I wrote Harvey Hix a fan email.  I said thanks for writing this book, I am amazed by the poems, all the levels of them.  The sounds, the rhythms, the images, the meaning.  I keep rereading them because they keep revealing more.  

In his interview in The Writer’s Chronicle, he revealed that he is a philosopher poet.  And it was true that his poems revealed a philosophy.  But they invited a different engagement.  To his philosophy as expounded in his interview, I might say well, I can see where you might come to this conclusion here, if you define your terms in this way.  However, a redefinition of terms along this line could lead to a different conclusion.  But with his poetry I say yes, I get how you feel.  There is a beautiful truth in you, and I have a parallel experience.  I am less tempted to engage in a polemic, but more drawn to engage in exploration.

Beyond my expectations, Harvey Hix responded to my email.  I began to imagine the possibility of engaging further – finding ways to engage philosophically on a poetical level.  I did so in my mind  continually, and eventually wrote back, saying (which was true) that I was elated to get a response, and had also been elated to write the first letter.  I didn’t particularly ask for further response, and I didn’t get any.  But I continued to be touched.  I was in love, not with the author, but with the poems. And I did feel a growing desire to be part of a community of thinkers and poets.  

I struggled with the question of how this could happen.  For one thing, I had no voice, no platform, no connections with the literary world.  I hadn’t even been an English major, so my knowledge of poetry was very scant.  Furthermore, there was much poetry I saw, in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, for example, with which I had no resonance at all.  Who decided what was worth printing? By what criteria?  Yet I loved the way it felt to form poems, the hum it gave my life to have them hovering about my consciousness.

My thoughts are reflected in the following – Ars Poetica being a term I had to learn the meaning of – meaning a poem about the art of poetry; the (e) reflecting my dilemma. (The first stanza also makes reference to a very self-obsessed teenager who lived with us that year, causing me to learn a great deal, but perhaps not enough, about cross-cultural communication.  From the second stanza on it is about me.)

Indeed, there is enough of that

Catching your gaze in the mirror

Jaunty look, cocked fedora

Sideways glance to see who else might see

Imagined crowds adoring, roaring

As you nod your thanks, your ego soaring

A second look, a quick, severe attempt

To catch yourself at fault, to find contempt

An awkwardness, or flab, something unkempt

To criticize, despise, and regiment

I fear the land of poetry

Like every land

Is claimed, policed, and parceled out

To those who play the game

Of who you know

And who you follow

And how your work

Exposes life as hollow

But if I write alone, will my words be

Pale, leggy, blind, a seedling in a box

Reaching gamely for some approbation

Wishing vainly to be seen?

I only can remain so long

Coiled, crouched for a spring

Before the impulse all leaks out

And I remain

Like a curled caterpillar, green

Twitching at your finger’s prodding touch

I seek community, not to be seen

But to photosynthesize

The greening needed not so much from praise

As from receiving that in you which shines

So let this be my statement

This my springing forth

This my breath’s compass

This my true north:

To feel now with this step that it is given

No fraction’s pause between the lead and follow

The bold, cold deep, or ripples spread on shallows

All known to me in this my home, heaven

In April last year, coming home from taking my daughter to see her future college, I discovered the poetry of Harvey Hix.  It was in a publication called The Writer’s Chronicle, which I had picked up at an office there.  The whole magazine was filled with glimpses of the rarefied world of poet professors – interviews and essays as well as poems.  I was both entranced and put off – it was a world I could have belonged in, and might wish to, but could also see its perils, the petty competition, the frail translucency of too many years in too-confined spaces.

But Harvey Hix – I saw his poems before I read his interview.  The one that first grabbed me was called “One Sparrow,” and it had a hypnotic rhythm and an intriguing scheme of rhyme and half rhyme (a villanelle, I later learned) while telling, in clear imagery, a story that was dear to me.  So then I looked at the other poems there.  Very challenging – lots of words I didn’t know.  Words strung together that demanded to be read out loud – so brilliant with sound.  Partial rhyme that I only started to notice after many readings.  I bought his book Legible Heavens (there’s a link about it, off to the right, under Books I Mention) and spent the spring and summer steeped in it.  Phrases would come as I rode my bike, and as I slept.  I woke up one morning with the line: “I have dreamed rhymes, I will birth sonnets.”

I didn’t yet know exactly what a sonnet was, but Legible Heavens noted that one set of Hix’s poems were sonnets.  And that summer, the following poem came to me (pretty much straight out of my pen, straight out of images at my mom’s house on Martha’s Vineyard.)  It’s not exactly a sonnet, I guess.  But it speaks of my being called to poetry:

Words gather around me like birds,

The soft summons of my rhyme puts them

at ease.  They cluck and coo, calling to

their mates and young.  Great flocks 

gather in the yard.  I don’t need

to order them.  They arrange themselves

large long-necked turkeys walking with their chicks

crows jostling each other to silence

cardinals and finches hopping closer

seagulls circling overhead

All of them will listen, all attend

All will speak, each in its perfect time

not for me but for this confluence

of meaning.  Giving purpose to the rhyme.

      
©Wendy Mulhern
August, 2010

Words sing around my head like lullabies

Phrases rendered senseless by the light

Find meaning in the chambers of my almost

sleep.  Murmurs remembered as melody

Before the mind knew they were words

Bring comfort, company and soft-hued harmony

So when I rise and look up quickly

Just in time to see a patch of blue

Ushered off hurriedly by efficient clouds

I also sense, like words that flit away as I awake

A flash of radiant possibility

©Wendy Mulhern
August, 2010