Katabasis, the hero’s journey through the underworld, is a feature of epic poetry: Inanna, Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante, and a host of other mythic, religious, and literary figures do their time in hell. Any journey in a lyric poem has to be briefer, although, as I argue elsewhere, short poems can still offer alternate possible worlds–pocket universes conjured by rhythm, sensory detail, and sometimes even brevity itself, if you’re more likely to give yourself over to heartbreaking material in a poem than a novel. I am. Call me a coward or a lightweight, but there are so many tragedies and terrors to honor. A poem can call me into its little room, persuade me to pay attention to subjects I can’t bear to immerse myself in for hours or days.
I’m teaching a three-hour virtual workshop on underworld poetry next week, preparing in bits and pieces as I carve out time for new writing, news-reading, and visiting loved ones who are struggling through their own purgatories (and in some cases exiting triumphant–my sister has successfully divorced the toxic narcissist, and there are celebrations throughout the land). My hope is for real connection with other poets across the abysses that strand us. I love a seminar-style conversation about poetry: no small talk, just digging into what matters, which can range from the subjects themselves that engage us to poetic strategies that might carry a reader along. Whether what comes to mind is death and decay or transformation and emergence, underground spaces have weird power and potential.
Below (hah!) are a few of the poems I’ll share in the workshop–the ones that are readily available online, because living writers ought to be able to drive you to their books for satisfaction. Poets go to dark places, deliver treasures, and don’t get much love or money for that labor. I strongly recommend Deborah A. Miranda‘s books–her poems, such as “Mnemonic,” can be fiercely geological–and there are compelling caves and cenotes in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s new Night Owl. Here’s another good one in Amethyst Review: “Cloacina” by J. C. Scharl, whose work I don’t know at all otherwise, but it’s an appealingly filthy poem. I’d love to hear about the ditches and basements, bomb shelters and swimming pools that haunt you, if you’re able to join us on June 28th.
Even if not, enjoy the following subways, scuba dives, and bog archaeology of influential 20th century lyric spelunking. There may or may not be additional artifacts at the end.
“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound (from Poetry, April 1913)
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet black bough .
“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound (anthologized version)
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
“Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
“Bogland” by Seamus Heaney
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening -
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They've taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They'll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
Easter egg photos in case you actually scrolled to this post’s underworld! These images are from hanging out with the Blue Ridge Mycological Society–a terrific way to walk in the woods, with knowledgeable people teaching, for example, how to taste and spit Lactarius. (Verdict: battery acid.) At left, a dead ant in a beech tree (photo by my new friend Masih), which, despite what you’re thinking, is SUPER INTERESTING because that’s a mushroom popping out of its little inverted head. A species of cordyceps infects ants, takes over their brains, urges them to climb to uncharacteristic heights, and then uses the elevated position to sporulate. Hence: “zombie fungus.” What microbes control my behavior, I wonder?