For K.D.
I once dreamed that the seam between reality and dream was delicate, as if sewn with thread spun from milkweed down. I dreamed that a dream could tear at its fragile seam and open like a milkweed pod, releasing its feathery seeds into the air. In this way, dreams impregnate reality, and reality gives birth to dreams. In his essay “Autobiography and Archetype,” from David Graham’s and Kate Sontag’s anthology After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf Press 2001), Stanley Plumly conceives of this cyclical connection between our archetype-saturated subconscious life and our lived experience, using less embodied language than mine: “Archetype is the machinery through which autobiography achieves something larger than the single life; and autobiography is the machinery by which archetypes are renewed.” It is this mechanism, among others, that allowed me to write my poem “Ballad,” which appears in my most recent collection, Modern Poetry.
“Ballad” begins by addressing the Fibonacci spiral of one of my recurring dreams: “Oh dream, why do you do me this way? / Again, with the digging, again with the digging up. / Once more with the shovels. / Once more, the shovels full of dirt. / The vault lid. The prying. The damp boards.” The speaker feels hard-done-to, weary from the dream’s repetitions. The plot of the dream, which bookends the poem, is my mother and I using shovels to dig up my father’s coffin. We open its lid to disinter him. The dream does not reflect reality. My mother and I never dug up my father’s bones. I thought of it many times, even as a young child, curious about what I would find there, but I resisted the temptation, as the only digging mechanism I owned was a teaspoon from a doll’s tea set. Thus, truth swallowed reality and gave birth to the dream.
The plot of the body of the poem is both real and true. My father had been ill since I was two years old, and died when I was seven. My sister was eleven. On the day he died, my mother showed up at the back of my second-grade classroom in the middle of the day. She was wearing her take-out-the-garbage-coat, a long billowing hand-me-down tweed that I took to wearing in college, where I fully embraced poetry as a modus vivendi. After the teacher spoke with my mother, she told me that I was excused. I already knew why, but I pretended otherwise. Although my classmates looked at me with pity and fear, “I acted lucky.” I continued the subterfuge as we walked to the car, the “(a)ir, teetering between bearable and unbearable. / Cold, but not cold enough to shiver.” Though I knew, I asked my mother what was wrong, why she had come for me. In the poem, I locate something in my child-self, a sort of faux-innocence: “I’m innocent, I wanted to say. / A little white girl, trying out her innocence,” and yes, I wanted that faux-innocence to be linked to whiteness in the poem, for false innocence is one of the most despicable delusions of white culture. My performance leads me to “encountering a fragment of evil in myself. Evilly wanting my mother to say it.” My pre-adolescent sister became reality’s representative in that moment, and in many others. She broke through my bullshit, when my mother could not. “He’s dead! my sister said. Hit me in the gut with her flute. / Her flute case. Her rental flute. He’s dead!” The plot of the poem runs parallel to reality, as it describes my mother pouring my sister and me each a small glass of Pepsi, when we “normally couldn’t afford Pepsi. / Lucky, I acted. / He’s no longer suffering, my mother said.”
I must interrupt the reality, the poem, and the dream, to address three ideas, along with Plumly’s theory of archetypes, that were crucial to the writing of “Ballad.” The first is John Keats’s description of what he called “negative capability” in a letter written to his brothers, George and Tom, in 1817. The second is from Spanish poet Federico García Lorca’s essay “Theory and Play of the Duende.” The third is the ballad form itself, as all forms are ideas, operationalized.
Keats’s own father died, from falling off a horse, when Keats was eight years old. His mother died of tuberculosis when Keats was fourteen. Tuberculosis also killed his younger brother, Tom, who was not yet twenty. Keats nursed Tom in his illness, thus contracting tuberculosis himself, finally dying when he was twenty-five. His life was brief and death-infused, and infused, as well, with romantic love, in his passionate and doomed relationship with Fanny Brawne. He left her behind in England, in 1820, to spend the winter in Italy, where doctors believed the milder climate might save him. Instead, he died in Rome, within hearing-distance of the waters of the boat-shaped Barcaccia fountain, designed by Bernini, in the Piazza di Spagna.
Keats’s life was compressed as a sonnet or a dream, but it contained everything he needed to compose the fifty-four poems he managed to publish. Of Keats’s output, Dana Gioia writes, in his review of Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats: “Even counting fragments, Keats wrote only 150 poems. His claim on posterity rests mostly on ten poems—the five great odes, three sonnets, and two narratives (“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “The Eve of St. Agnes”). With one exception, all of these classic poems were composed during his twenty-third year.” Like Emily Dickinson, Keats also left behind a verdant legacy of letters written to family, friends, and to Fanny. Here is the passage in Keats’s letter that made conscious what I had only understood before, in dreams. It was written just four years before he died. (Excuse Keats’s archaic use of “Man.” It can’t be helped):
…several things dove tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality
went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which
Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is
when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason.
With the use of “negative,” Keats does not appear to mean cynical or dour, though a poem resting in Negative Capability may be cynical and dour. Most scholars believe he is indicating negative as opposed to positive—the poem is negative for a narrow definition of truth, or negative for cheesy optimism, or philosophical idealism. The poet has a capacity to efface themselves, for a time; to become receptive rather than to impose, to diminish the ego in order to become open to everything outside the self. Keats uses the term “camelion [chameleon] poet” in his 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse as another term for the negatively capable poet: “…it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated…” When I first heard the phrase Negative Capability, it reminded me of my 3rd grade science project on the electromagnet, which taught me the neutrality of the positive and negative charge, once they are linked to the battery and the iron nail by copper wire, and the receptivity of the negative to the hard-charging positive, thus drawing the positive into its domain. The negatively capable poet, in their chameleon-like emptiness, can tolerate, rather than resolve, mystery.
Over a century later, Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca would offer up an approach to art and to perception that feels linked to Negative Capability. In his lecture “Theory and Play of the Duende,” he tells us that the duende is the “buried spirit of saddened Spain.” Lorca quotes flamenco singer Manuel Torre: “All that has dark sounds has duende.” He quotes an old guitarist saying, “The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.” Lorca’s claim is that intellect is often poetry’s enemy, since under its influence the poet “forgets that he might be eaten, suddenly, by ants, or that a huge arsenical lobster might fall on his head – things against which the Muses who inhabit monocles, or the roses of lukewarm lacquer in a tiny salon, have no power.” He delineates the duende as separate from both muse and angel, whose powers come from above, and from the light. The duende must be sought from within, “from the furthest habitations of the blood.” The duende arises when we are most afraid. No map can deliver us to it. Its process is struggle, and its ally is death. “A dead man in Spain is more alive when dead than anywhere else on earth,” Lorca writes. “[I]ts profile cuts like the edge of a barber’s razor.” He was known, in fact, for keeling over and playing dead at parties. At age thirty-eight, at the height of his powers as a writer, and at the outset of the Civil War in Spain, Lorca was dragged from a friend’s home by members of Franco’s fascist militia, taken to an olive grove outside of Grenada, shot, likely for his leftist politics and his sexual orientation, and buried in a shallow grave. His body has never been found. Lorca’s bones are nowhere, and therefore everywhere.
Openness to the duende can imbue poems with an earth-derived depth of intuition. Dan Sheehan writes on Literary Hub of a poem in which Lorca prophesied his own death. “In the final verse of his 1929 poem, ‘The Fable And Round of the Three Friend,’ García Lorca describes not just the violent manner of his eventual end, but the fruitless search for his body that would follow.” Note the pulse of self-address in the final three lines:
Then I realized I had been murdered.
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches
…. but they did not find me.
They never found me?
No. They never found me.
I vividly remember when I was haunting cathedrals during my unlikely college term in Spain, just two years after dictator Franco’s death, and viewing sculptures, like The Dead Christ of El Pardo (Cristo Yacente de El Pardo), carved by Gregorio Fernández in 1614, with bull horn teeth and fingernails, glass eyes, and paint applied to look like gluey blood. Death was death, encroaching garishly upon art. Christ was laid out in a glass coffin, like Snow White. I visited and re-visited him. He looked so much like my father on his deathbed.
Both Keats and Lorca advocate for openness to unmitigated Mystery, and each is known, as well, for a particular ballad, Keats for “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and Lorca for “Romance Sonámbulo,” which Sarah Arvio, in a tremendous essay and poem guide on the Poetry Foundation website, translates to “Dreamwalking Ballad.” Lorca’s poem begins with a refrain that will be reiterated mesmerically throughout, “Green, how I want you green.” Greenness overlays the poem’s setting and images like a green gel filters stage light. Its associations are multifarious—leafy, desirous, spectral, female, macabre. The poem is populated by an archetypal trinity of characters—an older man, a younger man, and a green-haired, green-fleshed, silver-eyed girl, who waits on a balcony, high above the men, who must climb to her if they are to reach her. “The poem not so much describes as enacts a dream state that is both terrible and beautiful,” Arvio writes, which could also be said of Keats’s ballad, a concise tale populated by two archetypes—a knight-at-arms, and a “full-beautiful,” wild-eyed faery, who seduces him into dream, and with the dream, beguiles him into death, where “the sedge is withered from the lake, / And no birds sing.” The ballad, in these two poets’ hands, is elliptical, constructed to both embrace a tale, and veer away from it. “…Lorca shuns narrative but never loses it. He does not describe his characters, he evokes them, with a green night and blood on a shirt. His dream environment coheres,” Arvio tells us. This coherence arises, in both poems, from the concreteness of the images themselves. Even as the balladic narrative corkscrews, the images’ materiality adheres, as Arvio tells us. The strangeness of both poets’ image palette is not ambiguous, but solid as the heads of nails.
Each ballad, in its way, moves forward by spiraling. Each presents a kind of entrapment—the trap of seduction, of the dream, of beauty, of death, and of the form itself. Neither poem perfectly bows to the traditional ballad form, but each makes use of vestiges of the tradition—a rhyme scheme, a metrical pattern, a refrain, and often, dialogue. Keats’s ballad opens with three stanzas in the voice of a questioner, after which the knight-at-arms takes over, answering the questioner through storytelling. Likewise, set at the center of Lorca’s poem is a dialogue between the older and younger man. As the green girl teeters on the balcony, suspended between dream and reality, life and death, so Keats’s knight occupies the in-between, stranded by the faery “On the cold hill’s side.” And each poem, in its way, serves as an allegory for the container itself, the ballad form, which inhabits the liminal space between narrative and lyric, story and song, as the feathery seeds of music press against the pod of storytelling, longing to be released.
Each poet, Keats and Lorca, died young, one by epidemic, the other by assassination. My father died young as well, not in war but of war. His casket was shiny black, like his hair. After the funeral, at the cemetery, I was handed a rose from a bouquet that had been rested across the casket lid. The flower enchanted me. My eyes traced the spiral of its petals, deeper and deeper, but there was no center. In the background of my connection with the rose, the typical sounds of mourning arose. They rose and fell. I was too young to mourn. I was sad, but my sadness was the least of it. My senses were attuned and intensified. I could smell the wild raspberries just outside the barbed wire fence on the north side of the cemetery, in confluence with my father’s father’s Old Spice aftershave, and the whiskey on his breath, and I could see the velvety mask of my father’s mother’s Avon face powder, and the pine cones rattling at the very top of the pines that lined Cemetery Lane. My mother wore green. “Green, how I want you green. / Green wind. Green branches.” Her wedding dress, as well, had been green. The haggard knight-at-arms was being lowered into the earth in his black box, his white shirt marked with blood roses. I could hear the cranking of the mechanism that lowered him, as no birds sang on that cold hill.
It was in that hour that I became negatively capable. My life spiraled onward, and duende became my claim to an errant power. And thus came the last two stanzas of my ballad, the scene that has echoed through my repeated dream, not real, but true:
Here, she said. Drink this.
The little bubbles flew. They bit my tongue.
My evil persisted. What is death? I asked.
And now, dream, once more you bring me my answer.
Dig, my mother said. Pry, she said.I don’t want to see, dream.
The lid so damp it crumbled under my hands.
The casket just a drawerful of bones.
A drawerful. Just bones and teeth.
That one tooth he had. Crooked like mine.
In response to my question, my what is death? it is my mother who eggs me on. Her dig, pry is nearly an order. But my present self, my adult self, does not want to see what is left of my father, “just a drawerful of bones.” A drawerful, the ballad asks me to reiterate. Just bones and teeth. It is almost a song. But Keats leads me onward. Lorca guides me. My mother, the ballad, commands me toward the last line, the tangible image: “That one tooth he had. Crooked like mine.” I don’t need to explain it. Deep down, my reader, I know you know.
