Then & Now: 2 reviews, This Romance by Bob Arnold, Origen Press 1992 available from: Longhouse / Jacksonville Stage / Green River / Brattleboro VT / 0530 & Going Out on a Limb: a review of Bob Arnold’s Faraway Like a Deer’s Eye, Longhouse, West Brattleboro, Vermont, 2022.
A reverence of intimacy—of an intimacy which is always human—opens up for the one who enters into the mysteries of matter.
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie.
This one THEN:
Bob Arnold is a poet whose prose is marked by value and measure, two elements missing from most of the poetry praised by critics weaned on the narcissistic psycho-babble that passes for poetry. Arnold's This Romance is a journal of this poet's daily life, documenting what is essential in a life lived close to the elements: stone work, carpentry, parenting, loving. As Janine Pommy Vega states on the back cover, it is "a love song to the whole of it-- fruit, bowl, rim, table, and watcher, jealous of the details." Vega’s statement is key to Arnold’s poetry, his life. It is a detailed illustration of Bachelard’s on Love & Writing:
To tell a love, one must write. One never writes too much. Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
And it's more. It's how all the details, life and writing, are measured. It's how we, readers and writers, value anything, especially our work, the work of writing.
In the midst of his observations about building with stone, Arnold briefly mentions a highly praised book similar to the one he has written: John Jerome's Stone Work. It's the book I thought of when I opened Arnold's to the first page. And after reading the first page, it was obvious to me that his book is infinitely more valuable to writers than Jerome's. Jerome writes of work as someone on vacation with the work of masonry, and he writes of writing as being on vacation from life (pages 65-68 if you want to check on me). Arnold begins his book with an image of himself reading in the midst of work, splitting wood for other people unwilling to do such labor. It is an image that proclaims this book and this writer as willing to measure himself against all writing as an accomplishment within nature rather than a refuge against it.
Another reason to love Arnold's book is that he is a real stylist. Unlike Jerome who writes with the internalized style manuals required of someone with his "credentials" — Esquire, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine —Arnold hasn't got a paragraph in his whole book. And the book is stylistically perfect.
Unlike the poets who call themselves worker-poets, striving for tenure by writing about the work their parents or grandparents did in mills, mines, and factories, Arnold works. He knows the value of work; knowing it he places his life in perspective, in balance, with his writing and his love of wife and child, hence: This Romance. The inclusiveness Pommy Vega mentions: his prose becomes a manual—a genuine hand book—for poetry. Throw out the how-to-write books and replace them with this how-to-live book.
Arnold takes his place with the small band of other poets I can think of -- Sue Doro, Ted Enslin, Sharon Doubiago, Janine Pommy Vega-- who are marked by their integrity, which is but another way to say "measure and value." It's $8.00 for the book. How long do you have to work to pay for it? It's only a wild supposition, but I'll state it anyway: if you know exactly how long you have to work to pay for the book you're more likely to buy it than if you haven't a clue about what that book and your own labor is really worth.
This One NOW:
Going Out on a Limb: a review of Bob Arnold’s Faraway Like a Deer’s Eye, Longhouse, West Brattleboro, Vermont, 2022.
In the mid-80s at the Deer Track Poetry Festival, Ted Enslin said to me as we were sitting in the sand looking out at Lake Michigan, "I saw a raccoon crawling carefully out on limb of an ash tree. It lost its grip and fell. I knew I had to somehow get that into a poem." And then Ted, but none of the rest of us, ran and jumped into the frigid waters and went under. I knew I had to somehow get “that” into this essay. And why is that? What is that?
Ted was a friend and a friend of Bob Arnold. There is that. And there is also, the water and music, which sometimes is the same thing. And Ted, more than any other poet I know, tried consciously to write poetry as music. Another friend of mine now dead, as are so many, had a line in one of his poems that went something like this: "An inch of water reflects a mile of sky". Lake Michigan is 1,180 cubic miles of water. Reflect on that. Imagine.
And now there is this book, 432 pages. Heavy. Although most of Faraway Like the Deer's Eye is assembled with photos and prose, a large section, almost a hundred pages, is built with Arnold's poetry. And here is where I go, along with that racoon way out on a limb: “This is the best poetry you are going to read this year, perhaps any”. So we begin with the poem that birthed the title of his book.
Faraway Like the Deer’s Eye
for Victor Jara, Chilean folksinger
Ah, yes, now I believe I know—
A cool breeze and very early morning
A wood thrush breaks from the pasture
Fences have all be mended
Here and there animal hair
I could spend all my time and limited space analyzing this first stanza. But analyzing means violence, taking something apart. I want instead to take part. Yet look at that last line. The image, without him mentioning it, is barbed wire. And with that others come to mind: being fenced in, wanting to escape, injury, pain. And these real ‘things’ make the poem not what fearful critics call a political poem but instead a love poem. This is how Arnold writes prose and poetry. It’s what real writers do. They invite you in. Imagine …. You are part of it.
The next stanza:
I think of Jara; Victor,
By jesus as they busted your fingers
And you kept to the last moment
Something loving, say your sister, far in your belly
Then they beat you like the backside of a horse
And it fell — my chore bucket spilled
Suddenly in Vermont
“Suddenly in Vermont”. If not there, where he is, then nowhere. There is more of this poem. I am trying to convince any reader to go find out what more there is. What more to this collection of his poetry. And the photos. And the prose: the personal biography, the biography of his press, Longhouse, which is intensely personal, his family, friends, his life-long companion. And a note about that. Faraway Like the Deer’s Eye, the book, is one long love poem to his wife Susan.
This is another crawl out onto the limb: “You can’t understand and therefore cannot appreciate what Bob Arnold has done with the writing, assembling, this book unless you understand what love is”. That's a tough one. I use “assembling” because Bob is a builder. As well as publisher and editor for 50 plus years who has published over 500 titles. That also is building, building a community. And he builds in his own, without federal or state grants. But always with Susan along with him. He also, I could keep on with these “alsos”, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He did community service then. Throughout all of his working life, he has always done service to the local and the poetry community.
I am going to offer a rather long quote from The Five Senses, Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, by Michel Serres. His book is about all of the human senses, that which joins us, conjunctions, conjugal, joins us to the material world, about the unacknowledged bias of sight, about the loss of hearing as knowledge, most of all, about touch as what joins not only physical bodies in loving but in knowledge gathered from human discourse in work and play. Serres after giving many examples of what he has learned from working with his father, from being a sailor, from travels through the world, privileging that knowing, explains:
No, I do not despise books, I love them so much that I have devoted my life to them. I love my language so much that I have given it all my time but we cannot bring a culture, a philosophy, to life without feeding it with what it is not…Professors, critics, theoreticians and politicians live on the closed side, the writer takes up residence on its outskirts, in the open, facing things that are hard…Aesthetics comes into play on the open side of language overlooking the garden.
Substitute in that quote “poetry” for “philosophy” and you can start to understand why Arnold is such an important poet for us now. In the account of one of his journeys out of Vermont to the west, he makes this statement: “It is a relief to hunt up poets in America today and not have to head to the nearest university.” Serres, anticipating criticism for his critique of language that is not rooted in hands-on, lived, experience felt the need to say, “I do not despise books”. No one could say that about Arnold, but it is understandable, that relief he felt about his hunt for poets outside the universities. He doesn’t make much of it. It’s just obvious: most poetry in this country comes out of the colleges, the workshops, a misapplied word certainly. If poetry is not primarily sourced in the real world where from writers who have more to offer than writing inspired by other writing, if poetry denies it is useful, then is it not useless?
Arnold is a stone mason. A carpenter. A builder. A man of experience who knows that hand work is never not also head work. Together. Joined. In hand, in order to touch. Poets lose contact without that felt knowledge. They end up writing only about themselves for other poets like themselves. They lose touch. And without even knowing that they once had it. That innate desire that started at birth. It is important, to the language that Arnold loves, that he write so many poems about the woman that he loves.
EVEN INSIDE
You were asleep
I blew out the lamp
Turned to you
A firefly blinked
Imagine. Real language is metaphor. It joins us in unexpected ways. Another about Love?
THE PLEASURES OF LOVE
The last of my noon hour
Black tin lunch pail
Sitting on a sap soaked maple stump
Woodchips nestled on my woolen socks
Finding a fruit cup she made for me
Clear cold glass in my oiled hand
Neat slices of strawberry and pear
It is their love-life of those fifty plus years together. If you separate any of this, it’s gone. Dead. His work is about life. That is what integrity is all about. In a culture such as this, from the news, the media, films, the constant wars that feed us death, he takes his stand, feet planted, head heavenly. And all is relevant to his life and his poetry. “And” you can’t separate them. Of course. On course. Like someone who knows his way and offers a humble gift to his readers, who he has welcomed as if they were at the threshold of his house and workshop. Accept it. And come on in.
_______
On Bachelard’s “the mysteries of matter”: Bachelard is not vague, but sometimes the meaning needs exploring, expanding. So much writing is embedded with un-acknowledge and unknown abstractions, creating metaphors and analogies that are little more than mind games, disconnected with the material life lived by the writer. Few books express the material base for culture better than Brian Fagan’s Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World. The last sentence of his book:
It was not the sudden inspiration of famous names that brought Europeans to North America—not Columbus, Cabot, or the settlers at Plymouth Rock—but the thousand-year journey in pursuit of fish.
And it is much more than that. Fagan’s “pursuit of fish” has demonstrated that the metaphors millions have lived by have a history that is only revealed through the study of the materials that sustain us. And few poets writing today understand that and live daily with that understanding and write from that living than does Bob Arnold.
