Elizabeth Carothers Herron
The poet’s house is the house without walls. Both concrete and metaphorical. It is a weaving, an interplay, a dialectic turned toward harmony. Its motive is reunification in the face of personal and global dissolution. Two primary forces shape the work: the force of cycles (repetition and stability) and the force of change (variation, chaos, mystery and surprise). These forces are represented in the poem by the figures of Mnemosyne (Goddess of Memory) and Coyote (the great Trickster figure of the West). As polarities, they also emerge in the rhythms of the poem, its images and its narrative. The rhythms reside in the repetition of images, words and phrases as well as in rhymes (generally understated by interior line placement) and syntactical structures. The narrative involves the arrangement of recurring images and their evolution punctuated by the introduction of new elements.
As with gamelan, the music of Indonesia, repetitions of the poem coincide in apparently random ways that, over time, one begins to experience rhythmically as anticipated intersections of energy. This presents a metaphor for natural systems; patterns emerge with greater density and frequency the longer one attends over time. As humans we are, of course, part of the natural world and subject to its laws. These include, as it turns out, the peculiar uncertainties of quanta, chaos, and emergent behavior (Coyote) along with cycles and repetitions (Mnemosyne). All this is implied, if not actually illustrated, in The Poet’s House.
The poem has its roots in a childhood of mystical connection with nature – the woods behind our house, extremes of weather, wild creatures, a little colony of violets I planted under the backyard maple when I was five – all gave rise to an abiding sense of a fierce but delicate, accepting, enduring and unifying spiritual force evident in nature. Much later, sitting meditation added another dimension. The largeness of the field of inner awareness beyond personal identity returned me to the childhood experience of merging with nature. I discovered in that largeness (largess, one could say) of the realm beyond the I – the field of awareness itself, which seemed to be both source and abiding presence, container and content, limitless in all respects. Through sitting practice, I was led back to the merged state of childhood by an entirely different path, circumventing my mental and emotional convolutions of separateness. I began to sense the fundamental labor of my life as the continual expansion of acceptance. To accept the given is also my task as a poet, and to document the losses, to strengthen the survival of beauty and love through acknowledgement and celebration.
As a poem about processes in which we are embedded and participant, The Poet’s House asks that we enter the text as much as possible. It demands an immediacy that resists the distance of type. In a world moving faster than the rhythms of the body and faster than the tongue’s sensual shaping of words, a handwritten text obliges us to slow down. It invites an auditory experience of the words, even if the hearing is interior. Handwritten text requires a more leisurely reading that draws us into the content as well as into a personal relationship with the poet -- who is visibly present to the reader within the words, through the pen. The visible rhythm of the hand with its nerves and bones and blood remind the reader of our physicality in an ever-more disembodied cyber world.
Bruce speaks of sacred space and his impulse to create a place for reflection and contemplation, states of mind that require time-out of our busy lives. Such periods of reflection and contemplation are necessary for any constructive action; so Poetry House, like other sacred spaces, is essential. By replicating the natural order of things through its musical structure and thematic weaving, in evoking an experience of the complex wholeness of life and pointing toward the relationships between seemingly separate action and events, The Poet’s House implies the insights that arise from contemplation. It is when we realize the essential web of connection that our personal choices begin to serve life beyond ourselves.
This book is written in cursive by the poet. First edition handbound by Jimalee Plank, by special order; Second edition limited to 30 copies, signed and numbered by the author.
Elizabeth Carothers Herron
P.O.Box 315, Graton, CA 95444 • 707-522-9000 • ehsalmon@earthlink.net