from The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid
Building a House in the Woods, Maine, 1971
A good uphill mile and a half from a not very good
dirt road,
That distance on foot meaning a sort of mincing strut
over frost heaves
And washouts across what had been a poor road at best
fifty years previously,
Through tangles of witch hazel, alder and birch saplings
and—at this time
Of year in the low spots—sucking gurgling mud:
that expedition
Taking the better part of an hour to a ridge side where
a few gaunt, disheartened
Apple trees and dead elms from the nineteenth century
stood like blank-eyed
Sentinels and where you intended to build a house
that would stare
Without curtains at a prospect of more ridges and then
real mountains that
Receded to the serene distance of pale green eternity.
And why shouldn't love be made here, meals cooked and
consumed, fires stoked,
Children born who would have the boundless woods to learn from,
who would feel freedom
In their footsteps and taste the calm thrill of dawn.
Weren't all of us
Young and able to split, hammer, haul, plant, saw, push,
carry, lift, and
At the end of the physical day simply and sublimely sit?We breathed the dank clean air, the thin sharp smells of
pine woods and dead
Leaves and melting snow, and we started to whoop and jig
for the vision of it,
The earth strength that we had lived too long without.
What brought me to the woods was grief. My mother died of cancer when I was twenty-one. She was forty-eight. Hers was a protracted, harrowing death with remissions, tatters of hope, experimental treatments, and deep stretches of agony alleviated by morphine oblivion. For six years she was in and out of hospitals. I walked the long linoleum corridors and talked with the doctors, interns, and nurses about dosages and the weather, about radiation and baseball, about surgery and traffic jams. For every dire perplexity a mundane tangent beckoned.
I sat by her bedside reading aloud to her from her favorite distraction—Victorian novels. She was wild about Anthony Trollope. The vicars and lords and widows whose cordial yet machinating lives Trollope recounted seemed reasonably settled, yet being people they managed to muck things up. Both the settled aspect, the golden dust of autumnal England, the material weight of furniture and dresses and jewels, and the making a mess of things pleased my mother. She had lived, but she wanted to live more. She had wanted to visit Europe and view cathedrals and parsonages. She had wanted to breathe the ripe air of history. Now there were a hospital bed and duration and books.
I lived with death on a daily basis, a companion of sorts, mute but tireless. When I shaved in the morning or stopped at a drive-in to get a hamburger or walked from one class at the university to another, I felt death's presence. In that sense, part of me was dying with her as I watched her valiantly struggle with her disease's mindless depredations. What did those dispiriting cancer cells know? How many nights had I sat by her bedside when she was asleep, too weary and sad to pick myself up, and listened to the noises of the hospital, the squeak of shoes and the rolling creak of gurneys, as if they might bring me an answer?
What brought me to the woods was the prospect of living with nothing between me and the earth—none of the electronic gibberjabber. I craved directness and quiet. What brought me to the woods was an impulse to get lost, to almost literally be off the map. America was a vast country. A fair amount of it still looked as though not many people lived there. I liked the prospect of thinking about land not in terms of building lots but as acres. What brought me to the woods was generational. My wife and I were part of the Back-to-the-Land Movement of the sixties and seventies, the little tide of people who wanted to return to a countryside they had never experienced. What brought me to the woods was romanticism. I wanted to feel elemental sublimity, the full force of the stars and rain and wind. What brought me to the woods was pragmatism. I wanted to learn how to take care of myself. What brought me to the woods was my being an urban Jew who was ready to leave behind the vestiges of assimilated religion and culture that had been bequeathed to me. I wasn't ashamed of it. I craved, however, something different from the largely asphalt landscape I grew up in. What brought me to the woods was the longing to be with words in an undistracted place. "Woods" and "words" were almost identical.
When we look for one thread of motive, we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.
***
Our family lived for over twenty-three years on forty-eight wooded acres that we purchased from an old Mainer who had bought up land in the thirties like postage stamps and occasionally sold a parcel when he needed to raise some cash. We lived off the grid—no conventional power, no electric lines, no light switches, no faucets or spigots, no toaster or hair dryer, no flush toilet, no furnace, no hot water heater, and no monthly bill from Central Maine Power. Often when we told people how we lived, they asked us forthrightly how we could live that way. What was with us? Frequently they assumed that we were ideologues, that we were living without electricity as a statement about the excesses of modern times, that our lives were an accusation against everyone else. Maybe we were latter day Luddites or devotees of Rousseau or the Shakers. We must be of the company of the sanctimonious, those who live to judge others.
I never blamed scoffers for making such assumptions. Anything out of the ordinary tends to be taken personally. It wasn't that we set out to live off the grid, nor did we feel we had to live on the grid. We were loose. We situated our house a few hundred feet beyond what the power company considered a reasonable distance to put in their poles. Beyond that distance, a customer had to sign a contract and pay a hefty sum up front. Lacking that money, we went powerless. We could have placed the house closer to the poles—there was plenty of road frontage—but that logical consideration never entered our heads. Other concerns—aesthetic, intuitive, and earthy—guided where we built our house. We chose a rise where, once upon a time, a farmhouse had sat. Despite the rapidity with which a dooryard reverted to woods, there was a remnant of a south-facing clearing. We had rented our share of dark apartments and wanted all the sunlight we could get. People had lived for eons without electric lights and water pressure. Shakespeare and Cleopatra had gotten by. Though we had never done it, as blithe and hardworking spirits we felt that we could, too.
At first we said, "Next year, we'll get power. This is just temporary." Years went by, however, and we got used to going to the outhouse, hauling buckets of water, heating with wood, bathing in a metal tub, lighting kerosene lamps. A small gas stove ran off propane tanks; we cooked on it when the wood-fired cook stove wasn't in use. We never set out to be purists. The simplicity of our lives, how physical action A produced result B, pleased us more than it tired us. Nor did we expect anyone to be particularly enthused about how we lived. Most Americans believe in progress of some type; going backward seems perverse. Though we had our material enthusiasms— hand tools, cast-iron cookware, blue jeans, and ceramic vases, among other things—the way we lived took some air out of the sails of modern, technological desire. An amused friend called us "cheerleaders for the days of yore."
I tended to take heart from what Hazel in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood said. His landlady was upset about the mortifications that Hazel practiced. It was medieval, something no one did anymore: "It's like one of them gory stories, it's something people have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats." To this Hazel responded, "They ain't quit doing it as long as I'm doing it." All it takes is one naive, committed, or stubborn person to undo any behavioral law. Although not stubborn, we definitely were naive and committed.
***
Taking care of ourselves the way we did—chopping wood, carrying water, lighting lamps, cooking from scratch, starting fires in stoves—was never a burden or imposition. It was day-in, day-out work, but it was work that had the ring of clear purpose. Split wood and be warm, grow tomatoes and make minestrone, fill the lamps and light them when the sky darkened, keep the outside pump free of ice and draw water for a bath. More than one visitor told us that we were doing nothing more than fooling around, that we were "pretend peasants" in the words of one guest. When I protested that there were no peasants in the United States, that we, too, were citizens pursuing our happiness, she brushed me aside. "You don't have to be doing this," she said.
We didn't, but I didn't have to be writing poems late into the night either. In its Back-to-the-Land way, the household we founded was an attempt to live a poem. Although our path was very different from the imperiously romantic fashion in which Robinson Jeffers in California or D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico lived a poem, I admired how they upheld their living on the earth as a defiantly human gesture that stood in proud contradistinction to the machine-driven world. The artist who makes a virtue of normality and modesty as if making art were one more vocation doesn't really trust art. Art traffics in spirit, and spirit, by definition, is wayward.
It's hard to imagine the likes of Jeffers or Lawrence driving to work and making a paycheck. They were seigneurs who strove to exist on a plane that was at once higher and more primal. Dollars were not going to define them. Our household's economic realities were modest but, nevertheless, real. We didn't have a big mortgage, but we did have one. You couldn't live where we lived and not have at least one car that was in good, running order. When someone spoke disapprovingly about people who lived from one paycheck to another, I held my tongue—that was who we were. For all our manual labor diligence, we were ardent cousins of Jeffers and Lawrence; our life in the woods was an aesthetic economy, an intuition we had for how much beauty lay in both raw and tutored simplicity.
Janet and I never consciously voiced this to one another. It was a premise that governed our decisions and feelings. We were starting over; quite literally, we were building from the ground up. In our way, we wanted to answer the great, unanswered question: "What do these usurpers, Americans, have to do with the land?" Very little around us answered that question. The stores that stood beside roads, the roads themselves, the houses connected by driveways to roads—none of this worked for us. It was too provisional, too arbitrary, too mechanical, too detached. The buildings stood on the ground but not of the ground. We wanted our experience to savor something lengthier and deeper. We wanted to taste the water that came from where we lived rather than the reservoir or holding tank many miles away. We wanted our food to be food we grew, and our warmth to come from trees we cut down. We didn't want to possess the earth, we wanted to be of the earth—a different concern based on a different economy.
Poetry is no stranger to such an economy. As it hooks one syllable onto another, one word to another in a relationship that is at once free and determined, propulsive yet linear, it is an economy in its own right—an ancient one. It is rooted in our steady, artless breath. We get excited, we run fast, we are frightened and hold our breath, we pause and take a deep breath—however dramatic, these actions are natural. Poetry, however, because it builds upon the human pulse, is artful breathing, articulation that plays upon and with the rhythm in our breath. It has that glimmer of self-awareness that distinguishes art and that takes the raw stuff of being, in this case the physical basis of our being alive, and makes it into something else. This something else, be it meter or free verse, bears the impress of breath, the shaping that stems from lips and lungs alike.
This attentiveness underlies poetry's fascination with the economy of language. Since each breath counts, since a breath can't be skipped, since syllables are fitting themselves to breath and breath is fitting itself to syllables, an enormous attention is being paid to the bits of sound that make up words. "Every word matters" is common enough advice for writing anything, but poetry enforces it physically. Poetry breaks the words down into their syllabic components so that it can feel them as raw sound, then offers those sounds reborn, as it were, in lines. An extra word or even extra syllable is a transgression of sorts, a ruining of sensible order, an indulgence, a carelessness, and, worst perhaps, an indifference.
Poetry is a household whose economy instinctively inclines toward harmony. The notion ofliving in harmony is largely foreign to modern, progressive societies, because harmony implies a degree of stasis that they reject in promoting what is new. Stasis implies stagnation; novelty is dynamism. Traditionally, however, harmony signals something deep-seated to which it is worth attuning oneself To practice an economy in touch with our breath, which is mirrored in the pulses around us—be they seasonal, animal, avian, insect, environmental, climatic—is to enter a current that is much vaster than the commenting human mind. As passionate practitioners of poetry, Jeffers and Lawrence knew this and delighted in it. Harmonies do exist; they are not phantoms. Our insensitivity and capacity for being distracted do not cancel them out. Aestheticians of all stripes have proclaimed that beauty is harmony. So do the bees in the flower garden.
Santayana once remarked that the pity of the revolutionary, modern world was that it exulted in smashing what once sustained human beings. It should have been weeping. Our lives in the woods came from our weeping and our desire to touch the sources of life that ran deeper than human invention. Poetry, of course, is made up, but because it is a conduit for our varied feelings, it is profoundly natural. When poets get semi-mystical while invoking the importance of breath to poetry, their enthusiasm is understandable. Our breath is our basic harmony and is precious as such. The agony of modern poets is understandable when one reflects upon their awareness of how much was being shattered to make a putatively better world. The persona of a Berryman or Plath struts, brags, preens, and shrieks on the stage that is the poem, but that persona knows that that stage is no substitute for feelings of wholeness, of what Hesiod, thousands of years ago, called "works and days." That persona knows that, although there never was a Golden Age, when we distrust simplicity we distrust our own vitality. Their poetry enacted the misery, pride, and passion of such distrust, of what was once indicated in the word "alienation." Barbed though it was, their poetry tried to break through such distrust.
No one can count all the microcosms at work inside the macrocosms that are the living, breathing world. We sense them, however, and there resides in even the darkest poetry a margin of praise as it honors the rhythmic interplay between breath and language. Similarly, there was in our life in the woods a margin of praise that over decades we came to cherish. The world around us and in us was there. We were not making it up, nor were we trying to fasten it down. Given the fragility of the green world, notions of permanence seemed a desecration of sorts. That fecundity was prodigal, yet that prodigality—all those leaves on all those yearning trees—was an economy. The poets have celebrated this magnanimous economy forever in societies all over the world. The traditional respect accorded poets (odd remnants of which hang on in the modern world) is no sham, for they are devotees and practitioners of harmony. They are people who seek to tune breath, heart, and word to make a pulsating concord.
***
Sitting in the rocking chair by the Jotul wood stove and drinking chamomile tea or Heineken or apple cider, I read about the poets. I wanted to know who these motley presiding spirits were. I wanted their lives to inform mine. It wasn't that I wanted to act as they had. Pound's denunciation of international Jewry or Rimbaud's violence was not what I was looking for. The spectacle of the good, white Wordsworth sinking into the cold, smug lap of Toryism made me queasy—yet I needed to know their unexpurgated stories. I needed some sense of how they went about their lives to make their art, how they moved on, soared, stumbled, fell down, and got up—or didn't get up. I knew that you couldn't be a poet unless flames singed your fingers. Although some went looking for those flames, I also knew that a person didn't have to quest for misfortune and heartache. Mortal life in Somerset County or elsewhere would take care of that. I wasn't interested only in how the poet brought language to bear on the hurt, but also in how the poet grappled with the fact of being a poet.
The metaphor that seized me most deeply and that seemed most apt for the lives of the poets was the subtitle Richard Holmes gave to his remarkable biography of the poet Shelley—The Pursuit. Shelley was a perfect example of someone who went where the spirit (and libido) listed and who caused others, such as his first wife, great pain in doing so. You could say he was self-obsessed; you could say he was hypocritical; you could say he was a child-man. I wasn't interested in explanations or judgments. What I needed was the story of someone who believed in the powers of imagination and lived life accordingly—which was Shelley. Inclined as he was to Platonism, it was easy to ridicule him as an impractical fount of poetic blather. A bit of commonsense might have taught him to swim, for instance (though that would not have saved his life). The intensity, however, with which he pursued poetry (to quote Holmes) as "a sympathetic and human faculty [Holmes's italics]—a simple responsiveness to human experience which he called the 'poetry of life'" was genuine. Though poetry went largely unrecognized during these standardized, distracted days, it was not something supplementary. Poetry belonged to us.
The contemporary world with its notions of living one's life according to psychological dicta and shibboleths would have appalled Shelley. In his eyes to be human was to aspire to ideals that were writ large in capital letters—Spirit, Beauty, Art, Love, and Truth. Since we were human, which was to say fallible, we wouldn't reach those ideals, but failure didn't obviate them. On the contrary, like stars they existed to show us that there were realms beyond us that spoke to us and by which we could steer our courses. As we sought to imagine and embody them, they became part of who we were. If, as human beings, we didn't aspire, if we didn't recognize how crucial the pursuit was and the caring and freedom that went with it, our feelings grew dull and monstrous as we fed on satisfactions that did not satisfy. We didn't move to the woods to demonstrate how indifferent we were to materialism; we moved there to see what the life of spirit might be in an undistracted setting. What we sought was a compass. We would have been the first to say that we weren't sure where we were headed; neither did Shelley.
Irony would oppose Shelley and point to his wayfaring feet that usually were dodging bill collectors, but it would not know what to do with his generosity of spirit, for there was no irony there. It was genuine. As Shelley wrote in his famous A Defence of Poetry, "The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own." The terrible blows that idealism has sustained in the historical forms of genocide, world wars, extinction of species, ruination of habitats, and Armageddon weaponry have made us cognoscenti of degradation and stoics of misery. We may be shrewder (though that is doubtful), but we are smaller, too. When, with Aeschylus in mind, Shelley wrote of the titan Prometheus, he wrote of someone who was literally larger than life yet possessed of a vision of what it might mean to be human. Prometheus is defined by his relation to the gods and suffers accordingly. His aspirations must be punished. When one looks at the baffled anti-heroes of modernity, one flinches, for they are human by being less than human. Kafka's Gregor Samsa of The Metamorphosis isn't even human. His relationship is not to any god but to the busybody, get-along habits of everyday life. The stuff of myth—metamorphosis—has become absurdity.
The poet's pursuit is for more than the mythic, perfected poem. It is a search for the life that will allow poetry to breathe gladly and fully. I, who never made a to-do about being a poet, admired this search and wondered at it. From my reading it seemed that, unless the poet was willing to turn him or herself into a jester or an ideologue (as happened more than once in the twentieth century), the reply to Shelley's pursuit would be, "Not in this world." Shelley, who was neither jester nor ideologue, rejected that reply. He held that art ministered to life, that the search for form that defined art as an activity was practical Platonism, a phrase that was not a contradiction in terms. Life was not an inferior entity but a passionate search for what was already there. The goodness ("Buddha nature," as the Buddhists would say) was in us. If given a chance, people, like the pines and maples around our house, grew to the light. People wanted to thrive and to love and give love. We humans were, however, febrile creatures, as Shelley bore testimony to in his own life. The response to that fever of feeling wasn't denial. The response was to acknowledge, appreciate, and honor the pursuit as it sought to embody feeling in beautiful forms. Poetry was one ancient way.
Shelley's friend Trelawney remarked on how Shelley was always poring over some Greek text. Shelley revered the forms that were intrinsic to poetry and sought as an artist to make them come to life. A quatrain—to choose one poetic form among many—was, in its own right, something beautiful. It had balance, equipoise, substance, and weight. Yet it could vary substantially in matters such as the length of lines, the sentences it contained, whether it employed end rhymes or not. As a template, it possessed an aura of perfection. It was the poet's vocation to keep that aura alive rather than letting it harden in social usage, as, for instance, when the rhymed quatrain becomes a jingling, narrative box.
This challenge is immense; it isn't hard to see why modernism at times grew impatient with the forms and jettisoned them. Yet a look at a crucial poem such as Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" shows a very modernist poet reinventing a very old form. The end rhymes are there, as in a ballad, but how the quatrain moves, its legerity and self-awareness, are something different. That incredible assertion halfway through the last line of the first stanza—"Wrong from the start"—has the unimpeachable jolt of the form coming to new life. The form does not cancel a human voice; it highlights it.
These forms have come down to the individual poet, and as such, they are gifts that human beings created over long stretches of time. They should be esteemed accordingly. Although esteem can turn into idolatry or pedantry, Shelley, as an artist, sought to balance reverence with active work. For the forms to live, they have to be used. For the forms to be recognized, their absoluteness has to be granted its value. The world of a quatrain is a different world from that of a tercet. If such distinctions aren't recognized and cultivated, then beauty palls. When the quatrain is esteemed, for instance, for its power and acuity, the intensity of the second stanza of Shelley's "The Masque of Anarchy" is possible:
I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him. . .
We associate revolutionaries with the iconoclasm of sans-culottes, Bolsheviks, and Maoists. As those groups demonstrated to the grief of millions, socialized notions of perfectionism are destructive, intolerant, and coercive. Shelley was a revolutionary in a very different sense. He opposed the swoon of objectivity, the belief that somehow science will do our living for us and all we need do is sign up. He welcomed the findings of science as much as anyone but believed that a human life rejoiced in the presence of the here and now and moved, at the same time, in pursuit of the Good and the Beautiful. The notion that knowledge somehow makes us masters oflife would have seemed laughable to him. Our shortcomings, both morally and artistically, remind us of our humanity. That humanity is a river; damming it up changes it into something very different, something more governable but less thrilling. Poets, as Shelley's life and art testified, live for that thrill. Little wonder that the integration of the poet into modern, specialized society has been problematic. The poet is never going to come to the world; the world has to come to the poet. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are still waiting. So is Shelley.
What I felt in Shelley's life and art was a commitment that was complete and real. People often assumed that I moved to the woods to write something called "nature" poems. That was not the case. What the woods gave me was the chance to live a life and write the poems on something like my terms. They were very basic terms—carry the water you bathe in and split the wood that keeps you warm—but they gave me the literal foundation I needed. The Platonist poet was fired by an ardor that had to do with being alive in an actual world of guitars, sunsets, trysts, and tyrants yet feeling the depth of spiritual being that informed that world. Living in the woods allowed for the space, quiet, and solitude to feel that depth so that it became, however provisionally, part of me. There was nothing more inherently "poetic" in my life than in any life. The woods allowed me to grow into my life as the poet I needed to be. The trees chose me as much as I chose them. Had a time machine whisked him forward, I think Shelley—part firebrand, part antiquarian, part dreamer—would have understood. The passionate era that motivated me, the 1960s, would have made sense to him.
About the Author
Baron Wormser was Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Carthage (2005), and the co-author of two books about teaching poetry. He directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and the Frost Place Seminar, and he is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program. He lives with his wife in Hallowell, Maine.
A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid
University Press of New England
Hanover and London
Copyright © 2006 by Baron Wormser
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
