The Dream of the Marsh Wren numbers among the handful of exquisitely wrought volumes that comprise the Milkweed Editions' Credo Series, investigations by contemporary American writers that probe “human experience and society in the context of the more-than-human world.” In this volume, Pattiann Rogers punctuates her reflection on writing poetry-and living poetically-with a lavish array of previously published poems (some thirty in all!). The poems alone make this work a worthy collection for the classroom. Add Rogers' deft weaving of poem and commentary, and the text stands as an extraordinary resource; its shuttling between verse and annotation leads students through an exhilarating exercise. To follow its course is to clear out the mental furnishings of a purview that regards the “other-than-human” world as either essentially inert or mechanically responsive to inexorable law and to (re)construct imaginatively a “self-referential” nature that “composes the entire, complex myriad of ever-changing events and details, unpredictable, paradoxical, passing and eternal, known and mysterious” (40). In short, the text invites students to attend to “reciprocal creation”-to experience “each nonhuman life [as] an expression somehow of an aspect of [themselves]” (31).
This rite of passage does not come easily, however. I must confess that I initially read Rogers with apprehension. The poetic instantiation of the human, wrought through the dream of the marsh wren in the title poem with which the text opens, gave me pause: Rogers elaborates a reciprocity of “turns and tangles” which “turns itself completely / inside out again here composing me / in the stationary silence of its only existence” (4). My reservations lay not with its bio-egalitarian impulse, but with the fate of consciousness, which I perhaps all too readily consolidate under human dominion. Even Rogers, I would aver, prompts us to “[i]magine the marsh wren making himself / inside his own dream” (4). But before I could settle this matter for myself or even sketch the context of my concerns with my students, I discovered myself thrust into the role of attending to their own, often vituperative, attacks on Rogers. While the intensity of their reaction to Rogers initially caught me by surprise, I now use it as a point of entry into key themes and features of her poetry.
My students typically find her overt celebration of the body, enjoyed fully in its intimacy with the earth (as evidenced in “Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew” and “Nude Standing Alone in the Forest: A Study of Place”) and erotically through the dance of seduction (“When at Night” and “The Hummingbird: A Seduction”), disconcerting. Their confusion of the sensate with the sensational and of iconography with pornography when reading Rogers betrays the very cultural perspective that her poetry places under question. In her comments that link the poems, “The Family Is All There Is” and “The Voice of the Precambrian Sea,” Rogers recounts an exchange with a geologist friend who effuses his love of the earth: “I love the earth. I just love the earth. It's so … so … so ancestral, so comedic” (62-63). Although Rogers delights in the conjunction of terms that he finally proffers, in her eagerness to complete his thought, she interjects into his elliptical stammer, “so voluptuous?” The geologist obviously ignored her interjection, but my students do not.
They often experience great difficulty in seeing the erotic aspects of Rogers' poems as anything other than lascivious. However, the utter palpability of Rogers' poetic images resists any attempt to gloss the sensual quality of her images with an intellectualizing veneer, even (and perhaps especially) the sort of intellectualizing that would dismiss them as obscene.
And in that time one eventually wished,
With the dull swell and fall of the surf, to rise up
Out of oneself …
… to balance
Above the shore on a swollen blue lupine, tender,
Almost sore with sap, to shimmer there,
Specific and alone, two yellow wings
Like splinters of morning.
(“The Voice of the Precambrian Sea,” 63)
A “swollen blue lupine,” ever how “sore with sap,” persists as a plant whose flower rises from a spike, and even the suggestive qualities of its representation must ultimately yield to the stubborn persistence of its being in the world. “Salvation,” Rogers observes, “is in the physical object” (106), to be prehended, if at all, by way of the senses. While her juxtaposition of matters spiritual with brute fact invites its own form of resistance, it is her charging of brute fact with sexualized energy that can make stumbling blocks of her poetic imagery.
Rogers' readers must contend with the bodying forth of the “more-than-human world” in language that simultaneously intimates (human) generativity and generates (nonhuman) intimacy. To imagine that the latter can be achieved independently of the “body erotic” reveals the contours of the stumbling block that conventional thinking places between us and “the astonishing intricacy, the complexity in order and chaos of the worlds” (74) that Rogers perceives.
Don't you understand that if you lie still,
if you take what I discover of your body,
if you accept what my fingertips can present to you
of your own face, how I might become what I give,
and how, by this investment, I might be bound
to keep seeking you forever?
(“The Gift of Reception,” 78)
Here, the human touch is manifest, literally tracing with “astonishing intricacy” a relationship grounded in intimacy and bound by mutual implication. Here, sensuality not only reveals the contours of physical bodies, but discloses their mystery. And it is here that my students intuit the revolutionary quality of Rogers' poetry. They sense that the autonomy to which our culture is beholden-the same autonomy that ensnares nature in its paradigm of acquisition and appropriation-recoils from Rogers' tropes, just as they recognize that the intimacy to which she gives voice confounds conventional notions of giving and taking. “The Gift of Reception” proves to be emblematic of the entire text, perhaps even of Rogers' entire corpus: it is a working through the paradoxical notion of give and take implicit in the poem's title that leads her readers to experience grace-to discover the inexhaustibility of (the self in) the other and to be forever grateful.
Review ©2005 by William L. Johnson and RSiSS
Palmer Trinity School
Miami, Florida