Spring or All Desertion: On Walt Hunter’s “Some Flowers”
Walt Hunter | Some Flowers | MadHat Press | September 2022 | 108 Pages
The weather conditions of Walt Hunter’s pastoral change very slowly. His poems invite specificity just as much as they reject a particular way of reading the landscape; they thrive in ambivalence, gradual movement with painstaking attention to the emergence of a feeling. The landscape is not sacred but profane, as the opening poem of his debut volume Some Flowers tells us: “certified sourcing / trace the arc of the maple / as a habit of thought,” and it’s only after the habit is acknowledged that the poem can turn back instead of forward, wondering in the next quatrain “is there an opening for thought.” The arc of the maple can be traced from the way it “scratches” the window, while the poem begins by observing the “sky above the treeline”—the opening for thought happens almost imperceptibly in the perspectival shift, the movement from the panoramic to the intimate head at the window. “is this a staircase routine,” the poem continues, and one learns quickly the many questions asked in Some Flowers are not meant to be answered, posed instead to situate the reader in a precise moment in which intense thought and feeling intersect, one never exceeding the other. Hunter wrests this equilibrium from a rhetoric of conclusion and instead gives us something closer to experience.
Without the treeline, something insidious from experience shows itself: take it literally and call it deforestation, suddenly we have a book of what might be called “ecopoetics;” or intuit the nearly unmanageable sense of grief or anger, because without the trees there is no language to arrange the equilibrium of thought and feeling; or really, Hunter does not want us to choose between the literal and the figurative at all. “it has nothing to do with language,” he writes in “No Trees,” then in the following quatrain, “language is a spray / a shape made after the weather.” Notice how, as before, the shift that happens between stanzas: the syntax doesn’t change, but a small realization occurs in the moment between quatrains, one short sentence to the next. A small realization, like a changing of seasons that transitions too slowly, then suddenly it’s the present without your noticing: “we were waiting in the spring / for our bodies to return,” Hunter begins the poem “Clematis,” a climbing perennial, “waiting in the fall / and waiting in winter.” If all one can do is wait (rather than anticipate), eventually they “collide with the future,” an eruption, a time at which the waiting amounts to nothing, to grief. “was it spring or all desertion,” the poem asks, with an allusion to William Carlos Williams’s 1923 Spring and All, and again, only in the next stanza do we find out who asks the question in the first place: “the dead arrived to ask us / and I went outside without you / when the winter came I lost you.” The way to move forward is by recontextualizing the past; an observation leads to a question which leads not to an answer but to further observation. Without an answer, the poem asks, what is the function of the question, if one can even call them that: “are they questions / are they prayers.”
If they are prayers, what figure looms to receive them; if they are questions, they ask to be repeated. Some Flowers attends to ritual, ordinary rites of the earth with a poet to observe and, through language, orchestrate. “how is each repetition of the scene the same,” the impossible question is asked in “Questions for Gillian Rose,” posed to the renowned British philosopher—yet at the same time, why worry about the repetition when “the wind has nothing to teach”? The function of repetition, of questions being asked toward this impossibility, is to create the conditions by which prayer becomes a conceivable way of engaging with the world: “lulay the exit sign / lulay lulay the rest stop / lulay the sky shot back in the eyes” (“Carol for Sean Bonney”). Cultivated throughout Some Flowers, the conditions of prayer are made to seem immediately necessary by a sense of isolation from the present world. Even though “The Swimmers” takes place in the Borough of Stonington, Connecticut, where the James Merrill House is located, drawing together poets and novelists to a narrow strip of land that juts into the Long Island Sound, the poem begins somewhere else, with someone who is not in the village: “This September morning it was snowing in Denver. / I told you that I dreamed my face was being / lifted off my face. You told me that you couldn’t find your hat.” An idiom is understood between these two people, the nearly terrifying image of a face being removed from a face met with humdrum concerns of getting through the day. The first of six sections, this stanza of “The Swimmers” soon shifts to the local:
It’s true what Jennifer said this morning on the docks:
the shepherds in the ancient pastoral, unhoused, say ‘nevertheless’
and share a meal together before parting.
To have such sorwe and be not ded—a car honks
To get us out of the way. And a pair of girls, faces masked,
are running fast as they can down Harmony Street, toward the Sound.
What happened this morning is happening now: the car honks, people sidle over. What was happening then is happening now: two girls wear face masks to protect themselves from each other and from other people as they get ready to swim or skip stones or look across the water. And the record of even earlier, what “the shepherds in the ancient pastoral” said, becomes a technique for contextualizing the poem’s present. Without thinking, one translates from Middle to Modern English while intuitively preserving the rhythmic idiosyncrasy of the original: “To have such sorrow and not be dead” sounds wrong, just as it would continue to feel like a violation of the poem to imitate its syntax more accurately with “be not dead.” By coming to a literal understanding of the clause, one recognizes the importance of preserving context. The shepherds in the ancient pastoral tell a story in Stonington, Connecticut, and the poem in the same village tells a story in Denver and Canterbury.
Tropes of ritual in Some Flowers, the sense of repetition simultaneously moving us forward and keeping us in the same place, does not preclude narrative. If the impossible question leads to its own repetition—“Having nothing at first / What was it that I lost?”—the prayer asks for some way to make the impossibility cohere: “I knew that stories / Didn’t make up worlds. / They took up time.” These lines from “Poem from Childhood” are skeptical of their own knowledge: by being from childhood, neither about nor regarding obtaining the same movement in time, the poem displaces its present to tell a story. How stories “took up time” through language is something one feels immediately, a reaction that happens before the cognitive process of understanding or questioning, certainly before the act of intellectualizing: “Falling asleep in the living room, / we told each other stories / we could barely understand.” Here in “Olomouc,” titled for the Moravian town “well known for its chocolate pie, / and for the episodes in War and Peace,” the inutility of knowledge, to “barely understand” a story, creates the conditions where silence “falls on the page where life could be.” There is nothing else to say, but there is time to experience: “End of story: / I came back, weeks later, from Romania, / sick, in love. You barely recognized me.” How else could this story end? And still, storytelling won’t always seem so private, so contingent on a shared experience of what is barely understood or what stays unknown. “The Ratings Period,” for example, remembers from childhood a father who worked as an investigative reporter in Philadelphia:
When I was seven
and eight, the world confined to windowsills
and Nielsen ratings, my father broke the stories:
Rodney King, the Gulf War, mob indictments,
Hostages released, suburban flight and murder.
One cannot choose between the public and private—“confined to windowsills / and Nielsen ratings”—always regulating between enclosure and exposure. The same might be said about making poems in post-Confessional America: what Hunter refuses to obfuscate from his style of storytelling does not prescribe biography any more than his technique of meter and rhyme, his quatrains, and “accidental” sonnets. One cannot generalize—but the question persists, “How to begin? These poems stop short / of making a scene. My father, after all, lived / his whole life in front us, live on screen.” This is where father and son differ: the immediate access to information presents itself urgently and becomes a point in the past, while the poem presents itself urgently (in different terms) and becomes a record of itself, inviting us to reread and experience that same urgency over and again. “who has the right to see their family / through a poem,” the poem asks in its seventh and final section, the answer is a command to oneself: “tear up, tear up the artificial turf / and let the rich and unworked soil / prove itself”
Tear up the artificial, Some Flowers says. Get rid of the turf and approximate the ancient. Tear up the artifice of memory that will happen in the future or that will never happen: “I only know / These words from memories / That haven’t happened.” The words in question are “work and song,” from the poem “Notes for a Child,” a figure describe as an “invisible friend”: “I see you outline / Time while what / I live is absence.” Son watches his father break the stories, then later in his life, son becomes a father to a child who is not physically present: “This is something more than death / You will live after me / But I will live before you.” The rhetorical artifice that guides one through this story does not approximate grief; again, description is not precise enough, the experience must be rendered in lyrical movement from stanza to variation, sentence to sentence fragment, repetitions that change by staying the same in a new context. No matter what, as Hunter writes elsewhere, the story must end:
Everything I write seems misperceived.
My failure was to find myself less interesting
than anyone else. The punishment will be
to see things finally correctly, but too late.
The wind starts up again when the day ends—
I’m lying alone in the hotel bed at the edge of winter,
the southern season you found possible to love.
These are the final lines of “A Different Ending.” To see a part of oneself represented and to conclude then a change must happen, to recognize that no matter when this change is perceived it will have been too late, one has no choice but to rest sleeplessly at the edge. If one crosses that line, Hunter responds to himself elsewhere, “the poems end in your proximity.”
The dismantling and preservation of what poetry scholarship calls the lyric has depended on a historical development of genres that might accidentally fall into this category. Virgil sometimes wrote pastorals: the category will help readers identify tropes of the pastoral, the structural possibility of his Eclogues, though it doesn’t help much in the way of being moved by patterns of language: “Nothing here is metaphor,” Hunter writes in “Southern Eclogue,” “or transcendence.” One is often moved before the category means anything, which keeps us returning to that moment. Walt Hunter writes a volume of pastoral poems, a category which helpfully communicates to his readers a style of dispossession, both and neither ecological ruin and a metaphorical landscape of impossibility. If “the stones proposed / by poetic forms are ethical ones,” as Hunter writes in “The Triumph of Love,” these stones are archetypes that Some Flowers accentuates by their artifice. You need to sit at the window and simultaneously regard the arc of the maple and the sky above the treeline. You need to position yourself to see almost everything:
Look, they said, you just walk
far enough away,
you get a panorama
So I just walked far enough away