Poet on the Poem: "Lightning with Stag in Its Glare," Approximately, The

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2008 by Rivard, David

This one has a tone going for it, one that I don't often get to - a watchtower gallantry that almost turns the ordinary world into a place out of a fable. I'm glad it doesn't commit totally to the fabular or mythical, though - it keeps leaning back toward various alleyways near my house, a Methodist church on the next block, my grandfather's breakfast whiskey, an old mill building burning on the Housatonic, a row boat on Buzzards Bay, and a slice of cantaloupe (now being transshipped from Guatemala). The declarative sentence gives the poem stability, calm, even if the structure is rather wildly synoptic.

One of the things that interests me in this now is the way in which the dry gourd that appears on the doorstep of the poem has become the bell at the end - I think it's Pavese who speaks somewhere of "image narratives," of how an image enters a poem and begins to transform itself (into other images and events). The gourd gets filled up, and then begins to spill over. Everything follows from there. But there's a kind of Rorschach moment where you have to say what shape the spill has taken - in order to do that, I had to become a specific character in the poem, alter the point of view in order to see these events from the proper angle. Not the stag. A woodpecker - the one that nests in my neighborhood is an airborne alarm clock.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped believing there's a defining storyline to my life (or anyone else's). Or perhaps it's so general as to be shared by all in ways we can only begin to guess at. A plot driven by both possibility and suffering. In any case, in lieu of understanding and insight, I'll take trueness any day. Something less absolute.

I started this poem July 19, 2006, a month or so after visiting Mass MoCA with my daughter. The feature show in the museum at the time was a retrospective of the work of Chinese installation artist Huang Yong Ping, whose constructions make for a rigorously magical and beautiful stage set, the found objects of political, cultural and mystic systems mingled in an intensely personal black-box theater. The Taoist medicine gourd in the poem is an image out of a large-scale piece by Huang titled "The Pharmacy." At the 2006 retrospective it shared a space in the former factory building with an even larger sculpture by Joseph Beuys called "Lightning with Stag in Its Glare." The poem has almost nothing to do with either piece, except in whatever small ways it honors those complex impulses that Beuys and Huang immerse us in, the trueness of their improvisations.

DAVID RIVARD is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Sugartown (Graywolf, 2006). In 2006, he was awarded the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize by the Folger Shakespeare Library, for his teaching as well as his writing. He is on the faculty of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.