SEEKING THE HOLY DARK

I finally located my copies of Seek the Holy Dark by Clare Martin after shuffling household goods following my move to Sewanee, Tennessee where I spend six months of every year. I had read through the book once before leaving New Iberia, Louisiana and knew that the poems in this volume were deep explorations of themes of loss and darkness and would require more attention than a cursory reading.  

I was standing in the pulpit at St. Mary’s Convent on The Mountain at Sewanee Sunday delivering a homily and had just commented on an article by The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor that appeared inTime magazine several years ago: “The Rev. Taylor speaks of finding God in darkness and delivered lectures on this theme for the Dubose Lectures here on The Mountain,” I said. “She says that she prays these days to the Holy Spirit which she sees as both the universally divine and the hardest to understand and says her job is to trust its movement…” Although I was focused on the delivery of the homily, what suddenly came to mind was the title of Martin’s latest book Seek the Holy Dark. On Monday, Martin's book turned up. Synchronicity?/!

Seek the Holy Dark is reminiscent of another female poet, Anne Sexton, whose last book was entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God; one in which Sexton confronts the idea of God and is defeated in her quest to adhere to a belief in the Omnipotent. Like Sexton, Martin explores the darkness that accompanies depression, telling her story as an attempt to experience catharsis. She joins the roster of female poets who have sought to legitimize depression by allowing themselves to participate in life, including depressive episodes, to honor those dark nights of the soul and to write mercilessly about the “holy dark.” 

In “Mourning,” Martin writes that “it is simple to relinquish the will to do anything to be a stone within a stone within a stone…over and over, though no cycle rules her, she rebirths herself. Empties her lungs, rises.”  It seems that the poet is letting herself into the darkness and allowing her soul to become intact, “stone within a stone within a stone” so she can move on and experience rebirth… no easy answer to the darkness. 

I don’t think that Martin intended her poetry to be a means of legitimizing depression but to form a link among creativity, spirituality, and her emotional struggles in darkness, seeking transformation and restoration. Her experiences are not neat, self-help examples of welcoming darkness and emerging with superficial answers. In “Dream of Sudden Water,” she speaks of “a harrowing thought/deep on my petrified bones — wash me savior/ we drop through this world/into dark awakening/we, the strong hearted.”

In poem after poem, Martin explores her captivity in depression, and at the end of Seek the Holy Dark, she speaks to the human condition with a vision that duplicates the ideas of John Moriarty in Nostos: “If nature can handle the destruction and reconstruction of a caterpillar into a butterfly, why shouldn’t I surrender and trust that it can handle what is happening to me?” Martin's version: “Beloved dead and living/voices surround me/a word/a handwritten note/subatomic change/of being/even spittle spurs/butterfly/to typhoon/to newborn star.”

Seek the Holy Dark is an Intense confessional of a gifted woman who sometimes crosses into the surreal, drawing poems from the depths of herself and seeking transformation while embracing the holy dark. A courageous contribution to the canon of feminist poetry.

Clare L. Martin, a native of south Louisiana, is author of Eating the Heart First, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Dzan Books’ Best of the Web, Best New Poets, and Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net.. She is founding publisher and editor of MockingHeart Review. Seek the Holy Dark is available on amazon.com and through Yellow Flag Press, 2275 Bascom Ave. #702, Campbell CA 95008.

  

THE LIGHT FROM GLASS

Last evening about dusk, I went into the dining room of our home in Sewanee, Tennessee and noticed that despite the shadowy room, three glass pieces by Karen Bourque of Church Point, Louisiana, hanging in the windows overlooking the woods, had captured the last light of the day. Two of the pieces, “Lotus,” and “Ibis and Crow” had been created as commissioned art for my personal collection, but the third one entitled “Beneath the Surface,” was one I had asked Karen to create for a book cover and seemed to embrace the room, and the woods viewed through the windows, in a soft light. (In the photo above, it's the glass piece on the left side of the screen.)

Karen explains that her glass piece, “Beneath the Surface,” is a “message of new beginnings and happiness.” The stone used to represent the wild ranunculus (yellow flowers) in the piece is prehinite, “a stone that illuminates the path forward to spiritual growth through attunement to divine energy,” according to Karen. Prehinite is also used by stone healers as a stone of vision “used to access higher levels of awareness.”

Karen relates all of the above and more in a special afterword to my book of poetry, A Slow Moving Stream, from which I’m scheduled to read next month as one of the selected, featured poets at the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The oak tree in the glass piece is the most dominant feature, and Karen says that the oak, a protector and stabilizer, is ever present in Louisiana Acadian iconography. The stark image aptly represents a poem entitled “The Mind of Trees” included in A Slow Moving Stream.

Karen, who worked in the field of medical technology for years, began creating glass art as a hobby, but soon achieved a professional level of success with her work, both as a glass artist and as a writer of sensitive texts that describe the glass pieces. Her biggest admirer is husband, Darrell Bourque, former Poet Laureate of Louisiana and Louisiana Writer of the Year, whose latest poems, paired  with the paintings of Bill Gingles, are contained in Where I Waited, published by Yellow Flag Press.

Karen has created covers for four of my books of poetry, as well as a book of essays: A Strand of Beads, A Lonely Grandmother, Street Sketches, Porch Posts, and the latest volume of poetry, A Slow Moving Stream. Several of the books have included either an introductory description of Karen's glass piece, or an afterword describing the work on the cover especially written by her.

I loved the afterword about “Beneath the Surface,” in which Karen says: “Spring, either as time measure or as metaphor, marks that time when the soul awakens inside the crossing of a water barrier, that time when unconscious mind and conscious mind surface and co-exist in the balance of renewed beginnings.”

I also have five additional glass pieces hanging in the dining room of my home in New Iberia, Louisiana. The pieces remind me that although many glass artists require special lighting or running water to showcase their work, Karen’s creations require neither of these elements and illuminate a room with natural light that helps the viewer to “grasp higher, more abstract concepts and facilitates inter-dimensional communication.”

Yesterday’s encounter with Karen’s glass images inspired me with enough light to anticipate “new beginnings and happiness,” and I’m most grateful for her artistic gifts. The one poem I’ve written lately, which will appear in the fall/winter issue of The Pinyon Review published by Gary Entsminger in Montrose, Colorado, will have to suffice to inspire Karen to create a glass piece entitled “Pandora’s Legacy” that I hope to acquire next year.

WHERE I WAITED

Where I have been waiting for several months now is in Sewanee, Tennessee…waiting for the mail to bring me the latest book of poetry, Where I Waited, by Louisiana’s premier poet, Darrell Bourque. To say that it was worth the wait is banal; the book is all that I anticipated. As I told Darrell, the Muse that sat on his shoulder as he ran every morning while he was creating Where I Waited (a time when Darrell writes many lines of his sonnets in his mind) was a very old, wise one who had been waiting to inspire him to write the poetry of his lifetime.  “Mystical” is an inept word to describe the work.

In this volume, the beautiful abstract paintings of Bill Gingles are paired with Bourque’s sonnets and must have also lain in wait for the moment to accompany the voices of iconic Creole-Cajun musicians and their wives and forebears featured in Where I Waited. In the words of the poet’s title poem, they are “… [those] voices all turn & wave & memory situated/in some arch between now & then…” Each expressionistic narrative poem is a song as poignant as the songs of the musicians represented.

Bourque includes poems about the lives of Amédé Ardoin, Cléoma Breaux Falcon, Iry Lejeune, and Goldman and Theresa Leday Thibodeaux, musicians and their spouses whose songs have been kept alive by historians and anthropologists and reimagined by the poet. It was impossible for me to single out one or two poems as examples of excellence. As I read each poem and looked at the paired painting, I found myself reluctant to move on to another, and I was not disappointed by the work of artist and poet after I turned each page in this remarkable volume. I read through Where I Waited twice.

The landscape of small rural communities in south Louisiana (Church Point, Mamou, Lawtell…) is the backdrop for musicians who seem to rise above their impoverished childhood and enter a mystical world of singing “we might wave over who we were, over what lives & what dies.” That line taken from “Wish Pond” was one of many tribute poems to Goldman Thibodeaux, still living, with whom Bourque has a strong bond. Lines describing Thibodeaux’s native Prairie Ronde sing of “crawfish pond, rice field & gravel pit pond, pond with dragonflies/hovering, pond dark as my brother’s skin, as light as mine, second/and third ponds & more for horses & cows & geese & ducks & skies/filled with thirsty Monarchs, ponds with us hanging in them there/like heavy pears in late spring or fat ripe figs in July tethered/barely to their trees…” 

In Bourque’s poetry, the reader recognizes that the poet could have been as adept at painting as he is in his poetry, and I know that he once considered majoring in Art History. In his home in Church Point, Louisiana, books vie for space with walls covered with art – fine art, Louisiana primitive art, abstract art…

One of the most moving poems, “Second Rate Mystic,” in Where I Waited is dedicated to Iry Lejeune. It's a sonnet about this blind musician who spent five years boarding at the Louisiana School for the Blind in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Bourque writes in Lejeune’s voice: 

“…In parceled light the only measure/I knew was true was measured sound. So, I made breakdowns/ & two-steps & laments, easy as flowers turning to sun. I broke/the mold of who I was supposed to be with air. Newly mown grasses were song & Caillette’s lowing too…Waltzes tied to the names of towns, /to branches in trees & to those cordoned off & lonely & broke…"

Only a highly-enlightened poet could enter the world of “there” and become the voice of deceased musicians traveling to “here,” as Bourque accomplishes with three of the music legends in this volume. The lyrics cross boundaries between physical and metaphysical to form a world in which there are no cultural fences, only the uplifting sounds of music that should be listened to and preserved.

Equally as valuable as the poetry are the Notes in the back of the volume. They provide factual material that Bourque used to shape the voices and narration of the musicians’ lives. Where I Waited is a book that will be lauded by scholars, fellow poets, historians, and artists, and this blog, limited in space and by the attention of casual readers, is intended only to titillate those who want to further explore the work of Louisiana’s finest poet.

Darrell Bourque, professor emeritus of English at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, directed the interdisciplinary humanities program and served as the first Friends of the Humanities professor. He is a founding member of Narrative4, an international story exchange program, a member of the board at the Ernest J. Gaines Center at ULL and a former Louisiana Poet Laureate. Two years ago, he was named Louisiana Writer of the Year by the Louisiana Center for the Book, Louisiana State Library, and this year he received the James Williams Rivers Prize in Louisiana Studies awarded by the University of Louisiana Lafayette. His latest book is Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie, and his latest chapbook, if you abandon me, comment je vas faire: An Amédé Ardoin Songbook, has become the best selling book in the history of Yellow Flag Press.

Congratulations Darrell! 

   

ALONG THE TECHE

Buttercup

Last week, we traveled to Arnaudville, searching for the cottages being renovated for use by artists and writers, who can apply and receive grants to complete their work in a bayou habitat, and found seven vari-colored cabins still under reconstruction hugging the Bayou Teche. When we turned to pass back along the street for another glimpse of the residences, we spied a beautiful, spreading sea of Ranunculus (buttercups) lining the bayou and stopped to photograph the bright yellow flowers. Ranunculus means “little frog” because the flowers inhabit the same waters as the frogs that are so abundant in south Louisiana.

Live oak along Bayou Teche

We were following Bayou Teche, the stream that Harnett Kane called “the most richly storied of the interior waters,” which snakes through 125 miles of south Louisiana. As it was once highly navigable, communities like Arnaudville sprang up along its banks. Four in ten people in this small community of less than 2000 speak Cajun French, and if you listen closely, you can hear the uncorrupted dialect of the Acadians who settled south Louisiana. The eight-mile stretch from Arnaudville to Leonville is known as the “Teche’s River Road” and is a journey into the heart of Acadiana. Arnaudville is the home of Bayou Teche Brewing, a company that makes a brew called “LA-31 Boucanee” made with cherry wood smoked wheat and is also the site of NuNu Arts and Culture Collective where artists from throughout Louisiana gather to showcase their art.

Scene of Teche at Arnaudville

In Arnaudville, we often have lunch or dinner at “The Little Big Cup,” a restaurant that serves some of the best cuisine in south Louisiana and features a “groaning board” on Saturdays and Sundays. We had been introduced to the town through Darrell and Karen Bourque. Darrell, a former poet laureate of Louisiana, once came up the bayou on a barge and climbed the steps leading to the deck of The Little Big Cup to deliver a reading from his book about the Cajun settlement of Louisiana entitled Megan’s Guitar. Poetry readings are not uncommon at this site.

Our recent visit to Arnaudville included brunch with the Bourques, and we sat on the deck of The Little Big Cup overlooking the bayou on a halcyon February day, talking about future glass work I’d like Karen (a consummate glass artist) to do for the cover of a new book of poetry and about Darrell’s chapbook, Where I Waited, to be published in the spring of this year by Yellow Flag Press whose editor is J. Bruce Fuller. Darrell’s work will focus on the paintings of Bill Gingles of Shreveport and I think it’s some of his best work. Just to titillate

Bayou Teche at Arnaudville

readers, I’m including one that I particularly liked entitled “Here and Here” that Darrell wrote and dedicated to Goldman Thibodeaux, notable Creole Cajun musician who was honored in 2014 with the Louisiana Folklife Heritage Award. The poem is after Bill Gingles’ painting Here and Here:

HERE AND HERE   

Sometimes my brother lives in a yellow temple inside here and here,

sometimes he lives in blue arches bent around those songs he’d keep

all his life if he could. I go to see him as often as I can, play Quoi faire

as many times as he asks me to. For him songs stay a while then seep

back into that almost imperceptible line here makes next to a place

not here. That line is the place we were boys together, pulling plows

through black gumbo dirt, picking the cotton the dirt made, his face,

then as now, darker than mine, bronzy color that favored blue, a vow

almost that beauty would always live in our house. He seemed a race

all to himself when I knew him then. He knew no other time than now

& he took me with him wherever he went. If he held something dear,

I did. If he climbed the sides of field wagons and burrowed in the heap

of white fluff we’d picked, I did too. He taught me how to lessen fear,

to live where he lived. Here is one leap; another here is another leap.

Darrell Bourque, December 21, 2015

Darrell and Karen Bourque at Little Big Cup

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan