WHAT ABOUT LONG POEMS?
One of the pleasures and challenges of serious writing involves pushing yourself into unexplored territory and so over the years I’ve written a number of long poems. One of them describes an afternoon canoe trip with my family on the Chena River in Fairbanks. Another, a dramatic monologue, is based on an incident described in Robert Hughes’s book, The Fatal Shore, dealing with a socking episode of cannibalism in colonial Australia. A third, The Cyclist, makes use of my readings on Kabalistic mysticism in books by the historian Gershom Scholem. Each of these poems runs 10 to 12 pages and took about 6 months to complete. But my longest poem by far, River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir, chalks in at around 30 pages and took a year and a half. How did it come about?
As with much of my writing, I wasn’t sure at first what I was getting myself into. The week-long raft trip the poem describes had taken place ten years before and wasn’t even on my mind when I started. I was simply free associating and accumulating lines—15 or 20 lines a day. I was also reading translations by Robert Bly and others of the Indian mystic poet Kabir and I sensed that he would fit into my work in some way. When I’d written a few hundred lines, I realized that they were part of a single poem, but it was also clear to me that I would have to find some structuring element, a narrative line strong enough to carry the meditative and philosophical passages I’d already written. That’s when a line by Kabir noting that our life is like a river sent me back to the raft trip and River of Light found its shape. Luckily, I’d kept a journal on the trip and it brought back lots of details I might not otherwise have recalled.
In a prologue and ten sections, the poem wends its way down an unnamed wild river in south-central Alaska. It includes the sort of lyric reflections that such a float-trip encourages, but it also contains a bear attack, a life-threatening rapids run, and other quirks and surprises characteristic of such wilderness adventures. And in addition to the physical journey, River of Light becomes a spiritual journey as well. For this thread, Kabir serves as the narrator’s mentor. Of course this long-dead 15th century poet isn’t literally in the raft; rather the poem’s speaker (a fictionalized version of me) carries a volume of Kabir’s writings and engages in an internal dialogue with him.
Kabir speaks with great wit and authority and he’s not modest in his demands on his listeners:
Having slept for millions of years, he asks, isn’t it time to wake up?
Just look around, he says. See this world for what it is: a foolish bag of tricks.
Oh, friend, he observes, when you pack a loaded gun inside your brain, how can you ever find the peaceful path?
Kabir often speaks in riddles, but his core teaching is clear: organized religions are useless, and spiritual truth can only be found by looking into yourself. Emerson considered him a forerunner of Transcendentalism and Thoreau refers to him admiringly in the concluding chapter of Walden.
But the main structural element of my poem is the raft trip itself, as the river’s waves and currents influence the shaping and pacing of its lines, and the wildlife and scenery provide frequent surprises for the travelers. The physical and spiritual journeys are woven together and Kabir, who was a weaver by profession, is a welcome companion on the trip.
I knew that a poem as long as River of Light would need to include a couple of dramatic incidents, so after doing some research into other people’s river adventures I decided that at some point my speaker would be thrown out of the raft and almost drown. Here is section VIII of the poem. The grizzly bear encounter is factual and Kabir’s quotes are drawn from his poems, but the near-drowning never actually happened.
THE BREATH INSIDE THE BREATH
Next day the river narrows between crags. We hang back, paddling to the side, and watch three grizzlies prowl their ledges, time the salmons’ leaps and catch one in their jaws, then drag the flopping fish away to strip its flesh. But listen, says Kabir, the answers that you seek are neither East nor West and like those fish one day you’ll be picked clean. One scrawny mother with a lame hind foot prowls our side so close her bear-smell and the scraping of her teeth inflame our senses with essential bear. The world that we've been given keeps unfolding into wider facets and no eagle can see farther than the mind. We part the final curtain which opens on an attic full of bats, a sinkhole, a crevasse from which there is no climbing out. But just look up—those farther starfields glisten on all sides. Forget the sacred texts, Kabir instructs. No book is holier than what you read inside. When finally the grizzlies drift away, we make our run. The river quickens, plunging through a gap with riffles, whitecaps, whirlpools, church-size rocks. Our skipper steers us left, but the raft, defiant, wanders, spins. Fighting with paddles, shouts, as a panicked swirling shunts us through the cleft between one hellish rock and that sheer cliff—and suddenly, I’m in the sky, then under, battling in the eddy’s drum and thunder, dragged down, and then spewed upward, Maytagged in the clatter, rack and din of the cycle’s rinsing spin. Whirled gasping to the surface— sucked back in! Friend prophet, have you any words for me in my distress? Kabir replies: There are no travelers on the river, no ropes, no one to pull. The breath inside the breath is all there is. Strength sapped by cold, I gurgle to the surface, belch out water, head reeling past all speaking as the raft pulls up beside me, offering a paddle which I cling to, gasping, as my fellow rafters drag me out. Doused, chilled—giddy pints of water bolt my stomach—laughing, tearing, gagging, as I strain to suck air in. That river you rafted once, remember, like a rope frayed at one end you shimmied down, and where it breaks apart the inside maze has been transformed. Whoever drinks that liquor, says Kabir, wanders this world forever like a man insane.
The best advice I can give to writers who want to try their hands at a long poem is keep going. You may not see the way ahead until you’ve written dozens or hundreds of lines, but at some point, if the poem is meant to be, you’ll find your way. Of course it helps to have a story in mind, but, as in my case, you don’t have to start with one. And if you do have a story to tell, it shouldn’t inhibit you from digressing and exploring.
Are there other approaches to the long poem beside story telling? Collage comes to mind, as in The Wasteland. And some of John Ashbery’s long poems just free associate. Pope wrote essays in verse. And of course there’s Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which does all of these things at once.
If you’re interested in reading the whole poem, River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir was published by the University of Alaska Press, with artwork by the outstanding Alaskan artist, Kesler Woodward, who was on the trip too. It can also be found in my collected later poems, The Hungers of the World, published by Salmon Poetry.
My favorite…not that I’m prejudiced…What a great reflection on that fine poem, and what a joy to share both the river journey and the publication journey with you!