Don Riggs

Making Things Out of Words

“As Below, so Above”

I have been using my daily sonnet activity to explore areas of my consciousness that my other quotidian activities — work, saying hi to people as we pass in town, writing letters of recommendation and the like — don’t allow to emerge. This may be because these areas of my life are irrelevant to those activities, and to other people, but in writing a poem, an unremarkable action or observation can become saturated with significance — see Sandra Gilbert’s fine sonnet “Outside Saratoga Springs,” in which Gilbert observes her shadow stretching out along the ground in front of her, and it becomes the “dark drift of” herself that she will walk along — and I am, in this aleatory morning activity, fishing for images that have some resonance for my larger self.
 

Subterranean to Surface Missive

My daily sonnet can be about things
that have happened to me recently, dreams
that I can remember upon waking,
whatever I perceive in the bathroom
at the time I am writing, memories
that spontaneously emerge from deep
in my past — like when I was in high school
and would wake gradually each morning

to the music of my clock radio,
set to the classical station, until
after 20 minutes, the buzzer jerked
me out of my classical reveries
and I had to become conscious enough
to turn off the alarm and start the day.
 

Does anyone care about how my high school alarm clock, set to WGMS, the Good Music Station broadcasting from Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s, woke me with 20 minutes of music followed by the buzzer daily? Probably not, but there is an element of the liminal state of consciousness between dream and waking that, I imagine, most of us experience. Then there is the recalled image that summed up an entire course in college, emerging some forty years later, after the professor had died:
 

Ancient and Medieval
in memoriam Cyril Dwiggins

The telos of an acorn is an oak,
said the philosopher, exemplifying
his point with a hard nut that would remain
for years in the attentive student’s mind.
That student was no good at taking notes,
and somehow never made it beyond those
ancient philosophers, first in the course,
eccentrics who left only anecdotes

about them — move over a bit, to shade
me from the sun, lying like an old dog --
or Sentences, obscure, that said it All.
Then the One who bound them all together,
and nothing after I really noticed.
It didn’t matter. The acorn had dropped.
 

An image, whether the supercharged mysterious surrealist image like that of the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing-machine on the operating table evoked by André Breton or the more commonly conceived image that is a simple visual or tactile mental reproduction of an object, can carry so much more than it literally contains. I have discussed the relationship between the poetic line and the line of the draughtsman in a drawing, as drawing is the visual art form I engage in — I used to paint watercolors for a while, but I have receded back to the more elementary school notebook doodle of my earlier days, although I do use “art paper” for my ballpoint pen drawings after photographs. I did try, for a while, to fuse the two lines in one calligrammatical work, as in my very first appearance in Press 1 — if you wish to refresh your memory, http://www.leafscape.org/press1/v2n3/riggs.html is the link — but now the two activities are only partly fused when I reflect on my drawing in one of my poems. For example:
 

Pose

The woman in this photo takes the pose
of the modern dancer. Her arms are raised
straight up, though inflected by the torso’s
cant, hips torqued atop the scissored legs prized
apart as if to make a cartwheel forward.

Only her body, without any clothes,
is directly itself, without one word
or image tattooed on her to diffuse
her unadulterated self in view.

We don’t meet her eyes, which are looking down
or closed; her mouth, which is slightly open,
is set in neither a smile nor a frown.
Only her hair, permed artfully askew,
expresses something akin to emotion.
 

Well, all right, the poem is about the photo that I copied in pen and ink, but the text and the drawing are two parallel approaches to the same visual image. I am trying to both be objective in my description of the thing in itself and at the same time infuse it with significance beyond itself, much as many great poems have done in the past — Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Reed’s “Naming of Parts” are examples.

But there is another element in my writing practice, which is not only to reflect but to seek out, to prime the pump by writing out a wish to my subconscious, my Higher Self, to my Muse, to some discarnate spirit ready to pounce on this opportunity, as they apparently have done on Ouija boards.
 

Invisible Hand

Sometimes I pretend that some other hand
reaches into my own and uses it
like a glove, perhaps to throw off some
karmic police, leaving my fingerprints
on the pen, having left words not my own,
an alien creature’s pawprints in the snow,
or even a drawing the stylistic
traits of which diverge from my own manner.

I pretend; sometimes I so much as wish
that what we back in the ‘seventies called
The Higher Self would squeeze through the chakra
at the fontanelle and fill my wet flesh
with its fiery lines to my fingertips
and leave me a message for when I wake.
 

My therapist will sometimes end a session by suggesting that I meditate on a certain issue that has come up during our conversation that day, and while I will carry that with me and consciously think about the issue over the ensuing week, it is often more likely to pop up in one of those morning exercises, when I deliberately focus on the purely formal aspect of the writing — 10 syllables a line for fourteen lines, no words hyphenated from one line to the next — so the issue arises spontaneously, under its own volition:
 

Anger

Anger is the fire along the coal seam
that has burned for decades underground, slow,
flameless, unquenchable, creeping along
parallel to the ground like strawberries
and poison ivy, roses entwining
subterranean trellises of wood
blackened, condensed with ages of pressure,

the infrared glow insatiable heat
radiates, lightless as far as we know,
for to see it exposes our fragile
warm-blooded mammal fleshy soft bodies
to excoriating instantaneous
combustion, reducing us to ashes.
 

The underground fire in and around Centralia, Pennsylvania is the initial source of the image, but it has fused in my imagination with that magnificent ending of James Joyce’s story “Araby” which reads, “my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” I have pointed out to several cohorts of freshman English students that Joyce undoubtedly associated the two emotions not only through their sound similarity but through the underlying etymological root in the Latin angustia, or narrowness, anguish and anger being two responses to being narrowly confined in a provincial worldview and set of social conventions.

Not long ago, when I was reflecting, during this morning writing exercise, on the process of writing itself — I like to think of this as realism, because the act of writing is what I am engaged in when I am trying to describe that very act, much like M.C. Escher’s etching of the two hands drawing each other — and I accidentally evoked a memory of something that had occurred over forty years previously:
 

Inkpen Improvs

The blankness of the page can be replaced
by anything proceeding from the pen
with which I skate across it, like the iced-
over creek I’d always hiked along, one
winter when it froze solid. Suddenly
where it was wider, massed behind the dam,
no trees on either side, the packed snow lay
beneath those folks who, marveling, had come

to build small fires and skate upon that pond.
No one but me went up the creek beyond
where woods came down in crowds on either shore.
I skated between narrow, twisted banks
on smooth ice and, where turbulences were
most days, with rougher pleasure than in rinks.
 

I don’t skate now in any literal sense, and haven’t done so for decades, but that hour or so of a delightfully cold solitude skating upstream, ducking beneath the occasional tree trunk fallen across the frozen creek, had not emerged in my awareness for years, and for just a few moments I was back there again. The Currier-and-Ives quality of the collective festivity on the open area of the frozen pond was in itself charming, and to a certain extent warming, but my own private subsequent exploration was much more prominent for me.

One other incident that gave rise to a reflection that transcended itself — that is, went beyond the literal act and image into something more archetypal — I recorded in a poem I wrote some years ago, after trying to trim a tree that had grown up right along the fence separating my back yard from a neighbor’s:
 

Pruning

In spring, the lithe slim green smooth limbs like vines
subtly slip from the amputated trunk
with roots so thick under the cracked cement
and husk so gnarled and meshed with the chain-link fence
that I have never known how to extirpate
the wizened leprous stump from its border sconce,
liminal space between the two back yards,
so as the weather warms I nip off the new,

rubbery and supple, with an inner sheen,
a whiff of my Dad’s witch hazel aftershave.
I fight this holding action against change
– the crumble and decay impelled by life
holding onto earth, intransigent fat tick –
crazy old man devouring his children raw.
 

Odd, how the simple whiff of the Witch Hazel that Dad used recalled that whole complex of emotions. Sharon Olds’ poem “Saturn” is parallel, in some sense, I suppose. However, another image of my relationship to my father — who, 40 years old at my birth, died 20 years ago at the age of 79, giving me now a possible 20 more years to go, if you follow the math [I did get a D in freshman calculus, to my father’s chagrin] — came from another self-reflexive incident of my writing:
 

Reflexive

It all comes down to this: pen and fingers
focused on a single point with the weight
of my entire being behind it
jiggling across the stretch of yellow paper
channeled between parallel blue lines

like a ping-pong ball that father and son
hit at each other, each one wanting to
catch the other unaware, get a point,
yet neither really wanting to cut off

the volley that is the closest they have
to a meaningful conversation, thoughts
limited to considerations of
force, spin, and trajectory, and the kind
of beauty that comes from keeping the ball moving.
 

Don Riggs has been writing 140 syllables each morning for the past decade, approximately. Sometimes he writes 280 syllables, and sometimes that turns into 420. All the prose that he sticks in between each clump of 120 syllables in his column is filler, what they call a “vamp” in the music biz, to let the reader relax and recuperate energy for the next onslaught of concentrated energy. He also teaches writing at Drexel University.