Spectral Freedom: Selected Poetry, Criticism, and Prose

By Jonathan Miller

"Spectral Freedom" sings melodies of loss in poetry, prose and criticism, as well as providing the reader the ultimate definition of freedom. She shows how the human condition can be cruelly imprisoned inside of a box nailed shut on all sides and yet the soul is capable of breaking through that prison and rise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casa de Snapdragon
• Release date: Oct 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465780898

Book preview

The Main Secret

Getting Inside Strongin’s Work

By Hugh Fox

Comparing a town in Europe to a bougainvillea. No town-time. But the bougainvillea link couldn’t be more unexpected.

The main secret to Lynn Strongin’s poetry techniques is the fact that there is no expected, predictable continuity in one line she writes.

Take a line like an ice cycle of gold forming … OK. Stop there. An ice cycle? Not icicle but cycle. A cycle of ice. Your mind goes outside, right, you’re in some sort of seasonal cycle? And then … let me finish the line: An ice cycle of gold forming over the oatmeal pot.[4] A gold cycle forming over an oatmeal pot.

Although a little later in the same poem there are some almost sequitur, not non-sequitur lines: "Rechargeable batteries could not light up our city/more vibrantly than the white wood carriages going/hearse-like/in rain... But even here the comparison between rechargeable batteries and white wood carriages is totally unexpected. And going in the rain, not the snow.

She has one very interesting volume called Secrets You Tell Your Doll that has a picture of Strongin herself on the cover as a little girl, carrying her doll, and here again, get ready for the totally unexpected: Doll clasps her bosom woman friend/to her slim chest as one does a civil war Bandage. To a wound. An ancient wound: a winter one.[5]

What I’m learning here is to avoid already-associated associations, to come up with metaphors, associations that have never been metaphored, associated before. And, of course, at the same time come up with comparisons that work, that bring you into new territories, new weltanschauung, ways of looking at the world.

Like linking together hypodermic needle blades and going figure skating, just a little extra saber-toothed thrown in to emphasize her own feral streak.

In the grave digger’s hours,

I hugged Xavier, my cat,

saber-toothed I went figure skating with hypodermic needle blades. What was the other side of this Ganges?[6]

Sometimes in her narrative poems, she actually becomes sequential ... for a while. But the unexpected is always there waiting to be reintroduced.

Transported

untarnished, transported

we are in it alone

pencil-pain

broad strokes night flare.

I do not want my break with memory to preface high thermometer:

But fever did precede:

storing living emotions.

Closed shop to health. A network break I took.

Caught off guard

I raise my face to light

like a young lover for a kiss.

I need a little help here with pencil pain, but then find myself emotionally transported with I am your sapphire. The unexpected just where it ought to be. And then after a very difficult gamboling around with fevers, emotions, closing shop to health and taking a break from networks (love-contacts?), suddenly the final image brings us back to neo-reality again. Light = love(r).

For about a thousand years I have been after Strongin to open up and explain the methodology of her writing. Is it all thought-out, being non-sequitur and surprising? Is it purposeful? Or is that just the way her mind flows? And if that is the way it flows, why? What’s the background of this sort of rich flow?

One day I asked her about sources and got back:

Emily Dickinson

Will Shakespeare

George Herbert

Henry Vaughan

Henry Vaughan? 1622-’95. George Herbert? 1593-1633. It’s enough to make Emily Dickinson and even Shakespeare seem like contemporaries down the road.

I expected Richard Kostelanetz, Dick Higgins, Mark Sonnenfeld, d.a. levy, writers who consciously (very consciously) slap words around with conscious, very intentional anti-logic.

And then one day she told me I can answer no more than the flower why it blooms.

But I persisted. The whole truth and nothing but the truth! And finally a letter came through:

Inside my head is a rich, diverse world: a busy, fascinating world but also the still point of the turning world.

Wyves of the Fire Dye is guided by actual history (note the dates, the 40’s, etc.), Secrets to Tell Your Doll is a little girl whispering her confessional.

One emotion, object, event usually inspires me: then I plunder my memory bank and look about me, always start day with prayer (Old Testament or New) and reading someone else’s writing. I am a lyric and language poet but the thought process must follow too: I pray that it follow with flow. Not just flow, not just follow: the first is mainly heart, the second guided by head.

So in her two latest books there is a kind of purposeful substrata of organization, but that’s not the point. The point is metaphors/associations, and, then we move into Strongin’s memory bank, the immediate world around her in British Columbia, the Bible and other poets’ work. It would be helpful to have some names here. Canadian poets such as the metaphysical Quebec poet, Anne Hebert, the Catholic Margaret Aison and the lyrical Gwendolyn MacEwen have been strong influences in Canada. British speech has infused the poet's work with a new texture, that of early lamplight, moth ball gas lamps, life behind the tweed curtain. Street and place names in Victoria have been juxtaposed upon the American experience for another grist and grain, a counter texture. Some of these names are Capital Iron on Store Street, Trounce Alley, and Bastion Square. This is the land of pensions where all the English Pigeons have come to roost. Becoming a Mental Londoner is a thing Strongin has admired and sought to become herself, but only in part. The mind is lever but the inner eye, the optic of the poet is dutch door: window half open to the sky. Heart, then head. So the fresh unexpectedness isn’t just an inspirational flow, but a carefully thought-out association process.

Let me take a poem from a 2008 volume of Strongin’s, The Birds of the Past are Singing.

Transplant[7]

A town I can nearly transplant

exists in Europe

like a bougainvillea.

The first week of the biggest project, the printer failed

"Announce Printer Works" came.

I had hoped to walk on clouds. Dante in love

lips parted.

My fate, though, was carved in stone.

The racehorse with the highest purse on his head

a silk one

was mine, bending—

flowing in a blond tapestry a Flemish masterpiece

wheat-like with small flowers

nail colors bent with wind.

Comparing a town in Europe to a bougainvillea. No town-time. But the bougainvillea link couldn’t be more unexpected. Then the printer of a book screwed up and she had hoped to walk on clouds. Again, the Dante-link totally unexpected. Just like her fate being carved in stone. And what silk racehorse are we talking about? I love the pairing-up of silk and racehorse. And then ending with a Flemish tapestry that somehow jumps out at me like she’d described it in thirty lines instead of just being blond, wheat-like with small flowers/nail colors bent with wind. Even the use of the word blent instead of blended gives the poem a more archaic timelessness.

I keep asking her for a confession about the inner dynamics and finally a letter comes that says:

Unable to walk, I seek to fly in my poems.

An earthy and ethereal child combined, I saw myself as boy- girl.

A musical child, I transposed the sung line to the poem.

My mother read me, early, Emily Dickinson.

So ... .she brings in the fact that she’s been in a wheel chair as a result of childhood polio for years, and that poetry is a kind of flight into an unfettered reality, an escape into liberating reality.

Only Emily Dickinson. As much as I love Emily Dickinson, I don’t find Strongin’s totally mind-boggling associations in her poetry. It’s all pretty well-united into a unified image-system, lots of nature-references like Strongin, but seldom the visitors from outer (image) space.

Although ... although...there are rare times when Strongin does come up with a unified, same-image-zone poem.

Like:

Colorado Winter Kitchen[8]

Icicles like glass-sculpture line the window:

currant-preserves on the sill’s red as blood of the lamb

the pine extrudes a bead of amber— frozen.

Must life flay like ice?

Yes. That sheer, azure, lean:

When the very skin feels taken to wrap

the beloved in.*

What other poetry has she been basking in over the years? Or has she just automatically turned poetry into mobility, turning herself into some sort of fly-everywhere, do-anything creature who travels not only everywhere in Time Present, but travels back to anywhere in Time Past?

Looking into her life itself gives us answers. Her father was a Russian-Jewish psychologist and her mother from a Romanian ancestry who acted in gypsy theatre when she was young. Early on she studied composition at the Manhattan School of music and got a B.A. in English and Music from Hunter College, totally immersed in Milton, Spenser and Chaucer.

Polio and the classics:

Paralysis and poetry went hand in hand when polio left me longing to move other ways: I found this reading of Raphael’s flight between worlds & worlds in Paradise Lost. Irene Samuel taught the Milton course. She was an inspiration. I noted often in life, in myself and in others That certain dashing eagerness of Milton’s younger angels like Zophiel. I found those in Spenser’s pre-fall paradisal gardens and visiting the Cloisters where again that medieval impulse kicked in, the Cloisters which house the Unicorn tapestries, in New York...

Driven by these impulses -- music, lyrical poetry, the Renaissance and Medieval world which haunted me -- I developed early mystical impulses. Music and mysticism, prayer and poetry, prayer to transcend paralysis have been drivers.

(From an e-mail, February 24, 2009).

So the atypically modern aesthetics, the mixture of untraditional elements, the mystical-lyrical originality, are rooted in the classics, with a touch of Jewish and gypsy mysticism: "Death was an early player in the morality play of this life in which I often felt, like the Jewish Mystic (as above so below.)

Strangely it sounds very much like my own life, polio as a child, a total immersion in the arts and in religion, almost total separation from the everyday, prayer and poetry ... although I find Strongin’s work much more unexpected, non-linear than mine. For me she remains the Master Teacher of our times, the incarnation of inspirational freshness, someone to become totally immersed in to the extent that the immersion soaks in and becomes part of your own individual creative mystique.

—Hugh Fox

Poetry

Part One – Oyster Boy

Dark Carriage

I ride the dark carriage away.

Field lilies: O, America, I miss your tongue, voice-box & throat deep down against the grain.

Farm plows piled a winter bouquet. Massed & brassy.

Child prostitutes wander glassy streets,

footprints leave reflections in ice.

Toy-drives stop at the foot of the ward-wall;

A Jewish woman keeps a Berlin diary.

Perfect processional, recessional

Sleeping lightly

a breviary

in cold classroom where mouth recalls its deep language lesson.

Snow is a cross

between cold & God.

A scrim unfolds:

Emperor penguins in oyster-colored satin

build a frieze

chainmail of feather-wall-bodies.

Bengal tigers & Brueghel red are haunting

like interlocked feathers in this land of Australs & Katabolic winds

Ice-mirrors glinting.

I saw it on a steep slope

and up close on your face:

grace.

One foot planted firmly in this life

the other unearthed, floating following the eye to a mirage-north.

The rep talked it over on the phone: it’s got a record

for helping extend lives some months.

I think of lives in the South, flash shadows, extended by hot noons endless evenings.

Trips to the Emergency room in an old

white box

remind her of being a terrified child:

The Red Cross ambulance is a locked icebox with a red flag on top a century old: Snow descendsintersection crucifix-connection between God & cold.

Oyster Boy

I too have desire

At sunrise:

a scarlet miracle mirror.

Then winter dead rise to sing

in pale robes like choir-children:

The Dark Ages haunt me

on mother’s dying

I move on to you, oyster boy

ardor heating

my own dark member rising.

I Write of the Secret Lives of Children

I write of the secret lives of children

folded like yellow paper from the legal

pads, buckled like origami birds opened slowly:

unfolded like blue poppies in my elbow, from my wristbone:

I write and then am gone.

What is totally heartbroken

what is irreparable

must be withheld out of respect

for privacy of those suffering.

Yet like quicksilver, like quicksand,

it sparkles

& as it whirls it beckons, it beckons.

Thunder Struck the Abandoned Railroad Station

X’s on broke wood signs which swung lit up at fork-lightning.

Kids crouched under tracks where rails crossed a ravine. Third rail.

lightning zigzagged again, jigsaw, a boy’s drawing.

Sun burned red as a beet, a Bessemer

the kind of sun you drew in kindergarten.

But Doomsday was reflected in shattered banks of windowpanes

of the stopped trains.

Ghosts are trafficking highways

stopping the Tollman, be he Death or Anon.

The ghosts bump with a small cry, pop of air balloon.

Silhouettes of girls & boys

come filing into classrooms

those who have committed suicide revolve backward in time, enter the grammar school

for the godded slang:

for Bee & shine.

Dutch Hunger, Winter 1944

Of course I didn't realize that because of my psychiatric illnesses, I would never experience the translucence of first spring.

—letter from a friend

By nine o’clock, walking against a Holland sky, reciting, observing

Iron fixed things.

Lord make me a magazine centerfold of a girl guide not the child on the March of Dimes Poster.

But God doesn’t listen to us:

At nine o-clock

Bone defined things.

More radiation

on our faces

Beyond dissolving.

Fasten ruined cities the most photogenic

Aspect

of war’s pity.

Lost railroads, factories, schools, temples, city halls. All mutiny.

Tintoretto Twilight

Falls, drapery

over the copper colored people

making their slow way home from work

Tuesday bearing the burden on curved shoulders again.

Shoeblack in the hair

takes

the hair out

So does radiation. Will she ever have what she covets? A medieval fringe again, our Anne? Only in heaven.

I strike a match

upon memory but it fails to ignite

Is this match wet? Or virgin? Twice, harder,

a third time

the holy trinity: I drop it to watch flame in glass burn a second, then blow it out.

Cup my head in my hands:

this darkly knotted world

this conundrum.

This glass box

February

This sky’s pink is skinned bone.

The dog’s bark rusts his hinged jaw.

In the Nickel Belt of Canada

people

are putting chains on cars. Arctic outflow-warnings.

During war we learned to move

fast

single-file, white socks on, heads bowed, checked for lice

There was no

walking away

no turning back.

Silver tarnishes to antique black

The compass draws in its long silver arms.

Storm

Confers on everything doomsday-feeling:

Ice outlines tightly on windows

Shrunk cellophane.

Not Your First Night in the Sweet Hereafter

at intersection between remembered & forgotten, the blind songline.

What if you returned to Chinese Soupspoon & found the restaurant was gone?

Lease terminated by the Bank of Hong Kong?

Chocolate-lilies, goldfish in the bowl gone.)

Houseboat days

would remain

wood burned

by hand.

Copper circles on the floor pennies ponds

winter ducks skate on

no childhood convex ladles

reflecting mirrors holding nursery spoons.

Thru Halls of Autumn & the Asylum

Thru halls of the mental institution

Where daddy worked

The dumbwaiter

lifted up & down black-brown.

Moonlight clung a nightgown

A small piece of lost paper

A library slip thinner than my sweater blew on my sleeve drawn to wrist. The fuels

Of movement burned:

The dumbwaiter

moved up & down

with the voice box on

a cord tied around, spectral-string.

Bottles with Glass Stoppers:

A brightness cobwebbed, smoked glass:

The ivory tower of childhood turned on its side.

I was moved out like a lit log.

Rainbow-tail of winter peacock bedraggled.

Night bristle-back

thirst-packed

ruining silk flame in a painting stolen:

medieval drawing Albrecht Dürer’s of quillery, a wild hog.

Cold Nights in the Allotments

i.

Cold Nights in the Allotments.

the only brake mortality

walking by feather-iron gate

churchyard at foot of town by the sea

There is no Bestower of Prizes

or you would long ago have won.

After the pension, comes a heady feeling.

A utility chicken, rough red wine.

Bus tokens for downtown. Fish on offer at the Shop Easy.

Mental Londoner.

in a spiritual suburb of Britain, maybe Cardiff, maybe Scotland:

Listening for voice-music:

Looking for silver balances.

Knowing

like a head-joined Siamese twin

I'd never look my sister full in the eye.

Wrists jutting out shirts home-knit hand-me-down sweaters.

A Milliner's tea-break:

Muffins glass-sharp.

A monk's life: no cars, no locks.

Cold night in the allotments:

See frosty breath

feel brain working that crystal walnut.

State-Registered nurses leave mums to work graveyard-shifts 1 am.

The mums

sit up in bed in pink bed jackets spitting crumbs

Willow, weep not: We've done our weeping, eyes Baltic-green.

Dark Comes to Teacup-City

Dark Has Come to Teacup City

Jackhammers make a ghost of quiet:

Thunder zigzags puts paid to silence.

There is no Be-stower of Prizes.

Mother, were you ever happy?

Driving out to ripe corn

down to talk to gulls, low tide rinsing in?

Locked

in dialogue

with gold Labrador retriever, dog & white cane.

The front of our lives takes the burnish of time.

Ice cracks on stations:

Lambs, arches hammered

Chill cone of air

becomes paper funnel

wrapping white egrets,