Poetry

Listen to Tim Hunt on Rowand Radio’s Writers’ Roundtable

The page (and the screen you’re looking at which is here functioning as its surrogate) is an odd thing.  It both marks our separation (you are not here as I write this; I am not there as you read this) and it partly overcomes that separation (I set this whittled stick in the notch of this electronic tree on the chance that you might look up as you walk along the trail, notice it, and think about the odd pine bird that implies singing but doesn’t actually sing, except in my mind as I was carving and perhaps yours as your fingers read the knifed marks).

When I was even more of a California redneck than I’ve since become, the way the page separated writing from reading bothered me.  I wrote for a while in spite of this and had some success (poems in a number of journals, a chapbook, The Chester H. Jones Prize), but then stopped writing for a number of years.  As I trudged through Jeffers’ manuscripts, his experiences with publishers, and the ups and downs (mostly downs) of his critical reception, I realized that the page can be understood as a surface on which to inscribe writing but also that it can be imagined as a space in which speech is enacted (this dyad figures in the pieces elsewhere on this site grouped under the heading Textual Mediation).  I then began writing again.

The poems in Fault Lines, the two forthcoming chapbooks (White Levis and Redneck Yoga), and the two collections that are standing out on the county road, thumb in the air, trying to flag a ride (’Til Twangdom Come and Listening to Wolfman Jack) from a passing haytruck derive from my attempts to write as if the page can be a space for speaking (and hearing) and to explore the ways the page can modulate the voice and catch at something of its silence.  It is, of course, still true that you are not there; just as it’s still true that I am not here, but perhaps (if we look past these black marks) we can talk anyway, even though we both know how different it is to speak (whether “to” or “with” a someone or a group of someones) and to write (as if “to” a “someone” who must literally be an absent, usually “unknown one” and who may well prove literally to be “no one”).  The following three pieces drawn from Fault Lines relates to this (or at least I think they do):

Peets

At the Peets in Berkeley, I am drinking a double
espresso with unrefined sugar in it; you, a mocha.
Do you remember in high school how we would
walk the campus, prowl the bookshops,
then sit here as if this were more real
than the little town to the north—
the apple trees and canneries, evenings
of Rawhide, Lawrence Welk, Route 66?

No, you don’t.  Because I am not in Peets.
Here, no one else is up yet.  I am drinking tea
(from the Peets in Portland) as the blue
squeezes down against the fog, and the trees
come out across the estuary.
And you?  I don’t know who you are
as I write pretending I do.

But if you were you and we were sitting in Peets, each
detail would draw another.  “Do you remember
when?”  “And how we . . . ?”  “And that time . . .” until
we could put on the world we’d woven
and stare off through that window at what might pass by.

Or, to remember differently.  It is Sunday evening,
a small college town in Maine.  The control panel’s meters
cast puddles of light on the spinning vinyl
feeding Ellington to all the someones who might hear
if they happened to turn their radio dials that way.
Is anyone there?  Or am I alone with the Duke and Johnny Hodges
talking to myself between numbers as I pretend
to talk to you and you and you, each in your separate
living rooms, where the light is different in each.

Here, this morning, the air is still cool, it lifts
off the water as the light grows within it
and you draw the ink across the page.
Perhaps where you are the light is also
warming your skin.  Perhaps
as we share the passing by
these words are not silence.

*

“We need to talk . . .”

Let us imagine that we are beside a creek.
The water pools as if it is still.
Looking out, each with our carefully
gathered stones—the smooth ones, flat, rounded,
we skip them across the surface.
Each touch of the stone is another kiss
deflecting from the moments of water.

It is all in the angle of the hand,
the stone spinning off the end of the finger.
We have become so good at this we
no longer think about it.  The stone comes
into the hand, the arm arcs, and we are talking
on this surface of water, your stone, then mine,
yours again across the late morning.

*

Language

It is not the letters
marching
the matted white
of the page
in starched
black uniforms
as they try
to blend
the blatty
consonants
and reedy vowels
into more
than sound.

Rather, it is
the tongue’s
motion, the hand
riding the waves
as they spill
up the beach,
then lace out
into the sand
leaving behind
the broken
bits of shell
that mark the tide.