and the buses grind toward
the middle of the city, I know it is ten years since they buried you
the second time in Lakota, a language that could
free you.
“For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash . . .” declares itself as an anniversary ritual or ceremony to mark and memorialize her second, or true, burial. This implies that this second event was the moment when Aquash found her Native resting place, her natural home, in the language that liberated her to embrace her heritage and become herself.
The poem structurally turns precisely at the point of its one stanza break, its single pause. Notice how the speaker projects onto nature the rage she feels: “I heard about it in Oklahoma, or New Mexico, / how the wind howled and pulled everything down / in a righteous anger.” This is the other side of fury, the righteous anger pushing change forward. John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy” for the projection of human feelings onto the natural world, something he considered a weakness of Victorian poetry and a false vision, though it has always been a device of archaic and Native poets, who share a belief that the world is alive in all its parts. Here Harjo employs it to naturalize not just her own anger but the rage of others too, especially women: “(It was the women who told me) and we understood / wordlessly / the ripe meaning of your murder.” The women don’t need language to understand the underlying meaning of this brutal killing.
The lines shorten as the poem comes to its conclusion—as if enacting the sense of loss while simultaneously letting go. The speaker sees past the sordidness that stopped a dedicated young woman in her prime. The poem accumulates its disparate images—the turning seasons, the whirlwind of rage, the ghost dancers—to build a final understanding. Harjo brings these images together in a single sentence expressing a new realization:
As I understand ten years later after the slow changing
of the seasons
that we have just begun to touch
the dazzling whirlwind of our anger,
we have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers
entered
crazily, beautifully.
This effervescent moment of recognition—as if it all makes sense in the end—quickly comes and goes. Anna Mae Pictou Aquash’s death becomes the springboard for a cultural revitalization that is only now beginning. The speaker projects her own sense of amazement onto the world itself. The death of a single martyr is linked to the visionary trance world entered upon by the ghost dancers. That dance is unworldly, but it is also renewing and Dionysian. It is crazy and beautiful.
Joy Harjo also enters the world of the ghost dancers in this homage and memorial. She envisions a spiritual existence after death. She too has come to dance with others, to celebrate and remember the dead, to use the death of one courageous young woman as a call to action, to empower others, to wring joy out of rage and grief.
Garrett Hongo
* * *
“Mendocino Rose”
(1987)
Garrett Hongo’s work has always been motivated by a search for origins. A fourth-generation Japanese American, he was born in Hawai‘i and raised in California. His poems are populated by people from his past. He has written with desolating accuracy about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, one of the most shameful episodes in American history. His poems are lush explorations, furious rescue operations, determined memorials.
Hongo’s second book, The River of Heaven (1988), is dedicated to the memory of his father, Albert Kazuyoshi Hongo, and in memory of his grandfather, Hideo Kubota, with the inscription “ka po’e o ka ‘āina me ka ’āina” (“the people of the land with the land”). He thus situates his subject—ethnically, culturally, spiritually—in a distinctly Hawaiian world. The book begins with a prologue poem, “Mendocino Rose,” which originates in the traumatic aftermath of these two fundamental deaths.
Mendocino Rose
In California, north of the Golden Gate,
the vine grows almost everywhere,
erupting out of pastureland,
from under the shade of eucalyptus
by the side of the road,
overtaking all the ghost shacks and broken fences
crumbling with rot
and drenched in the fresh rains.
* * *
It mimes, in its steady, cloudlike replicas,
the shape of whatever it smothers,
a gentle greenery
trellised up the side
of a barn or pump station
far up the bluffs above Highway 1,
florets and blossoms,
from the road anyway,
looking like knots and red dreadlocks,
ephemeral and glorious,
hanging from overgrown eaves.
* * *
I’d been listening to a tape on the car stereo,
a song I’d play and rewind,
and play again,
a ballad or a love song
sung by my favorite tenor,
a Hawaiian man known for his poverty
and richness of heart,
and I felt, wheeling through the vinelike curves
of that coastal road,
sliding on the slick asphalt
through the dips and in the S-turns,
and braking just in time,
that it would have served as the dirge
I didn’t know how to sing
when I needed to,
a song to cadence my heart
and its tuneless stammering.
* * *
Ipo lei manu, he sang, without confusion,
I send these garlands,
and the roses seemed everywhere around me then,
profuse and luxurious
as the rain in its grey robes,
undulant processionals over the land,
echoes, in snarls of extravagant color,
of the music
and the collapsing shapes
they seemed to triumph over.
“Mendocino Rose” is a sideways lament, an elegy that reveals itself as it goes along. This is to say that it doesn’t seem to start out as an elegy, but as the record of a drive through northern California. Hongo finds his way as he proceeds, and the poem enacts a breakthrough into feeling. Indeed, he projects that feeling, a sudden release and opening out, onto a vivid western landscape, which is described with luxuriant precision. The English Romantic poets took long meandering walks in the rural countryside. As an American Romantic who also happens to be a late-modern postcolonial poet, Hongo depicts a long winding drive on an All-American Road. His speaker is on the move, leaving the city, locked in his car, an iron solitude. He takes great care to specify exactly where he is driving (in California, north of the Golden Gate Bridge, on Highway 1, up the Mendocino coast) so that we could find it on a map.
Hongo’s poems have always swung between two worlds: Hawai‘i and California, the one a lost utopia, the other a failed dream. Like the Romantic poets, he has a special gift for describing ruined landscapes. Here the coastal landscape and Pacific cliffsides start to remind him—they pull him back—to the Big Island where he was born. The car becomes the vehicle of a spiritual transport—and his two worlds merge.
“Mendocino Rose” spills down the page. Each stanza is a single curving sentence, the syntax mirroring the turns and twists of the road, which become the turns and twists of his own thought, his own feeling. The lines accordion in and out; the rhythmic undulations enable the speaker to observe and capture the vine “erupting out of pastureland” and the “gentle greenery / trellised up the side / of a barn or pump station.” But it also gives him space to reflect upon what he is seeing.
The structural turn in the poem comes in the third stanza. The speaker is listening to a tape of ballads and love songs by his favorite tenor, the traditional slack-key guitarist and folksinger Gabby Pahinui, who is known, as Hongo puts it in an elegant formulation, “for his poverty / and richness o
f heart.” Pahinui, who was born and raised in a poor district of Kaka’ako in Honolulu, specialized in the music of old Hawai‘i, which he expressed and transformed. He is an emblematic figure of the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance. Hongo is listening repeatedly to “Ipo Lei Manu,” Pahinui’s version of a nineteenth-century Hawaiian lyric, a lament written by Queen Kapiulani in mourning for her husband, King David Kalakaua, who died far from home. The personal grief of the queen—and the grief of a people for a king who legitimized Hawaiian culture—reverberates through the landscape.
The music also opens up something inside the speaker of “Mendocino Rose,” who has been lost in a raw, nameless grief. He takes the song personally and understands it as a lament for the death of his own father. It is something that might have been sung at his father’s funeral. This speaks to the true power of art: a nineteenth-century dirge, reimagined as a folk song, suddenly gives the speaker a language for his feeling. It answers an inner longing. It takes his “tuneless stammering” and gives a cadence to his heart’s murmurings.
In his memoir Volcano (1995), Hongo writes about returning for a year to the village where he was born. The last chapter, “Mendocino Rose,” discusses the experience described in the poem, which he now revisits and amplifies:
When I realized what the man was singing, true grieving rose up in me like a swelling breaker and I dove under it. I looked off from the black asphalt road winding ahead to the roses blooming around me as though they were a music too. I looked off over the cliffs across the Pacific.
It was a fleeting but powerful premonition of change. The song and the rose opened me again to something I’d had when my father and Kubota grandfather were alive. It was not only a place but a resolve of purpose, I suppose, a feeling of connection not so much to any particular place, though that helps, but to the world of feeling and openness to it, that exchange between the human and whatever might be the rest—the infinite, say, or the nature world of pure spirit that the nineteenth-century romantic philosophers defined as sublime. Whatever it is that is greater than the self but that, nevertheless, empowers the self, overwhelms and inspirits the self. “And who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?” wrote Rilke, skeptically, in his Duino Elegies. “Even if, suddenly, one of them were to grip me to his heart, I’d vanish in his overwhelming presence.” Beauty is nothing but the start of a terror we can hardly bear, he concluded, a scorn so serene it could kill us. It is the Buddhist’s vajra, the lightning bolt of pure, cosmic perception, a grieving that leads to eternity.
In the poem “Mendocino Rose” the speaker can find his own music only because a Hawaiian song delivers him back to himself. The last stanza enacts the transport. The key sentence from the song, “Ipo lei manu,” which means “I send these garlands,” actualizes the movement from language to experience. Hence:
I send these garlands,
and the roses seemed everywhere around me then,
profuse and luxurious . . .
Hongo’s grief is transformed by the roses growing wild in the California landscape. The music and the landscape come together. There is a kind of stateliness to the language, which puts us in the space of something larger than ourselves, a world of un-antagonized feeling, something that cannot quite be articulated, something extravagant that momentarily connects us to a boundlessness within ourselves, a world outside time. That’s how “Mendocino Rose” becomes a poem of spiritual regeneration, a true lyric of the American sublime.
Adrienne Rich
* * *
“(Dedications)”
(1990–91)
Adrienne Rich told Bill Moyers in an interview that her thirteen-part poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1990–91) “reflects on the condition of my country, which I wrote very consciously as a citizen poet, looking at the geography, the history, the people of my country.” She was trying to fathom what it meant to love her country, the so-called difficult world, in a time of crisis and war. Rich’s politically engaged poem confronts American oppressions, the gap between materialism and idealism, and tries to stage an ethical intervention. The idea was to provide a book of maps or charts through a challenging democratic morass.
Here is the moving last section of the poem. We usually think of a dedication coming at the beginning of a poem, but this one comes at the end. As an epilogue, “(Dedications)” tries to reach across a great gulf to break down the final barrier between the poet and the reader, the poem and its audience. It speaks to the sociality of lyric and calls attention to itself as a poem, as something constructed and made for a potential reader. Rich insists—she knows—that there is an audience for poetry, especially for a poetry of witness. She treats poetry as the most intimate form of public art and reaches out to individuals in a time of need.
(Dedications)
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
Rich carefully places the title in parentheses, “(Dedications),” and thus makes it seem like an explanation or afterthought. What matters is not the title, but the potential contact between the poet and her readers. The poem proceeds to catalog twelve very specific readers, each a different type and all of them lonely, isolated, and in need of connection. The list is structured. The suffering of individual readers seems to intensify as we go along, and there is a general progression down the ladder of social privilege. The irregular extra space in certain lines emphasizes the distance between separated readers—a barrier to be crossed. The anaphoric repetition—“I know you are reading”—exudes a Whitmanesque confidence that the speaker can reach out and connect to all of them. “I wanted the poem to speak to people as individuals,” Rich said, “but also as individuals multiplied over and over and ov
er and over.” The people are themselves, but they also stand as representative figures, allegories of themselves. Each one is archetypal. And the poet is intent on bringing these different isolates into a distinct community.
“(Dedications)” reaches out to people who are lonely and struggling, disconnected, disenfranchised. Rich locates people wherever they are and treats reading itself as a material act. Each one is specifically placed. The gender of the individual is indeterminate. Rich’s empathy has stretched from the days when she could identify only with other women. In every case here the isolated reader could be a woman or a man.
The first reader is an office worker who is still in the office late at night (the “yellow lamp-spot” and “darkening window” make one think of an Edward Hopper painting); the second is someone standing in a bookstore somewhere on the snowy plains. Rich is writing from California and thus reaches out across the country to someone she knows can’t or won’t buy her book. The isolation of the lone individual stands out against the vastness of the landscape. The third person is someone who has suffered from abuse, who has opened a suitcase but can’t quite bear to leave yet. The fourth has escaped on an underground train and is about to run upstairs “toward a new kind of love / your life has never allowed.” The implication is clear that the person is running toward some socially proscribed kind of love, probably same-sex love.
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