spring equinox

Joy Harjo - "I am a Prayer"

​Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed”
You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed” (This poem is in the public domain)
 
 
Octavio Paz, “Proem”
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
  the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
  the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
  the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
  the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
  for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
  the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
  the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
  the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
  the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
  the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
  the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Syllables seeds.  
“Proem” by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger, from The Selected Poems 1957-1987, copyright ©1986 by Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
 
 
Muriel Rukeyser, “Elegy in Joy” (excerpt)
We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
“Elegy in Joy” by Muriel Rukeyser, from Elegies, copyright ©1949 by Muriel Rukeyster. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 
 
 
POETIC THEMES 
            The ancient Babylonians and Persians marked the turning of the year sometime around the vernal equinox. In my neck of the woods, at least in the moment of global warming in which this book was written, around now is generally considered a safe time to plant seeds, especially if you are looking to harvest edible things in the summer. But there are many ways to plant a seed, as these poems illustrate.
            Frost’s “Putting in the Seed” represents gardening as solitary labor through which “Love burns” (his wife making him dinner is not configured this way). The petals he’s fingering are pretty suggestive: “not so barren quite, / Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea.” Hm. “Putting” (an odd, neutral choice of verbs for this otherwise sexy poem) seeds into the ground is seen to be the demonstration of his “springtime passion for the earth.” He is such a “slave” to passion that he may or may not decide to come eat the dinner prepared for him. His wife is, however, invited to the early birth, when the “sturdy seedling” will shoulder its way into the world.
            Contrast this to Octavio Paz’s expansive vision of planting seeds. A poem about the action of writing poetry as an analogy for seed-planting would seem to point to a certain self-reflexivity. The horizon expands and expands further in the far-reaching scope of what poetry can be: vertigo cliff-walk of bodies, speech, and death. Words parachuting onto the page are depicted in Biblical proportions of sorrow and despair, which would seem to aggrandize the poet. But then, admitting this “idolatry of the self” is itself a kind of desecration. And in this play of expansion and contraction, the small self of the poet is dissipated into something much larger. Poetic creation is figured here in terms of destruction, before anything new can be possible: epithets are beheaded, rules and commandments are set on fire. Even the poem’s nostalgic homage to the ancient world of Plato and Epicurus forces open the Western ancient world to include the gardens of Netzahualcoyotl.
              Language isn’t configured as the poet’s spawn, a product of his labor pains, but instead as something wild, set free, far beyond and outside of him. Verbs migrate with “wings and claws,” nouns are “bony and full of roots,” language is a sea of waves. The mystery of creation isn’t an act to be claimed or owned here. For Frost, the middle of the sonnet holds the love act that breeds its creation: “Love burns through the [capitalized act of] Putting in the Seed.” But love only emerges at the end of Paz’s poem, so mysterious as to be invisible, unheard, and unspoken. The involuted line “love in love” comes back to the final, solitary, italicized line: “Syllables seeds.” The poem created, for Paz, is what comes before, like a proem. The love for creation seeds, in turn, more love.
            Is it far-fetched to perceive in “Elegy in Joy” echoes of the watery despair, engendering love, roots and flame of “Proem”? Rukeyser’s articulations of a liberal politics might owe just as much to Octavio Paz as her poetry does. I’ve only dipped a toe in it, so I’m not the one to say. But in the foreword to her translations of his early poetry, she describes finding in his work a fusion of politics and art: “In coming to the poems of the young Octavio Paz, I found that voice of the meeting-place for which many of us were looking in those years. Meeting-place of fever and the cold eye, in a passion which could hold together with his own arms the flying apart of his own time.” She describes, in the foreword, how translating him transformed her. Her grace and humility in admitting her limitations, not being of Mexican descent, exemplify a keen awareness of the messiness of intersubjectivity ahead of its time. She recounts her awkward “stumbling” through the task of bringing the full range of meanings, carrying Nahuatl as well as Mexican nuances. She confesses to having made many “mistakes in my frenzy and ignorance,” and speaks directly to appropriative violence: “…the traces of my attempt to move from this poetry toward an English poem have left wounds, scars where we need healing.” She closes the foreword by restating her conviction that “The translator must be exposed to this extent; fully, that is”; ending not with her own conclusions, but with Carlos Fuentes’ description of Paz’s “lucid expression of Mexican tragedy.”
            But back to “Elegy in Joy”! Rukeyser’s elegies were her response to the confusion of World-War-II-era America. They are part of an oeuvre that, like Paz’s, wrestles with the nitty-gritty of a commitment to pacifism in the context of savage political realities. And this poem is the last of the elegies. It is the work of a mature poet and anti-fascist activist, no longer naive to the ways of the world. As such, this poem swims in grief, aware of its own limitation in offering nourishment or answers to wide-eyed children in wartime. Still, it isn’t an elegy for joy, but an elegy in joy. Like a small raft on the flowing river of despair, joy persists in new beginnings. The “green tree of grace” gives a blessing in the form of a seed. The seed here is configured as a metaphor standing for new beginnings, of whatever kind, which we are called to nourish and which in turn promise nourishment. Anything sullied, tainted, made toxic by ordinary human cruelty, can be recreated: “Not all things are blest, but the / seeds of all things are blest.”
             After spending “Years over wars and an imagining of peace,” the nowness of the present moment is the seed for peace, an instantiation of “fierce pure life.” All of us collectively caring about the broken world, “which is many wishes flaming together,” holds the possibility for our “expiation journey / toward peace.” The first word of the poem is, after all, WE. Frost’s labor of love in sowing a seed creates new life, configured as progeny. Paz’s poem is the creative seed that generates a love so expansive that the smallness of humanity disappears in it. For Rukeyser, Love itself appears to be the nourishing seed that "gives us ourselves": we are recreated in and through the very notion of beginning anew. The blessing of “this instant of love” makes possible “new techniques for the healing of the wound, / and the unknown world.” And then the magnificent final line about the reach and import of each mortal incarnation, as far-flung as any surrealistic sweep of Paz’s imagination: “One life, or the faring stars.”
 
 
PRACTICE
            The most literal way of exploring your relation to seed-planting would be… um… to plant an actual seed. Frost’s poem is the most grounded in embodied movement and earthy detail. You could come back to earth by feeling the dirt under your fingernails. Or you might instead plant an emblematic talisman, a meaningful object of some kind, referencing the magic of something you’re ready to birth this spring. You could mark it with a stone, dig it up at the end of the summer, wash it off, and see what has come into the world through you. Or you could render the action of planting a seed metaphorically, as Paz does with the analogy of writing, through some creative act. It seems very fitting to mark the new year by generating something new, and perhaps it could renew your love for painting, or journaling, or dancing. Or you could “nourish beginnings” in Rukeyser’s way, through letting grace drop its seed in a single act of loving. Who needs you in this moment? How could you contribute to healing the world’s wound by reaching out to them in love?