meta-blogging: poetry x 12 (February)

A note before I get into the thick of this: my poem “Homeopathy of the Nation” is up at Qarrtsiluni today! Check it out.

(If you don’t know about the poetry x 12 challenge, check it out over at Dana Guthrie Martin’s blog!)

For February’s portion of the poetry x 12 challenge, the goal was to read a collection recommended by others. While I haven’t been much of a poetry collection reader myself, I know hardly anyone aside from my father who reads such things,  so after scouring blogs without much luck (because I vowed not to buy a collection, I was stuck with picking ones that I could find in the library), I found one of the authors he had recommended. The collection is Saying the World by Peter Pereira, a gay poet and physician in the Pacific Northwest.

The book is divided into three parts with three distinct voices, so I’ll tackle them one at a time. (However, Pereira gives an excellent opening poem, “Nosophilia”, where he states: “What pains us makes us us.” His poems echo this simple human fact, brilliantly.) I’m not sure how many poet-doctors there have been since Williams, but I’ll throw my lot in that Pereira is the best of them. Not only can he write about something as medically methodical as an emergency Cesarean with charm and grace (comparing the exposed uterus to “a giant d’Anjou pear” and the whole process to “a magic trick … pulling a rabbit out of a hat”), but he handles the emotional turmoil such a profession entails with gravity and beauty. Two of my favorite poems in the collection are titled, simply, “Hydrocephalic” and “Labyrinthitis”; I love the imagery and language he comes up with, the human depth he gives to otherwise straightforward medical jargon:

“What transpires inside this vault
where there can be no images, no thoughts?
Oceanic vibration. Whale song. Voice of angels.
Pure tone of an empty bell.”

According to the bio, he worked at a clinic for the poor of Seattle; some of the stories he tells here are heartbreaking, some are hopeful, some are bittersweet. I wonder how much of it is true, and how much of it is what he wondered and imagined.

The second (and shortest) section primarily deals with his childhood and family life, especially the death of his sister when they were kids. The powerful “Suite for a Sister” shows the impact this event had:

“Origin
of my twin
vocations:
poetry and medicine.

One the study of grief,
the other the study
of silence.”

(And I’m not sure which is which.) The poems in this part powerfully depict the creation of Pereira the poet, showing the formative moments of his youth and how they reflect upon the next generation, especially those directed to his young nephew. Overall, though, I found this middle interlude to be less effective than the other sections, perhaps because the experiences are so specific to his life that it’s hard to relate as easily. He can describe a medical procedure on a patient with stunning words, without getting too into the backstory because it’s a life that’s merely touching his own; these kinds of poems are easier to get into than those laden with his own experience and all its connections. There are still some true gems in here: “Chambered Nautilus” illustrates the difficulty of coming to grips with sexuality, and “Hiking to Tsagaglalal Petroglyph…” is a mythic, nuanced landscape of his Northwestern home. Maybe my difficulty connecting with expository life-poetry is just my own bag, I don’t know.

The third section chiefly explores Pereira’s romantic life and adulthood. Whereas the doctor spoke of his clinic patients with ornate, fluid metaphors, and the nostalgic spoke of his family in heartfelt, wistful narrative, this last sequence is thoughtful and homey, almost every poem bursting with plants and plantlike imagery. I like this last aspect, because it suggests new growth, pruning and sowing, over the rich, nourishing detritus of what’s past. There is a mixture of unashamed but tasteful sexuality, romantic worries, comical moments, and panoramic, geographical visions; it all blends together without truly mixing, forming discrete swirls that complement as perfectly as the pieces of a life ought to. There’s one called “Senseless Beauty”, which is utterly hopeful and beautiful in its springtime glory:

“Our neighbor with throat cancer
hoped the radiation burns would heal
before he starved–and now

I hear his voice singing across the yard.
Fat robins flap and splash in the birdbath.
Stands of poppies open their red hearts.

The sky so damn blue.”

Beautiful! (Also, he shows a real knowledge of his botany, which I appreciate: poetry without knowledge is so much hot air.) It’s interesting and heartwarming to see the progression from young, harried medical student to awkward, uncertain child, to secure, contemplative adult; the doubts and sorrows seem to wax and wane, never really going away, but never winning either. The last poem in the collection is the title poem, and part of its last stanza goes like this:

“It’s as if the mere saying of the words:
Comice… Early Girl… Blue Comet…
had made the garden appear; and now
the not saying–has begun to make it fade.”

That is the essence of “saying the world”, I think: we speak these things into existence, and by speaking them correctly, we make them beautiful, powerful, life-changing, static and dynamic at once, interesting, lively, and real. Pereira shows us different aspects of his life through three (and really, more than that) lenses, with different magnifications and levels of focus, displaying the specifics and the generalities from all different perspectives, letting us go in as close as we need to. And I’m glad he chose the aspects he did: at one point, he speaks of a Khmer woman and her “long scarf they use for everything: sleeping, bathing, carrying food, wrapping the bodies of the dead.” Examining our lives and articulating them through words works in much the same way, doesn’t it?

Overall, I really can’t recommend this collection enough, and I’m really glad I found it buried in the library bookshelves. Please do check it out when you have a chance! And I’ll be back with another collection review of this kind in March…