Bitter Greens

Oct 8 2013

Root vegetables

bitter greens.

The lush orchard, overrun with weeds

plucked free.

Succulent fruit, slightly bruised

rotting where it fell.

Blood orange,

cutting through its smooth dimpled jacket

into crimson flesh.

A potato, freshly pulled,

dirt

still clinging to its skin.

Smelling of sunless earth, disinterred,

squinting eyes

fixed inward.

Ginger, like some little man

with twisted limbs, stiff back.

The wages of sin

or lived too long?

Still alive, cells divide

when I pick ‘em fresh,

disconnected

from life support.

Fertile soil,

stinking richly

of decomposition

wiggling worms. 

I'm unusually pleased with this poem. It's so much closer to what I've been trying to do, and badly (very badly!) missing.

Most of my recent work has been too talky, too wordy, too linear. This, on the other hand, seems simpler and looser; less formal. It has the compression and distillation I admire in my favourite poems by other writers. It is rich in delicious word play and sensation. There is a unifying line running through it; but that line leaves ambiguity and room. The poem is very small, dealing in microcosm and close observation. And finally -- and perhaps most important of all -- It works out loud: the mouth-feel the, cadence, the music.

Finally!!!

It started with the title of a poem I just read in The New Yorker: Kale. (The poem, btw, had nothing to do with kale, as far as I can figure out!) That somehow led me to think of bitter greens, and I thought the poem would move in the direction of bitterness, virtue, smugness. Luckily, I resisted that kind of intellectualization, and went instead for the sensory and the whimsical, writing less in the mode of thinking and more in the mode of stream of consciousness, with a carefully cocked ear. Which may be the secret to all good poetry: less thinking; more feeling and flow.

I could have picked pretty much anything as the title. But, in homage to its obscure origins, I went with Bitter Greens. As with all my titles, I try to visualize a reader scanning down the title page, and like a connoisseur gleefully plucking a fine chocolate out of its box, lighting on an irresistible morsel he hopes will reward him with something delicious inside. So titles that work can be are playful, evocative, ambiguous, highly sensory, double-entendres, and humorous. Or even hopelessly clichéd, because who wouldn't want to look to see what he could possibly do with something so ridiculous. (Some titles are also necessary to the poem: either helping point the reader in a certain direction, when the poem is tangential and discursive; and other times intentionally misdirecting, in the hope the poem will blind-side and surprise the reader.)


(Here's Kale, by Jordan Davis, from the Oct 14 2013 New Yorker:

I hear James but can’t see him so
I call out his baby name, Jamey-James,
and he pops up from behind a plow
bank. We walk down the driveway
past the barn to the fenced-in
garden, iron rail, green metal grid,
red thread for the deer. The black
mama cat with the extra toes comes
running past us.

“The ones buried
in snow are insulated,” James
tells me, as if quoting from
“The Pruning Book.” He might be.
“If you cut a butterfly bush
down to nothing it grows back
the next year twice as high.”

There are five or six tall stumps
of the flat variety, and eight or nine
low curly ones. We fill a plastic
popcorn bowl and leave as much
behind still growing.)