Layli Long Soldier's "38"

The Window Encasing the Fjord: Following Poetry All the Way (to Iceland)

• Sketches at the Naesti Bar, Poems by Jane Varley (Finishing Line Press, 2011).

• “Old Sow in the Road,” a poem by Bill Holm.  From Common Ground: A Gathering of Poems on Rural Life.  Mark Vinz and Thom Tamarro, eds.  (Dacotah Territory, 1990).

 

During a general education literature course I took as a sophomore at the University of North Dakota, professor Jim MacKenzie taught a selection of poems from a regional anthology called Common Ground.  Though I enjoyed reading, I hadn't read many poems in my life, and didn't expect to like it.  But I remember reading Bill Holm's “Old Sow in the Road.”  I was immediately struck by Holm's accessible, declarative style:

OLD SOW IN THE ROAD
 

Thirty below.  A hundred miles from home

the Buick throws a rod.  Dead.

An hour later, I'm headed south

away from Paynesville in a truck.

I could read this.  It wasn’t too complicated.  More than that, it was familiar to me.  Paynesville’s about an hour from where I grew up in central Minnesota, and my dad owned a couple of old trucks that we used to haul firewood.  I’d been out on those roads, in those vehicles.  As the poem continued, I found more in it than familiarity—I found transformation.  The poem evoked a kind of mythic longing that I felt in my family for farm life—my father had left the family farm behind and moved into state bureaucracies and I sometimes felt his regret like the heel of a giant palm crushing our family into the bland desktop of our routine life.  “Old Sow in the Road” brought this feeling forward in me so that I could recognize it, but then it did more than that.  It crossed over something—some barrier between the past and the present, between people and animals, between who we think we are and who we might actually be—and it carried me along with it in an immediate way that I’d never felt in all my experience as a reader.

A half mile out an old sow sits 

on broken haunches in the middle 

of the road.  We stop.  Maybe

fell off a stock truck; nobody

saw her in the iced-up mirror.

She swivels on that broken back, a pink

lazy Susan turning on the yellow line.

Ice blue light, gun barrel pavement

pink nose, snow, snow, more snow.

Airy colors for such a monster painting.

Windows iced tight, heater purrs loud,

but by God, I hear the howling

of that old sow, snout rotating, a double

barreled gun aimed straight at me.

And that face!  That face said everything

I’ll ever say until I’m either dead

or alive as that sow at that moment

wanted so badly to be.

I hate to say that, re-typing this poem now, out of my old copy of Common Ground, I feel a little embarrassed that such a blunt rendering of such a mundanely horrifying event could’ve changed me so much, but it did.  My immediate responses to Holm’s poem (and it was this poem, too, and no other) were a) to avidly seek the transformative experience of poetry reading in other places and b) to write my own narrative poems that would try to find the beating heart of experience as powerfully as Holm’s “Old Sow in the Road” did.

            Fast forward two decades, and a lot has happened.  That moment launched my life.  I found in poetry a mode of art and expression that suits my character, and I dedicated my vocational life to it.  In the process, I’ve made a lot of great friends in poetry, including one Jane Varley.  Jane studied at the University of North Dakota just after I did, and studied as I did with Jay and Martha Meek, who have been life-changing mentors to so many poets & scholars over the years.  When Jay died in 2006, Jane and I met at his funeral and have become friends, finding in our email correspondence an echo of the things we valued so much about studying with Jay and Martha. 

One year, over cocktails at a writing conference, Jane and I compared life notes and the subject of Iceland came up.  Jane had been there recently, and I was jealous: as some people are Anglo-philes, I’m an Iceland-ophile.  Though I’ve never been there, I harbor in me some serious romance for the place.  I love the sense I have of the vastness and starkness of the landscape, and the sparseness of the population.  I also love Sigur Ros, the orchestral, kind of emo-rock-y Icelandic band, and their spin-off band Amiina, which makes beautifully weird music with large saws and plinky sounding chimes.  If my romance for Iceland sounds a little immature, well… yeah, okay, sorry. 

As it turned out, Jane had been going to Iceland during her summers to study in a writer’s colony that was organized by Bill Holm.  I told her about my experience with “Old Sow in the Road,” and she told me about her amazing experiences in Iceland, and about the generosity and intelligence of Bill Holm’s writing instruction.  Holm’s book of Iceland essays, The Windows of Brimnes: An American in Iceland, had just come out, and Jane recommended it.  More significantly to me, Jane was working on a collection of poems from Iceland, and I was anxious to read those. 

Not long after that conversation, in which our Iceland energies connected so joyfully—I talked about trying to join her there one summer for the writers’ colony, and maybe engineering some kind of a study-abroad trip with student writers who might have the kind of literally awe-some experience that can open up a young writer to grander scales of thinking—Bill Holm died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack.  I never had a chance to meet him, and still haven’t made it to Iceland.  However, Jane’s poems came out last year in a chapbook, Sketches at the Naesti Bar, from Finishing Line Press.  I would’ve loved the book in any circumstance, but given the weight of synchronicity and shared experience—shared passion, shared commitment, shared instruction in poetry and in reverence for the world—the book has become precious to me.  When I read passages like the ones below, excerpted from “The Bells of Akureyri,” I feel like Jane’s work is twinned to my mind, conjoined to my heart:

The Bells of Akureyri

No one will find me here, standing still

with a whole world of young mountains,

the sea not broken into shape or song,

Arctic Terns angling the sky.

…

Why do the gods in our hearts do this?

Bring us out and turn us free?

The poems in this collection do more than tour Iceland, they connect us to a soul standing at the brink of a kind of unimagined possibility—an open-ness so unbelievable, so impossible to prepare for, so beautiful that it hurts.

Email to Gary

We have come to get Mr. Sand his Icelandic social security number.  On the way, we picked up Bill’s sweater, forgotten at the sod house near Hollar.

You can write back if you’d like but I’ll be out of range again soon, going back to the village.  You know that picture I showed you on the web? It does nothing to capture anything about the place.  The fjord is gargantuan.  The mountains just go and on beyond the circumference of everything.  I haven’t even had a chance to go sit by the river, a blue rush coming down from the glacier.  Christ, honey, it’s so fucking beautiful.

I am often grateful for a sense of un-conditional wonder that Jay Meek’s poetry and teaching prepared me to experience—wonder that’s not limited by the pleasantness or pleasure-ability of an experience, but that extends to difficult emotional experiences and even beyond those to approach encounters with massive scale, where we’re dwarfed by the world to the point that our wonder—surely the only appropriate response—is practically irrelevant.  I’m not sure I’m saying that very well, but I find something like it in Jane Varley’s Sketches at the Naesti Bar—an ability to perceive and feel very sharply, even in a landscape whose vastness threatens any affective response with irrelevance.

            At the core of the book, though, is a generosity—an openness expressed between the people who appear in the book, and a care for moments of being that is probably the impetus for Jane to write the poems.

Letter to John about Helgi and Didi in Sigtun Tavern

…  Helgi switched to English and asked where I was from, wrinkling his large forehead as he tried to picture the middle of America.  Didi moved behind the bar, rinsing glasses, smiling when she caught me studying her as they continued on in Icelandic.  This was way up north, John, thirty miles under the Arctic Circle, at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.  The little town was called Hofsós.  These people, they gave me drinks, candy, and they laughed a lot.  I could feel them watching me taking views through the window encasing the fjord.  The sun was frayed and orange, skidding down a black mountain slope toward the glowing headland with its wide, green velvet back. The concourse of the water had one strange black streak and a thousand fluorescent pinpoints of light.

I’m grateful for Jane Varley’s Sketches at the Naesti Bar, for these intrepid poems that carry me out and further out, beyond my continent, across my ocean, to the northernmost edge of myself, where the beautiful, foreboding landscape is not comforting or welcoming, but is itself only and undeniably, and asks from me exactly nothing.