Rhina's poems combine such a natural musicality and life force that I hesitate to do more than let one poem demonstrate my meaning. She cuts straight to the chase and makes me live the poem. I chose this one in response to Clive Watkins's request for a list of poems we might like to read when we knew our days were numbered.

Rachmaninoff on the Mass Pike


It calls the heart, this music, to a place
more intimate than home, than self, that face
aging in the hall mirror. This is not
music to age by — no sprightly gavotte
or orderly pavane, counting each beat,
confining motion to the pointed feet
and sagely nodding head; not Chopin, wise
enough to keep some distance in his eyes
between perceiver and the thing perceived.
No, this is song that means to be believed,
that quite believes itself, each rising wave
of passionate crescendo wild and brave.
The silly girl who lived inside my skin
once loved this music; its melodic din
was like the voice she dreamed in, sad, intense.
She didn't know a thing, she had no sense;
she scorned — and needed — calendar and clock,
the rules, the steps, the lines, Sebastian Bach;
she wanted life to break her like a tide,
but not too painfully. On either side
the turnpike trundles by, nurseries, farms,
small towns with schools and markets in their arms,
small industry, green spaces now and then.
All the heart wants is to be called again.


Thank you Rhina.

Janet

Thanks so much, all of you who have posted poems and said wonderful things! I'm moved by all of it, precisely because I've never written exclusively for myself but always for some unseen other person I want inside the poem with me. The first experiences I had with poetry--in my grandmother's house, where poetry and music were always shared pleasures, not solitary occupations--taught me to think of it that way, and I think the inability to communicate with others in this country before learning English strengthened the need to invite others in, and to be invited in. To this day the poets I love most are those who open the door, even if the reader is surprised and not entirely at home once he's inside. I'm grateful to those of you who say you find it easy to walk into my poems and stand where I am: that's exactly, exactly what I want the language to do!

What happens after that, of course, is another story, and you're on your own once I have you where I want you. That's what happens with Frost, and one of the things I admire most about his poems. They open the door because the language is apparently just conversation, but then once you're in there he shows you things that sometimes make you wish you were outside again--in "Out, Out--" for instance--but you're better somehow for having been trapped in there. Emily Dickinson does that too, even though she's not really "conversational." She coaxes you in with conspiratorial wit, and then the roof falls in. But by then you're so hooked that you don't mind the roof.

The poetry I like least is the kind that shuts you out with thorny hedges of language so impenetrable that once you get in, no matter what you're offered, even if your eyes tell you it's caviar, you end up thinking, "Is this it? I got all scratched up and bloody for these little crackers with stuff on them?"

I have been trying to identify what it is about Rhina's poems that makes me feel that not only my aesthetic experience but also my life has been enlarged after reading poems of hers. I think her insights are not just human but humane. Something that I had seen without noticing suddenly falls into place, and I both recognize it and understand it. Or the experience is unlike anything I have had, but once she has described it, it is as if it had happened to me. The poems resonate with the mixed feelings that feel so much truer than the unmixed ones that one encounters more often in literature than in life. Her understanding feels hard-won and not static.

Susan

I carry many of Rhina's poems in my heart, but "Their Only Child," posted by Gail, has a special place there. I like to imagine that someday my daughter, also the one who didn’t get away, will see herself in it.

"Practice" is another favorite of mine. "Picture this pair," it begins, and reading the poem is like watching a scene from a film, the characters and their gestures are so deftly drawn. And I love the ending.

Practice

Picture this pair: eleven-year-old boy,
nine-year-old sister; we old folks ahead,
strolling between azaleas and a bed
of tulips he refuses to enjoy

because she wants him to. She spots a kite
wrestling pine branches; wordlessly, aloof,
he looks the other way, for further proof
of his contempt spins on his heel and right

into the woods we skirt. This walk is her
choice, and he's come against his will, is stone-
dense with fury, wants it to be known,
known and remembered. Old folks who prefer

peace to the truth — in fact, to everything —
we stay ahead. But she persists, looks over
her shoulder, offering feathers, pebbles, clover,
regrets her morning wish to walk in spring

now that he will not warm to her. Poor girl —
I think — transforming even now to suit
some other who draws back, passive and mute
and strong, wielding his silence and the curl

of his small lip — but no, she'll come to learn
to be a little hard herself, need less
another's pleasure than her own, to press
ahead alone and happy and not turn.


from Rehearsing Absence

To Susan McLean, regarding:

"I have been trying to identify what it is about Rhina's poems that makes me feel that not only my aesthetic experience but also my life has been enlarged after reading poems of hers. I think her insights are not just human but humane....Her understanding feels hard-won and not static."

I'm grateful for the thoughtful skill and accuracy of this assessment. I couldn't have said it better.

"Practice" has long been one of my favourites of Rhina's. It touches my own early life experience. I think that if there is a divide between female and male experience Rhina has put her finger on it here. Thank you Catherine for choosing it for this discussion.
Janet

I'd like to add one more poem to Rhina's thread. This one may not be as well known as some of the others, and it's one of my favorites. It appears in The Muse Strikes Back as a “reply” to George Herbert (currently my favorite male poet.) I think not many of us would venture to converse with Herbert in his own medium.

DIALOGUE

My friend George Herbert has been chiding me,
wielding his blend of wit and humor. He
who could have summoned patience to abide
a sword piercing his side
nevertheless
rebukes my thanklessness.

“Give thanks? To whom? For what?” I bridle, knowing
there have been cries like mine forever, going
backward through all our days. I find him still
in that small room pure will
keeps clean of doubt,
sweeping the world's dust out.

“Why, Love, who is our Father,” says my friend,
“whose word is our beginning and our end.
Such thanks are what we owe; Love's debt was paid
by covenant once made
there, on the cross.
Love found, all else is loss.”

Oh, to believe him right! But wrestling with
the difference between history and myth,
our short view down the barrel and the long
perspective of his song,
“Help me to go,”
I beg, “past what I know:

If I, who have three sons, shoot two, will one
on whimsy's lucky side kiss the warm gun
that spared him? I have brothers everywhere
beyond both luck and prayer.
Now for their sake
teach me what sense to make

of such a random love, such fatherhood.”
“Picture a grub who measures every good
by the half inch of soil he curls in. Now
picture, with man's eyes, how
acre by acre
Earth surrounds him. Maker

to creature of his making – grub or man
or angel – is so infinite a span!
Will the grub teach the farmer husbandry?
It is enough to be,
to tend this nest
and trust Love for the rest.”

“For your song's sake – not what you sing to prove -
I will give thanks.” The clock chimes, my hands move,
the books slips from my lap: alone, at night,
unanswered – but not quite,
who at sleep's edge
enjoy such privilege.

I think that this may be the poem that hooked me on Rhina:

Almost

I peer inside it to make sure, and yes,
this is your car beside mine in the lot,
your jacket on the seat, your children's mess
of blankets and stuffed animals: I spot
a letter to be mailed, a shopping list.
Not spotting you, at last I drive away,
framing my joke; how cleverly you missed
lugging your mother's bags on shopping day!
And think how easily — by blindest chance —
this cell or that could have flicked elsewhere, failed
to clasp in that first moment of the dance
that life begins with, how you could have sailed
out of all possibility, downstream,
lost to my flesh forever, like a dream.

Ha! I was coming to post my favorite Espaillat piece, "Song," but I see Gail has beaten me to it.

When considering Rhina's poems, the phrase which perpetually arises forefront to my mind is expert craftsmanship.

Or craftpersonship, as you like it.

I found Rhina's Lapsing to Grace in a used book store in 1994 before I had the privilege of meeting her, and I was hooked by that book. It's been nothing but wonderful gravy since.

Rhina:

I want to ask you a very different kind of question. You've helped two poetry groups blossom, and the second, the Powow River Poets, has incubated a number of amazing poets. Can you talk a little about that and what you would say to others about starting and maintaining such groups?

Thanks!

Mike