Literature Gives Us Back to Lives Within and Just Beyond Us

THE PARIS Review threw up, Friday night, Mark Strand’s “After Our Planet,” a poem the great Canadian/US poet first published in the winter of 1992. There is in Strand’s poetry a sliding toward the surreal, an undoing, through what comes off as a kind of snideness, of a mystic seriousness, and it makes it hard for me to quite trust the lovely poems he writes. It is as if he cannot quite bring himself to trust—in case it’s a bad look among his peers—“that which strives toward truth” (about landscape and about love and intimacy and language) “and wants to come into language,” as Paul Celan puts it. But sometimes, when the irony is stilled and the seductions of fiction are refused, and the tricksiness is held in check, he writes the best lines.

There is a whole section—section four of five—in “After Our Planet,” for instance, that knocked me sideways, rereading the poem Friday night. Strand starts with a line of Rilke, a similarly ethereal poet, and picks a fight with him. But in the end what he makes is a poem that persuades a reader that perhaps one’s longings reach, rightly, both deep within oneself and well beyond, into others’ lives and the meaning places make of all existence; and “After Our Planet” makes, sensually and implicitly, a compelling argument that a well-made life is one spent in the realm that poetry, and a poetic way of being, alone allow us to inhabit. As Strand put it, himself, in an essay on the nature of poetry: “a poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable.”

Here’s that section of Strand’s “After Our Planet”, beginning with a quote from Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus:”

“I would like to step out of my heart’s door and be
Under the great sky.” I would like to step out
And be on the other side, and be part of all

That surrounds me. I would like to be
In that solitude of soundless things, in the random
Company of the wind, to be weightless, nameless.

But not for long, for I would be downcast without
The things I keep inside my heart; and in no time
I would be back. Ah! the old heart

In which I sleep, in which my sleep increases, in which
My grief is ponderous, in which the leaves are falling,
In which the streets are long, in which the night

Is dark, in which the sky is great, the old heart
That murmurs to me of what cannot go on,
Of the dancing, of the inmost dancing.

“Part of all that surrounds me” riffs on Wallace Stevens’s “Theory”: “I am what is around me”. But Strand’s poem says that’s not all one is. Though one longs to “step out/ And be on the other side,” keeping company with the “soundless things”, one doesn’t want that for long, or for always. “For I would be downcast without”: I note the deft enjambment there. “Without,” that is to say, outside the self, in the beyondness, in the ineffable meaning-scape of things, in the inscrutability of the land, one of its creatures, one would be soon “downcast”, in which I hear the echo of “outcast.” The rest of the poem—nine lines out of fifteen—is a gorgeous and slightly mocking advocacy of the withinness of things—the realm of “the old heart” “in which the leaves are falling,/ In which the streets are long, in which the night/ Is dark, in which the sky is great, the old heart/ That murmurs to me of what cannot go on…” There is an “inmost dancing",” the poem is suggesting, in which, perhaps even more than in one’s outermost wandering, one’s real life really goes on.

But there is a place where you can, at once, step through your heart’s door and wander deeper among the things that door helps you keep in. The lyric place a poetic way, and poetry itself, practise.

In the same essay, in The Weather of Words, where he speaks of poetry’s unique fitness for the purpose of making palpable what lies beyond us and what lies within, Strand writes that a poem “allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living.” This has been, though human history, of course, the work that art and religious practice have served—giving us back, even if just for moments at at time, to the fullness of the mystery of our humanity.

Poetry, Strand goes on “permits us to live in ourselves.” Back in our bodies, he may mean, and back in time and in all time, untouched for a time by time’s passing, and by what we have taught ourselves by listening too much to what others—theorists and bankers and critics and all who think instrumentally about the nature of a human life, of all existence—tell us that we are.

But his sentence goes on: poetry permits us to “live inside ourselves as if we were just out of reach.” To be both within ourselves and beyond ourselves at once. In other words, who we are utterly and uniquely, and part of a much older and wider Self we also inhabit, part of eternity, part of humanity, part of a species, part of a consciousness, perhaps—and none of them reducible to any of the more meagre categories to which prevailing ideas would always consign us.

These are thoughts I have often thought and have explored in many essays and poems, including recently in “Why You’re Here: In Case One Day You Need to Know,” which I just recorded yesterday and posted to You Tube, and which, in print form appears, almost as the centrepiece, in A Beginner’s Guide, my 2022 collection. Here’s some of that:

You’re here to divine

The world a bit, to walk the god in you

Out with you, to make your moment

On earth worthy of the suffering it costs

You. And those you love. And the earth.

You’re here to keep coming undone,

To keep opening, like an answer toward

Its question, like sound toward silence, like

And echo toward a voice, like one toward

Another. Like water, you’re here to run.

You’re here to throw the light that only

You can throw. Like a shaft. Like

A blanket. Like a party.