original totem without knocking it over. By the time we tired of the game we had left beneath us a field of rude snow monuments, casting shadows across the white.

I have been reminded just now by Thoreau of an apple tree I discovered in the woods by my parents’ house in Oregon last summer, the tree probably not wild, yet certainly abandoned, growing singly among firs where the creek bent. I was led again back to thoughts of the farmer who must have planted it by the creek there and perhaps marveled at the transformation of the apples’ skins to red even as the reddening Chinook returned in the creek to spawn. I also thought of the apple tree Alex and I discovered growing out of a berm beneath railroad tracks by the sound at Golden Gardens a year ago, dropping its sour green apples into clefts of rocks the saltwater sucked in and out of. We ate the apples with blackberries that had overgrown the berm, hidden from the commuter train clattering by just above our heads.

I drove past a sunken barn with bands of light falling into it through its broken roofbeams—falling onto a huge unruly snarl of green blackberry vines. It was clear no livestock had sheltered in that place for a long time, and I could think that now, when it appeared most forlorn and abandoned, the barn was finally filled with its proper store. The farmer could have cleared those vines out, but I like to think he delights in the accident of this crop, and awaits their ripening in August with secret zeal.

I took so much pleasure in writing (and take now in re-reading) these paragraphs that it seems silly to try to justify them. The pleasure is in noticing, and noticing is not what you might think. It cannot, for instance, be willed. Noticing is the intuition rising to greet events beyond one’s control or predicting. In fact, it is relinquishing the need to predict, or to already know; it is naïve in Bachelard’s sense of openness. It is profound acknowledgment and acceptance of what is there. It is a suspension of judgment, with its concerns for distinguishing between arbitrary binaries like right and wrong. It is allowing the mind to take its interests and attending to those interests.

Talking about noticing belies the difficulty of practicing it. You can’t will noticing, you can only train your mind to quiet the chatter of already-knowing that inhibits noticing. Even then, because the act of noticing requires full attention, it is difficult to notice yourself noticing. For instance, this morning I was trying to pour cereal quietly so as not to wake my son. Never before had I noticed, as I did now, the incredible loudness of cereal crashing into the bowl. But I didn’t notice myself noticing this until after I had already poured cereal and milk and was munching, reflecting on how quiet the house was at 5:30 on a winter morning. It would have been easy for the noticing of the loudness of the cereal not to rise to the level of consciousness and to be immediately forgotten. The difficulty and pleasure, then, is to notice your mind’s noticing.

This example should illustrate that the act of noticing isn’t necessarily the same as the act of writing poetry. Poetry, or I should say the poetry most necessary to my life, discovers language suitable to evoke objects, events, memories and ideas noticed, and selects and coordinates them into a unity that allows us to experience the palpable presence of the noticed. The discovery of language is itself another kind of noticing—an intuitive attraction to fortuitous sounds, rhythms, diction, and a recognizing of them as, in fact, fortuitous. More often than not, the poet must admit that the sounds, rhythms, diction have not been fortuitous, but have been forced by some habitual way of writing or seeing the world and conform with some preconceived notion of reality or form.

I have an index card pinned above my writing desk that I turn to when I am hampered by my own preconceived notions of writing and reality. It is from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki:

You become discouraged with your practice when your practice has become idealistic. You have some gaining idea in your practice and it is not pure enough. It is when your practice has become rather greedy that you become discouraged with it. (72)

Suzuki is talking about a meditation practice in which there is no goal except to sit. Any desire for enlightenment would get in the way of enlightenment, so the meditator instead focuses only on posture and breath, which enable sitting to occur. The sitting practice is analogous in my mind with a writing practice that opens a space for noticing. There are many ways writing can become greedy, just as a desire for enlightenment is greedy in Zen meditation practice. Sometimes I want to write a poem as good or as complex as a certain poet. Sometimes I want to write a poem that expresses some truth I think I know about the world. But the work resulting from such desires never surprises. The noticed, no matter how mundane, must always surprise us with its presence. Bachelard explains it this way: “A consciousness associated with the soul is more relaxed, less intentionalized than a consciousness associated with the phenomena of the mind. Forces are manifested in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge” (xvii). It is only when I can enter the space where I am writing to write without knowing where I am going that I begin to remember events and objects I have noticed, and I begin to discover a language to make them palpably present.

In just this sense, the poem is a process not an object. It is the noticing discovered in the act of writing the poem; it is not (or not only) a transmission of content known before the poem was written. It is also the noticing discovered by the reader in the act of reading the poem. The richest poems include a surplus of noticing far beyond what the poet could even have been consciously aware of as the poem was written.

Arthur Sze, a poet whose work I have come to admire, espouses an understanding of the poetic process similar to my own. Crucially, Sze understands that goal-oriented poetry, poetry that desires, for instance, to express a certain political orientation, is in danger of becoming shallow and predictable:

I prefer poetry that isn’t overtly political. It seems to me a danger of political poetry is when you or the poem moves into a position where you try to tell people what to see or what to do, and poetry shouldn’t really be doing that. Poetry should be mining a much deeper, visionary experience and, in a way, shedding all of those controls. It’s much more subversive and liberating in its true potential and actuality. Ultimately, politics are going to be there—you can say they’re even in the choice of words you make, in the form of the poem you choose or create. But I prefer poems to be a little more oblique; as Emily Dickinson said, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” (Davis 7)

Sze’s preference for obliqueness means that his poetry is often not reducible to any particular stance or commitment; he says of his writing process, “My procedure, more often than not, is to shed or not know where I’m going” (Davis 8). Nevertheless, he works to balance openness with rigor:

…I want to add a distinction between superficial and deep surprise. On a first reading, a poem may dazzle with surface effects, but if the underlying rigor isn’t there, the initial surprises evaporate, whereas, with a deep surprise, there may be an initial feeling of discomfort and disorientation, but over several readings, the singularity of vision and underlying rigor emerge. (Baker)

Sze’s notion of “deep surprise” here, the initial discomfort of which invites further investigation, is comparable to Bennett’s description of enchantment, with its fear that “becalms and intensifies perception” (5). Beyond the “pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter” during enchantment, Bennett posits “a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition” (5). Sze’s “deep surprise,” after initially disrupting our default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition, opens a meditative space in which to contemplate the possibly limitless interconnections between objects and occurrences, without delimiting and thus fossilizing their significance.

In Sze’s poems, “deep surprise” opens an imaginative world that is inhabitable. Inhabiting requires we more fully utilize all of our organs of perception and thought—to be fully present. Take, for instance, the poem “Power Line” from Sze’s 2009 collection, The Gingko Light, whose juxtaposition of intensely particular images is exemplary of Sze’s style since his acclaimed 1996 collection, Archipelago:

            Power Line

            As light runs along the length of power lines,
            you glimpse, in the garden, watermelon,
            honeydew, broccoli, asparagus, silking corn;

            you register the tremor of five screech owls
            perched on a railing under the wisteria,
            shaggymanes pushing up through pecan shells;

            though a microbiologist with a brain tumor
            can't speak—he once intimated he most
            feared to be waiting to die and is now

            waiting to die—children play tag in spaces
            around racks of bowling balls and white tables,
            while someone scores a strike, shrieks;

            young girls chasse diagonally across a floor;
            a woman lays in an imperfection before
            she completes her Teec Nos Pos weaving;

            a sous-chef slices ginger, scallions,
            anticipates placing a wet towel over dumplings,
            as light lifts off the length of a power line.
        

On a first reading, the images of this poem may seem mundane and disconnected from one another. However, further inspection shows each image is unusual and compelling in its way, and resonates with other images in the poem. The opening image, light running along the length of power lines, is not dramatic, but it is particular, the kind of thing we see all the time without noticing ourselves noticing it. What’s more, the more you think about it, the stranger the image becomes—the “power” of each power line has nothing to do with the sunlight that falls on the line; the line transmits electricity day and night. And yet, zoom out a few levels of scale, and the sunlight has everything to do with the power inside the line—whether it is generated by wind, water, or coal, that electrical power originates in the power of the sun. The image and the poem’s title become subtly meta-poetic—the “power” in each line of poetry is transmitted through the charge held by its sound, tone, and image; but, in a larger sense, each line is dependent for its full power on the dimensioning effect of the poet’s vision of the relationship of all of the sounds, images, and tones in the poem.

One of the amazing aspects of “Power Line” and Sze’s poetry in general is how subtly, almost imperceptibly, the author intervenes in the creation of meaning; in other words, very little of the poem could be said to be rhetorical. Instead, the poem invites us to compare the tremor of screech owls living under the wisteria in a garden with children playing in a bowling alley and with the shrieks of the bowlers. What to make of such a comparison? Each occurrence is set in a human, circumscribed space—a garden, a bowling alley—and each space, nevertheless, allows the spontaneity of life to occur within its bounds—tremors, play, shrieks. Still, there is uncertainty. A tremor or a shriek can be a sign of pleasure or of pain, a strike is a triumph in bowling but can mean death in a military context. Soon after the strike in the bowling alley, “a woman lays in an imperfection before / she completes her Teec Nos Pos weaving” (14-15)—an image of a woman making a Navajo rug. Because this indigenous craftswoman appears so soon after the strike, we cannot help but remember the history of brutality perpetrated against the Navajo and other indigenous groups. However, according to ethnographer Jill Ahlberg Yohe, the imperfection (called a “spiritline”) Sze refers to is an artistic element of the rug purposely included by Navajo weavers to invite the rug-making tradition to continue and to express modesty: “the spiritline is woven into the textile as an intentional ‘flaw,’ a symbolic path for the survival of the weaving tradition to continue into the future. The second interpretation is that the spiritline is a deliberate design element incorporated by the weaver as a valued expression of modesty” (Yohe). So, the image of the weaver is also one of hope—of a tradition continuing despite great hostility, even as it subtly reminds us of that hostility.

Similarly, the positive image of the edible mushrooms pushing up through the pecan mulch contrasts with the unwanted growth of the tumor in the microbiologist. This latter image is complex in itself as the tumor is about to kill someone who may have contributed something to the understanding of or treatment of such tumors. Later, the image of girls chasse-ing in a zigzag, which, taken by itself, might evoke the corniness of a halftime show at a high school basketball game, rhymes visually with the zigzag pattern of the Navajo rug and becomes a sort of spiritline of its own. The final stanza of the poem celebrates sensation, the smell of ginger being cut, the taste of scallions, the tactile enjoyment of draping dumplings with a wet cloth. And yet these images are also subtle transmogrifications of the images of the living garden in the first stanza—where we had growing watermelons, broccoli, asparagus to open the poem, we conclude the poem with picked scallions and ginger, and whatever is filling the dumplings, probably beef or pork. We can anticipate the enjoyment of the dumpling’s taste, while also realizing that something living was sacrificed to make them. We can see the light lifting off of the power line and realize it is a signal of the end of a particular day, while also realizing that an end of all days will come for each of us. The power of “Power Line” is its complexity: it doesn’t ask us to choose between elegy and ode (which in another poem in The Gingko Light, “Equator,” form “our magnetic north and south”), but to enter a space in which we can contemplate both modes simultaneously.

In this sense, Sze is updating John Keats’s negative capability for the 21st century. Keats characterizes negative capability as a state in which “a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (261)—a state that bears a strong resemblance to the ones desired in older meditative philosophies (especially Taoism and Buddhism) in which judgment is suspended in order to escape the ego’s tunnel-vision. Sze’s poetry, which has been included in The Wisdom Anthology of Contemporary Buddhist Poetry, reaches back through the American Transcendentalists and British Romantics to a deeper vein of non-attachment in Asian philosophy. However, it would be wrong to think that because it rarely displays an “irritable reaching after fact and reason” Sze’s poetry never explores fact and reason. Rather, as in the “The North Window,” when Sze’s speakers employ rhetoric, they do it in a provisional, non-exclusionary way. In other words, ideas are often followed immediately by different, even contradictory ideas, so that the concerns of ego and superego are not denied and yet the mind is not allowed to fix on any one idea as if it provided a total picture of the world beyond the mind.

            The North Window

            Before sky lightens to reveal a coyote fence,
            he revels in the unseen: a green eel snaps; 

            javelinas snort; a cougar sips at a stream.
            He will not live as if a seine slowly tightens

            around them. Though he will never be a beekeeper,
            or lepidopterist, or stand at the North Pole,

            he might fire raku ware, whisk them to Atitlán,
            set yellow irises on the table, raft them

            down the Yukon. He revels at the flavor of 
            thimbleberries in his mouth, how they rivet 

            at a kiss. In an instant, raku ware and 
            the Yukon are at his fingertips. As light 

            traces sky out the north window, he nods: 
            silver poplars rise and thin to the very twig.
        

In the opening stanza, the speaker posits a character who, before sunrise, is imagining animals—eel, javelina, cougar—living their lives out in the dark world. Curiously, we are told the character is imagining these animals “Before sky lightens to reveal a coyote fence,” so that he must also be imagining the coyote fence—a type of irregular wooden fence erected in New Mexico to prevent coyotes from leaping onto an owner’s property (1). Immediately we see a mind bringing into reality through its imagining animals as well as a means of controlling animals. We seem to be confronted with contradictory ideas: that one can both revel in the human-made, which impinges on and limits the activities of animals, and in the animals’ free, unhindered presence.

These two ideas are synthesized in the assertion at the end of the second couplet: “He will not live as if a seine slowly tightens / around them” (4-5). Here the character reveals the anxiety that the human-made means of animal control, the seine, might trap (and presumably kill) the animals he has imagined living free. Yet, curiously, he goes on to admit that he will never be a bee keeper or lepidopterist, as if those professions would allow him to keep the seine from closing down around animal species, when in fact those disciplines are highly controlling of the species they study, even requiring the death of individual organisms (think of Nabokov’s butterfly collection). Standing at the North Pole, too, seems to be the dubious result of the human ambition to know the world and conquer it. However, on second look, it is not so different from the more playful assertion that the character can imagine whisking these species to safety in a Guatemalan lake or an Alaskan river. Curious, too, is the interpolation of firing raku ware (Japanese pottery used in tea ceremonies) and setting yellow irises on a table—two acts done for the purposes of aesthetic pleasure—into the imaginary rescue of the animals. Is the idea that the rescue will be an act of aesthetic enjoyment that will allow humans to co-exist with other species being set in contrast here to the act of scientific observation, whose distancing makes it easier to control the animal other? That there is a type of human making that is generous to other species and a type that is disastrous? Could cutting irises be said to allow the flowers a separate existence like a cougar sipping at a stream? Strange, too, is that a sudden moment of sensory pleasure—the kiss-like eating of a thimbleberry, puts imaginary raku ware and Yukon at the speaker’s fingertips. Here, the attentively experienced sensory detail (thimbleberry) appears to allow imagined things (raku ware, Yukon) to be experienced as if they too were sensory.

A reader may initially be at a loss to find a through-line of coherent thought in “The North Window.” However, Sze’s poem isn’t trying to convince us of an effective means of preserving animal species; it isn’t instrumental in that way. Rather, it is asking us to experience a sensitive mind’s mulling this problem from many angles at once. It is as if the poem is asking us to notice (not control) thoughts as they arise; as if, before we can act ethically we must learn to notice all of the competing impulses behind our desire to act. What is affirmed, finally, is that this process of noticing allows us to fully inhabit our lives. Because the speaker has traced this imagining that begins with a slight anxiety about a coyote fence out in the pre-dawn dark, he has prepared his attention to notice what is actually there at dawn—silver poplars rising, not the idea of silver poplars, but particular ones thinning “to the very twig” (14).

Sze’s poems often ride on the melting of their noticing, to borrow from Frost’s famous “The Figure a Poem Makes,” rather than on anticipation of a synthesis of antithetical elements. The complexity and freshness of their meanings comes through subtle analogy of images, tones, sounds, rather than through distinction and affirmation. Poems in both modes can certainly be composed in the manner Frost describes in his lovely figure of ice on a hot stove that “must ride on its own melting,” (a process of discovery in composition similar to Sze’s): “[the poem’s] most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went” (778). A favorite logically-unfolding poem that always appears fresh is “September 1st, 1939” by W.H. Auden, which discovers its surprises out of a strict rhetorical and formal structure, in which antithetical human drives—to take solitary sensory pleasure from the world or to take power over others—must be transformed into one love for other human beings, or the consequences will be disastrous:

            All I have is a voice
            To undo the folded lie,
            The romantic lie in the brain
            Of the sensual man-in-the-street
            And the lie of Authority
            Whose buildings grope the sky:
            There is no such thing as the State
            And no one exists alone;
            Hunger allows no choice
            To the citizen or the police;
            We must love one another or die. (45-55)
        

We arrive at the final line in this stanza, which would appear an empty truism in another context, feeling the full force of its moral imperative as the culmination of a logical argument and the delivery of the anticipated rhyme that has been postponed by four intermediary lines. Auden wrote this poem as a British expatriate in New York just after Hitler invaded Poland. The fear, frustration, and hope evoked in the poem are convincing to me, even though Auden would later renounce it. As Frost asserts in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” genuine emotion for the writer is a precondition for surprising oneself in writing a poem: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” (777).

Who could verify such a statement? I can only say that in my experience it seems true. My best notes in The Book of Uncommon Praise arose out of a genuine feeling of wonder at what I was noticing. At the same time, there are many unreadable purple passages in that journal where I am trying to impose some feeling on an object or experience that I just didn’t have. My point, ultimately, is that at this moment in time, when I am honest with myself about the origin of my deepest feelings, I see them arising out of small moments of everyday perception of the world around me or insights into the relationships I care about. Though I have written some rhetorical political poems expressing deep anxiety about environmental destruction, the moments when those anxieties have risen to the pitch of an impetus to write poems have been far fewer recently than moments of surprise at seemingly more mundane subjects.

I find Sze, then, so insightful in understanding why these smaller noticings, these smaller surprises, can nevertheless be profoundly important. Sze, as editor of the anthology Chinese Writers on Writing, remarks how recent Chinese writers in exile in the West have observed that the strong impetus of political resistance that drove their poems in their home country disappeared when they could suddenly write anything they wanted:

For the more recent Misty School poets, Bei Dao’s generation, you should know that they had large audiences and what they wrote was taken very, very seriously. So when Chinese writers have left China, they’ve often said: “Writing in Chinese, we knew what the stakes were, we knew certain political and social boundaries, and we felt like our lives were on the line. Now that we’re in America, we can write anything we want. We have this great freedom, but the tension is gone. Nobody really cares or, at the least, there isn’t that dangerous edge that there was in China.” (Davis 7)

Sze goes on to outline a different function for poetry in our more politically open, more privileged American society:

For the American writer, I think writing asserts imaginative power, a widening and deepening of our experience, and poetry as an art form is in resistance to American consumer culture because it asks readers to slow down, to listen, to fully experience the sounds, rhythms and nuances of language. Good poems need to be read and re-read again. Stevens asserts, “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” So poetry reveals itself over repeated readings. It is incredibly nourishing and plays a vital role in rooting ourselves imaginatively in the world. What’s at stake is to see clearly, to experience with deep emotion. At the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference in July, Brenda Hillman asserted, “Deep feeling is endangered in American culture. Few people feel deeply anymore.” And poetry asks us to passionately do that. (Davis 7)

Slowing down, seeing clearly, experiencing with deep emotion—these actions may at first seem narrowly personal. Bennett, though, argues that we need to be aware of the ways our emotions affect our ethical choices because wonder at the world is often a precondition for caring about it and our worldviews are to a certain extent performative: we create the world we imagine. In other words, if we are only capable of imagining the desecration of the world, we will inhabit a desecrated world:

…it seems to me that presumptive generosity, as well as the will to social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence, and that it is too hard to love a disenchanted world. Affective fascination with a world thought to be worthy of it may help to ward off the existential resentment that plagues mortals, that is, the sense of victimization that recurrently descends upon the tragic (or absurd or incomplete) beings called human. (12)

Bennett asks us to be enamored with the existence we inhabit, which includes metamorphing creatures (for example: Catwoman; Deep Blue; Rotpeter, Kafka’s ape-man); nanotechnology; advertisement (pants dancing as if by their own volition in a Gap ad). Bennett is careful to acknowledge the potential negatives of each of these phenomena, but she also accepts them as facts of our world and asks us to be honest about the wonder they evoke, drawing on that wonder in our thinking about who we are and how we might act ethically.

For example, she points out that the harsh condemnation of consumerism by theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer may help us both feel righteous in our opposition to consumerism and sense that changing our consumption habits won’t affect the capitalist monolith at all, leaving us to continue consuming indifferently. Instead, (drawing on William E. Connolly's work) Bennett asserts if we acknowledge that there is an aspect of consuming that is attractive to all of us, we might come to consume more inclusionary goods (public healthcare, education, and transportation, for instance) and fewer exclusionary (cars, private healthcare, private education). Most importantly, when we presume the world of late capitalism is a totalizing force of control, we set ourselves up to feel helpless to act ethically, and we blind ourselves to the potentially magnanimous, exhilarating energies latent in capitalist products.

Bennett’s call to be open to the wonder possible in a contemporary context might be seen as a very recent iteration of Lao-Tzu’s admonition to be prepared to accept and use whatever arises: “[The master] is ready to use all situations / and doesn’t waste anything” (27); or of Keats’s negative capability: “…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (261). The poetry of Arthur Sze is capable of evoking the wonder of contemporary subjects. “Virga,” for instance, begins: “A quarterback slants a short pass to a tight end, / and the screen fills with tacklers” (1-2). The way the screen fills with tacklers in this opening image is uncanny; it is as if the screen was a vessel and the humans were being poured into it. The uncanniness is reinforced by the parallelism of “quarterback slants” and “screen fills,” which accords an equal agency to the human and the screen. The image gives us a sense that the players are there as much to fill the screen as the screen is to record their playing.

By simply noticing in a detached way what happens on the screen, Sze has undermined the narratives of personal glory professional and college football leagues use to keep people interested, subtly suggesting that the players might be merely replaceable atoms in a massive entertainment complex. But they become something even stranger, almost sublime, when we recall them by analogy in the poem’s final image: “at an underwater peak / in the Coral Sea, shrimp thought to be extinct / for fifty million years, on a large screen, congregate” (27-29). Is it that, like the shrimp’s unexpected resilience, some resilient quality being acted out through football will allow human beings to go on? Or, more sinister, is it that all life has come to be mere content to be watched on screens by passive human receivers? Or, perhaps it is that screens offer a frame through which the world’s wondrousness can be newly appreciated—the coordinated movements of football tacklers, of shrimp so deep in the sea that without cameras their existence would be entirely unknown? As with the analogous images in many of Sze’s poems, all of these possibilities seem plausible—their non-exclusive co-existence inaugurates the complex, multi-dimensional world of the poem.

The suggestive juxtapositions in Sze’s poems are endless as the possible moves in the Chinese game of “go,” which the poem “Fractal” posits would “…take a computer / longer than the expected / lifetime of the universe” to consider (5-7). What a pleasure, then, to trace significances in a few sequences while knowing there will always be other significances in store on another read. In “Yardangs,” “a neighbor frets over air-pollution vectors; / a teenage girl worries her horse slashes // its neck along barbed wire” (8-10). In “Grand Bay” an “…airplane lifts / from a nearby strip and triggers vultures” that “rise in waves” (11-13). In “Pinwheel,” a walk across the forecourt of the Pergamon Altar (in Berlin), the “incubator // of dreams” (12-13) foreshadows the later living dream of life on the street: “We did not foresee sponges dangling / inside a spice shop or the repeating pattern // of swastikas along walls that have led there” (13-15).

Bachelard offers us an even more basic way to apprehend Sze’s juxtaposed images than attempting to explain their significances:

the reader of poems is asked to consider an image not as an object, and even less as a substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality…At the level of the poetic image, the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions. (xv)

The “specific reality” presented by the image works like a hologram, then—a hologram held at an angle conducive to experiencing its depth: when it is shimmering just at that angle, we may feel we inhabit the dimensioning of that depth. Yes, held at another angle, the illusion will disappear and we may see the bare outlines of the image, the text as text. But this admission doesn’t preclude dwelling in the dimension the image, when apprehended naïvely at the right angle, inaugurates.

If the poetic image is not a concept, then, if it is not a symbol pointing to some idea outside of itself, not a digestion of objects into subjective thought, what is it, and what good is it? To Bachelard, it is a coming into being, into form, of an “inner light” that is not simply a reflection of a “light from the outside world” (xvii). Or, as Heidegger sees it, through the lens of Rilke’s famous characterization of poets as “bees of the invisible”:

The inner recalling converts that nature of ours which merely wills to impose, together with its objects, into the innermost invisible region of the heart’s space. Here everything is inward: not only does it remain turned toward this true interior of consciousness, but inside this interior, one thing turns, free of all bounds, into the other. The interiority of the world’s inner space unbars the Open for us. Only what we thus retain in our heart (par coeur), only that do we truly know by heart. Within this interior we are free, outside of the relation to the objects set around us that only seem to give us protection. In the interiority of the world’s inner space there is safety outside of all shielding. (130)

For Heidegger, the “objects set around us that only seem to give us protection” are the material ends of a language that assumes an instrumental relationship to the earth and its resources (the power lines, computers, televisions, airplanes, etc. we find in Sze’s poems), a language that arises out of a desire to dominate Earth through scientific calculation and technological production. The language of poetry frees us psychologically from this instrumental relationship to Earth, allows us access instead to an interior “world” of being. For Bachelard, the poem reverberates with “a sonority of being” when we speak it:

The reverberations bring about a change of being. It is as though the poet’s being were our being. The multiplicity of resonances then issues from the reverberations’ unity of being. Or, to put it more simply, this is an impression that all impassioned poetry-lovers know well: the poem possesses us entirely. (xviii)

Being possessed is frightening. It is an experiment with non-identity, with a focus so total it exists outside the realm of reflective thought. It is an absorption into a being shared by all beings, where, according to Heidegger, “one thing turns, free of all bounds, into the other.” In other words, the poetic image is an enchantment, in Bennett’s sense of that word (drawing on Philip Fisher): a momentarily immobilizing encounter, a suspension of time and body movement, a moment of pure presence, which, crucially, doesn’t remind us of anything (5). We might think again of Emerson’s claim in “Self-Reliance” that true prayer doesn’t ask for anything, it is more like pure joy: “It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul” (276). Or of Simone Weil’s related assertion: “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer” (106). The good of images like those in Sze’s poems, then, is that they allow us to experience the fullness of being. Creation of and receptive immersion in the poetic image, by its very nature, must take place outside the realm of instrumental production and consumption, in the fortuitous space of naïvety, openness, attention.

Allowing oneself to be possessed and enchanted, experimenting with non-identity—these practices are as old as human culture. Brenda Hillman offers a compelling metaphor to explain the significance of such ancient ideas in our current moment: just as increased technological production and resource consumption threaten biological species with extinction, they threaten species of thought:

In addition to endangered species, there are endangered forms of thought. One of the things ecopoetics tries to do is reconfigure the poem so as to include some of the endangered thought species. Poets keep track of radical and intimate encounters with the nonhuman. These encounters have often taken iconoclastic— and seemingly “abnormal”—forms in writers such as Clare, Dickinson, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, and include the permission to record the unacceptable or dysfunctional perception, the excess of feeling, or the integration of mythic states with other ideas. (Hume 12-13)

The metaphor might be extended—just as biodiversity is necessary for an ecosystem to reach and maintain a state of climax, so thought-diversity is necessary to ensure a flourishing of salutary “encounters with the nonhuman;” otherwise, instrumental reason, which views all nonhuman others as potential resources for extraction, potential means to the ends of human enjoyment, might so dominate our understanding of these encounters as to eventually eliminate them altogether.

The Book of Uncommon Praise was ultimately a failure in a number of ways. My interpretation of praise was too narrowly positive—the beam of my attention was focused primarily on natural objects like trees, rivers, mountains I felt I could safely worship. I missed the larger point of attention—being fully present to what is actually there. At times my sentences sound like those of a second-rate Ruskin imitator. Though I agree with Hillman about the value of incorporating “endangered thought species” in one’s work, including “radical and intimate encounters with the nonhuman,” I admit I was often beholden to these “endangered thought species” to the detriment of my noticing. Furthermore, my practice was usually to take my journal into the field and record as I saw; when I didn’t see anything, I strained to see something. I rarely made leaps out of the narrowly defined present of my walk into memories, ideas, myths, all the inward riches of association. I was “grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation, and thrill,” as Gary Snyder cautions against in “Poetry, Community, & Climax,” rather than “re-viewing memory, internalized perception, blocks of inner energies, dreams, the leaf-fall of day-to-day consciousness” (174).

I have since changed my writing practice. I rarely take a journal with me and write on the spot. Rather, after I have had some unusual experience or gone for a walk or a bike ride I let some time pass before I record the aspects of it that have stayed with me. In this sense, memory becomes a tool of selection. I tend to remember best what I noticed myself noticing and to forget the rest. Another change is that I allow frequent associative leaps off of the subject of my walk or ride into other areas of my mind. The associations might be of sound, tone, shape, or of analogies I am not even aware of at the time. I have learned to worry less about the coherence of what I am writing and have thus come closer to writing to write.

Later, I comb back through a number of journal entries looking for phrases, images, metaphors, that call out to each other across the page. I pull these out to see if they might coalesce, along with other lines composed at the moment, into a poem. It is a playful process, but always, I hope, “play for mortal stakes” as Frost describes meaningful work in “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

	        Only where love and need are one,
	        And the work is play for mortal stakes,
	        Is the deed ever really done
	        For Heaven and the future’s sakes. (69-72)
        

My journal now is more playful than when I filled The Book of Uncommon Praise, but the stakes feel as high or higher. An entry October 22nd of this past year should demonstrate the difference in my process from that exhibited in the passages I quoted earlier:

The scent of the snuffed match that lit the candle lingers long after the meditation begins. I listen to the recording of someone breathing years ago already in San Francisco. Remember eating the large, cheap, tongue-like oysters at happy hour in Seattle, drinking stout. Happy hours hail hangovers. But first, listening to the symphony just at the edge of drunkenness, you feel falsely carried by the notes into the upper deck. Then fall back down, to sleep almost, by intermission. Before a child is born, the whole world is there for your pleasure alone. Then you mumble in the night to your love to be careful not to roll over onto him whom you have already put back in his crib. All occurrences are teaching us acceptance. I’d like to learn anything else. One bag of fresh stir-fry noodles I bought yesterday was thorough moldy. We sat to eat and I smelled the foul steaming strands hanging from my chopsticks. This morning sunlight raised the backyard maple to a glorious orange-yellow. Now distant clouds have come to backdrop the tree, deepen its catching colors. Months from now you could blow on the smoldering coals of those colors, and they will go out anyway. Imagine your chagrin, you gaseous pouch! The pianist’s hands quiver with potentials my untrained hands lack. Do pianists’ hands pump gas? Please, no. And yet I do hope they dice unusual squash. Delicata, yes. My eyes have potentials, yes. Bright leaf-piles decorate the street. The tall tree by the auditorium is a gingko! I must never have looked higher than its trunk. My life had come to mean…anger at noodles. Dear tree, now that I see you are a Gingko, I feel the lockjaw superego release. I heard Mitsuko Uchida climb Bach’s spiral staircase in that auditorium for five dollars, you must have arranged it. I place fingertips on eyelids veined like your fan-shaped leaves. I think I could hear every note of a sonata without being reminded of anything. The sonata Delicata. A sonata for prepared rattle with tea tin accompaniment. It is an orange-striped emittance. An out-crashing gas. Ezra is its centripetal center. Everyone asks how he is sleeping, not how often he smiles. Not whether he enjoys looking at a book upside down as much as the other way. “Will he watch with berserker joy the tea tin roll across the floor and back?” no one asks. Here: a cold apple from the refrigerator, a cold apple on the bough. Monsieur Ez grimaces to bite where I have bitten, smiles as if he has been tricked, grabs the apple to bite again. We live far enough from the city the first frost is news to people. I like whatever is news to people, but—people. If we only agreed to comb each other’s eyebrows sometimes there would be this trust. Before we ever kissed the lost one asked me to shave her neckline with a razor! Oh we had it all out of order. My breath rustled the hanks I lifted. Breath and neckline and rapt rapt rapt the razor made itchy sound where it slid... “Stand back! Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping…” Yes, that’s why barbers smile that way. I just say joy of the worm to them. A young man picks up a smooth buckeye, thinks uneasily of his wormy testicles. We act certain the outer ring of the stump was last. But we were born so late, it could have always been all rings at once.

Is this excerpt done for “Heaven and the future’s sakes?” Let’s not know, yet. In fact, let’s let others know, let’s only notice: the recurrence of child and music and trees. Of failed philosophies. Of circles, spirals, rings. Of sensory pleasures, loves.

And it leaps! Meditation to oysters to symphony to baby to noodles. Maple to hands to gingko to symphony to baby. Frost to eyebrows to lost love to barbers to buckeye to stump. Emerson says: “Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim” (271). Emerson isn’t always right. I’d modify his statement thus: “in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting, darting, darting…” My aim was to write to write. Perhaps I accomplished that. I like to think it is somewhat evidenced in the unselfconsciousness of the passage, in the charge of its language. I also like what the Tao Te Ching says: “Do your work, then step back. / The only path to serenity” (9).

I step back, knowing the work is there to return to. It could be a poem is somewhere in the passage. It could be a poem is somewhere across this passage and others. It could be the passage is complete unto itself or irreparably incomplete. What luck to not know yet! To feel no irritable reaching!

If attention is in the passage, there is praise. If it is attention it is uncommon in that it won’t ever occur again in just that way. Tomorrow I will return to the passage or to the possible poem or to a blank page with openness, hopefully. Like A.R. Ammons in “Corsons Inlet,” I will greet whichever of these I choose without finality of vision, like a new walk:

                I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will   
            not run to that easy victory:
                        still around the looser, wider forces work:
                        I will try
                   to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening   
            scope, but enjoying the freedom that
            Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,   
            that I have perceived nothing completely,
	            that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk. (120-128)