The World is Your Heart

or,

What I've taken from this class

by Frank Strong

I. From a hill outside Columbia, SC

A few weeks ago, I pulled out of a drawer some notes I had scribbled last winter while visiting my dad in South Carolina. In particular, I had written about a moment in which I found myself alone on the top of a small hill, contemplating the landscape that surrounded me. While there, I had wanted to remember the cold air, the grayness of the sky, and the immense expanse of pine trees that seemed to spread out forever. As I looked over my notes, though, I found that my memory of that day was inextricable from the memory of the sadness I had felt at the distance between myself and my girlfriend, Hannah. That was why I had found the view so poetic in the first placeóit had echoed the sadness that I was feeling. The emotions that those notes evoked were so strong that I had to try to put them into writing. The result was this poem, called "From a hill outside Columbia, SC":

I'm studying this sky now-

it spreads like lead here,

big and gray and forever over me.

I can stand here, a hill,

small and real in my blue coat-

call out to you and watch the words

harden and fall,

so small in the day's air

Do you know what a pine tree is when I'm without you?

It's a point, a needle in the sky

They spread from here for miles,

all these splinters in the gray,

cold and thin like my words,

cold tips on the slate,

thick green in my heart.

On this hill, at the side of a pine

whose smell I can feel at each splinter

in my body; On this hill I can call to you

and nothing comes back

but the scent of those pines.

In his essay, "The World is Your Body", Alan Watts suggests that the universe exists and acts as one being and that the boundary between ourselves and our world is more ambiguous than we think. This is an exciting idea, and one that has impressed itself more and more on me as this class has progressed. It has endless implications for poetry and personal writing: not only can we learn a lot about ourselves by studying nature, but we can also find in nature reflections of our emotions, moods, and desires. Watts says that "the world is your body"; I think that, in poetry, the world can also be your heart.

The writings of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca demonstrate this perfectly. Lorca internalizes his physical surroundings; that is, he looks around at the world and reworks it in writing as a manifestation of his interior self. The result is a poetry that captures the landscape in perfect (sur)realistic detail while expressing the inner-most emotions of the poet at the same time. Lorca's poems trace a delicate balance between description and expression, making extensive use of metaphor and vivid language. This is true throughout his work, but especially in Romancero Gitano and Poeta en Nueva York. In Romancero Gitano, the Andalusian countryside inspires the poet's personal vision. The greeness and orange trees of Andalucia appear as the poet's desire, its silver moon as his fear of death, and its heat as his frustration. In Poeta en Nueva York, the city itself becomes a symbol of Lorca's own mental anguish. Lorca vividly depicts New York's skyscrapers, teeming masses, and coarse character, but each becomes a characteristic of some aspect of the author's internal conflicts. In one poem, "Ruina", Lorca describes a visit to the Vermont countryside. One verse reads:

Suddenly it was clear that the moon

was a horse's skull

and the air a dark apple

The imagery is startling, but with it Lorca conveys his own preoccupation with death as well as the brightness of the moon and the denseness of the rural night air. Thus, instead of merely reflecting his surroundings in his writings, Lorca uses nature to reflect his soul.

When I sat down to write "From a hill...", I came up with a similar internalization. Maybe the class readings on unity had influenced me, or maybe our trips into nature had instilled in me the full meaning of the readings. As I wrote, the landscape became something interior, a part of myself.The finality and vastness of the gray sky seemed perfectly suited to symbolize my sadness at the distance between Hannah and I.In the poem, the narrator feels this distance like a leaden wall on which his words fall ineffectually.The pine trees that dominate the landscape from that spot turn into the pricking and preoccupying thoughts of that distance, their thick green color and strong scent a painful reminder of the abscence of the narrator's loved one.I addressed the poem directly to her to better express the urgency and intensity of emotion that bleak space evoked.

This is a fairly common technique, I suppose.It's natural to look at stormy skies when we're in a bad mood and see ourselves in them.Still, it's a technique that requires a powerful intimacy with our environment and a deep understanding our surroundings.For his part, Lorca learned by heart everything he could about his native Andalucia, its people,and its landscape.He learned the colors, rhythms, and moods of his homeland.When he went to New York, he skipped nearly all of his classes at Columbia University in favor of long walks through the city and trips into the countryside.Writing about these places became as easy for Lorca as writing about himself, and because of this he was able to do both at the same time.I have never had such a strong connection with nature until I took this class.In the past semester, I've taken trips to see trees and gardens and creeks, and instead of just visiting nature, I've learned to study it.Through our writing exercises and emphasis on detail, I've learned the intimacy thatís necessary for writing in nature.

II. Whitman Draw

The process repeated itself just last week, when we visited Waller Creek for the second time.I sat on the stone bank, a few inches from the creek, and studied water.It reminded me of another time Hannah and I were apart, when I was working at a summer camp near Marble Falls.There was a creek near the camp called Whitman Draw, a name that I've always remembered.As I watched Waller Creek and thought about the water, its banks, and the plants surrounding it, that past came flooding back and I put together another poem.In this one I tried to write the creek as the interaction of two lovers, witnessed at night by a boy who feels the abscence of his loved one.The creek appears as her, lightly moving,and the banks appear as his hands, scooped to hold her.I was trying to write this interaction as intimately as possible without losing the scene itself.I tried to combine detail (mostly in the movement of the water) with the bigger picture of the boyís associations and emotions.The final result was this:

Whitman Draw

I thought of you nights when

we were apart. I went driving

around the lake, to the Whitman Draw-

a little dark tuck in the limestone,

a cut

with water like obsidian.

I saw first your back-

its spine the pale dark-curving line

spread and narrow,

flats and pulls and eddies-

I saw it; so much so that

I kissed it,

bent my lips to the cool backslip

to hold it.

I watched the water play on the banks:

quiet, insistent,

filling spaces,

those little tender lappings

leaving traces of

darkness down the stone.

And what about those banks,

that broad shelf,

scooped and knuckled for you?

Those banks clean and bare,

those banks there beneath your

drawing and tucking,

pulling and smoothing?

Each moment they hold you,

and in each moment they lose you.

I'm not a very prolific writer.Poems usually come from me very slowly, maybe only once or twice a semester.But this semester I've been writing an uncommon amount.Not just in my journal, and not just during assigned nature-writing times.I've written letters, scribbled thoughts, and composed more poems.The two poems above deal most explicitly with nature, but I think that I owe this entire creative outburst to my participation in this class.As we've taken trips into nature and concentrated on our environment, I've become much closer to the world around me.I've learned to see myself in the landscapes around me, and Iíve found nature working myself,too.Of everything that I'll take from this class, this new understanding is by far the most valuable.

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