Writing by Susan Smith Nash, with podcasts. Works include poetry, creative writing, memoirs and writing from various places, literary theory, humanities, and responses to film, texts, and places
Speaking to Rochelle Owens is always a pleasure because she sheds insight on her work and discusses some of the themes and philosophical constructs that animate it.
Welcome to an interview with Owens, where she reads from her new long poem, “Patterns of Animus,” and chats with Susan Nash about her work and interests now and in the past.
“Patterns of Animus” appears in her collection of the same name, which also contains a series of essays written about her earlier work.
To purchase Patterns of Animus or to read free on Kindle, click here.
Rochelle Owens has been writing and publishing poetry since the early 1960s, and now her early work is available together with recent work (from 2020) in a single volume, The Aardvark Venus: Selected Poems 1961 - 2020.
Welcome to an interview with Rochelle Owens, who chats with Susan Nash about her work, the philosophical ideas that have influenced her.
To purchase a perfect-bound paper copy, or to read it on Kindle, please click here.
(Audio recording) It is very hard to interpret D. H. Lawrence’s “Coming Awake” without a clear understanding of his notions of poetry as expressed in his 1919 essay, “The Poetry of the Present,” and a conceptual framework for Imagist Poetry and the Imagist Movement.
D. H. Lawrence begins by saying that we need a new kind of poetry because most of the genres of poetry currently used either propel the reader into a projection of the future, or pull them back into the a nostalgic past. The problem with poetry that focuses on the future or the past is that it has to be perfect.
If you focus on the present, however, there is no idealizing gaze and there is no force-fitting a grandiose “message” or meaning.
If you focus on the present, you tend to chronicle the concrete images and things that are happening around you. In that case, instead of being grandiose, you’ll be closely observant.
By being in the moment, you can create a “poetry of the immediate present,” and it will capture a part of the present – like a still pictures from a video of reality.
In addition, the poetry that captures what is happening in the present is, as Lawrence puts it, “like the wind,” and there is “a sheer appreciation of the instant moment.” He cites Walt Whitman as a wonderful purveyor of the “poetry of the present.”
In contrast, for Lawrence, poetry that attempts to adhere to or conform to “any externally-applied law” would be “mere shackles and death.” For this reason, he prefers free verse.
So, if we apply this concept to “Coming Awake” (1916), it is possible to appreciate it as an example of “poetry of the present” which seeks to imbue the poetic space with a sense of immediacy and of heightened powers of the senses and observation, so that what poetry does for you is to intensify your experience of everyday life. It amplifies, intensifies, and magnifies everything you perceive with your waking and awakening mind.
In “Coming Awake,” the poet’s observations are of minute, delicate details – ones often overlooked by the person whose mind is in the clouds or in a fog of the past. Lawrence begins by observing the characteristics and qualities of light that often go unnoticed: “lake-lights were quivering” and “sunshine swam in a shoal.” The personification encourages the reader to feel the elements of the poem because the language suggests a human body.
The poet’s intense attention to tiny details makes the reader perceive it as though looking through a magnifying glass and seeing the “hairy, big bee” with “his body black fur.” The bee “hung over the primulas” which are later described as “airy primulas.” Primulas are also known as primrose, and they consist of clusters of tiny petals and delicate little stamen. The sense of looking at everything as though it were magnified many times, and frozen in time is what the poet’s language has done for us. It puts everything in super-sharp focus, freezes it in time, and then magnifies it.
Thus, the process of awakening can be said to be akin to reading the poetry of the present which functions as a tool to bring everything into extremely sharp focus and to put the reader in the very center of what is being described. The result is an experience so intense that it could also be depicted as shrinking to the size of a bee or a primrose and walking around in the garden and observing a gigantic, hairy, furry bee buzzing loudly, triggering your senses into extreme awareness.
The careful reader will see an influence of Zen Buddhist thought and the poetic ideas of the haiku and other minimalism.
Lawrence’s concept of the “poetry of the present” is deeply democratic. It basically proposes that everyone can and should write poetry because it is a tactic for living a happier, fuller, more vibrant life. Anyone can write a poem, Lawrence might suggest. The key is to slow down, write observations, exaggerate the concrete details so they appear larger than life and generate an emotional response of joy, happiness, appreciation of life.
Works Cited
Lawrence, D. H. “Coming Awake” in New Poems. London: Martin Secker, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/128/ .
Harsh buzz whine whir scream blind illumination
You’re the perfect cicada 17 years of anticipation a short sweet hot moment of life for life’s sake
I’m only here to breed let’s get that straight
That’s why my hallmark sound is of whip-sawed metal and the concrete you stroll down as though summer would never die
If the night is sweet the air damp and warm the dog watering fountain splashy with the sound of a collar and fur shaking I may take a moment to stare into the stars Imagine stardust under my incessantly vibrating wings
I saw you as you took that final fall my pine needles will say nothing
As your wings turn to weeping the night deepens consciousness leaves not a mark
They cling to their dry crackly hopes and misplaced modesty:
Leaves that will not fall.
They endeavor to create an illusion of solidity and sempiternal life
Yet they simply transmit a message of never letting go.
Whether that is good or bad
I will never know.
Norman, Oklahoma
March 7, 2020
************************ CATTLE ON A HILL
They are eating the tough dry grass of winter.
It fills their mouths but perhaps not their minds
except to remind them what it does not have:
stick-to-the-ribs grains and blossoming flowers.
And on a beige carpet
Jackson Pollock working with weeds, not paint: dribbles of cocklebur, butterfly milkweed, hoary alyssum and a poke sallet banner bending in the wind -- Hail, Spring!
The greening of the fields
makes my heart beat fast with joy but I must remember – the first greens are always the most deadly.
March 6, 2020
Norman, OK
****************** BRADFORD PEARS
The first few days of March
come and go
in a whirlwind of the mind
when nothing seems to stick
to the bare trees of memory
until overnight white and curiously odorous
flower clouds fly up
punctuate the wordless
timidly deciduous trees
so that the idea of a message
with its contradictions of beauty
and a noxious scent
sends a message of reality
rather than idealizing gazes
March 7, 2020
Norman, OK
Bradford Pear Trees in Oklahoma
********************************
THE WAGES OF LIFE
Cedars burned by a prairie fire
two or three years now gone by now
half-naked skeletons
draped in scorched rags
their ash quaffed by the wind
somewhere between
desire and fear
march 7, 2020
norman, oklahoma
**************************** WE, THE SHEEP
A field of sheep
A field of sleep
Those odd, square-shaped ponds
Storing oil pumped from shallow wells
The oil field below rumbling into a gusher
Men covered in mud and sweat
