Jeanne Murray Walker

Importance of rewriting

The following article is located at: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2016/janfeb/when-is-poem-finished.html

When Is a Poem Finished?
On Jeanne Murray Walker.
Thom Satterlee | posted 12/24/2015

See first paragraph re putting a comma in or taking it out, and rewriting.

I heard Walker say that she often found things she'd like to change in her published poems. "What things?" I wondered then. Now, with Helping the Morning, I can see for myself how an accomplished poet pores over her poems, some of them as many as four decades old, and makes inspired changes.

Walker's work represents the best qualities of what is often called "accessible poetry." You never have to ask yourself, "What is she talking about here?" when you read a Jeanne Murray Walker poem. Often the title gives you all the information you need to understand the poem's dramatic situation: "After the Funeral They Bring Food,"

That a poem can start here and lead to an image of God as a phone that "You smash … with a hammer / till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbered up bits," but still end with answering that phone and hearing "a voice you love" on the other end is testimony to Walker's brilliance as a poet and depth as a believer.

But it takes precision for a poem as evenly balanced as that to convince a reader of its authenticity, to give a true feeling of spiritual questing. Word choice, line and stanza breaks, punctuation, even such small typographical matters as italicizing make a difference. The poem on the page is like a musical score, whether you read it out loud to a friend or to yourself in your head. An italicized "is" carries a different tone, one of resignation here, than the same word, unemphasized, would convey. The effect created by a semicolon is similar to, but subtly different from, that of a comma followed by the word "and"—and very different from a dash or colon.

Is it only poets who find these matters both fascinating and consequential?
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I used to play racquetball with a colleague who liked to tease me about poets who spend half their work day deciding to put a comma into a poem, then the other half deciding to take it out. Part exaggeration, part cliché, but also part truth: poetry is an art of precision—as well as an exercise in second- and third-guessing oneself. Many of us who believe in inspired writing also believe in its corollary, inspired re-writing. The heavenly muse sometimes sends corrections years after a poem has been marked as "final" and published in a journal or book or both.

These notions were with me as I read a recently published collection by one of my favorite poets, Jeanne Murray Walker. Since the book includes work from seven of her previous collections, many of which I have on my bookshelf, I naturally wanted to compare earlier and later versions of some of the poems. Several year ago, either at a Faith & Writing festival at Calvin or during one of her campus visits to Taylor, I heard Walker say that she often found things she'd like to change in her published poems. "What things?" I wondered then. Now, with Helping the Morning, I can see for myself how an accomplished poet pores over her poems, some of them as many as four decades old, and makes inspired changes.

I'll reserve the second half of this review for a few select comparisons. But first, for readers not already familiar with Jeanne Murray Walker, a little general biography and an introduction to her work. Walker was born in 1944 in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota (a frequent setting for her poems) and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, when she was still a young girl. She graduated from Wheaton College, where she met fellow poets Robert Siegel and John Leax, who became lifelong friends of hers. In 1965, she won both the poetry and fiction categories for a contest sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly and was selected as an Atlantic Monthly Fellow at the Bread Loaf School of English. She completed an MA at Loyola University and a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught English and creative writing at the University of Delaware for over forty years, and has also served as a Mentor in the Seattle Pacific University MFA program.

As readers of Helping the Morning will quickly discover, Walker's work represents the best qualities of what is often called "accessible poetry." You never have to ask yourself, "What is she talking about here?" when you read a Jeanne Murray Walker poem. Often the title gives you all the information you need to understand the poem's dramatic situation: "After the Funeral They Bring Food," "Praying for Father on All Saints' Day," "Pythagoras Understands His Theorem and Sacrifices to the Muses in Thanks," "Portrait of the Virgin Who Said No to Gabriel," or "Looking for Ruby Earrings on Portobello Road." Usually, her poems offer a narrative, whether it's the story of Aunt Joe falling in love or taking a trip to the dump; a brief scene of negotiating terms with a child who's intent on destroying a philodendron plant; or the sight of a wedding party setting up their festivities on a beach being swept by hurricane-force winds.

At the same time, however, Walker always avoids the worst qualities of accessible poetry: over-simplification and quaintness. If I were to choose one phrase from all the poems in this new collection, the signature that to my mind best captures her motto as a poet, it would be this one from "The Last Migration: Amherst, Massachusetts, 1981": "Truth is the thing you pull around your shoulders / like a shawl against the human chill." With this commitment to the truth of her experience, Walker can write poems that express such complex emotions as, for instance, celebrating a daughter's 21st birthday while at the same time aching at the loss of the former child: "Like a woman whose hand has just been severed at the wrist, / but who can still feel pain winking in the lost fingers, / I felt my stomach turn when she moved in her crib of seaweeds."

The same honesty holds in her poems centered on spiritual questing; if anything, her refusal to simplify matters when it comes to faith is even stronger than elsewhere. The poem "Staying Power" does, I believe, all a poet of lifelong faith can be asked to do in doubting her own religion:

Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside and question the metal sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this, and finally I say,
"All right, it is improbable; all right, there
is no God."

That a poem can start here and lead to an image of God as a phone that "You smash … with a hammer / till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbered up bits," but still end with answering that phone and hearing "a voice you love" on the other end is testimony to Walker's brilliance as a poet and depth as a believer.

But it takes precision for a poem as evenly balanced as that to convince a reader of its authenticity, to give a true feeling of spiritual questing. Word choice, line and stanza breaks, punctuation, even such small typographical matters as italicizing make a difference. The poem on the page is like a musical score, whether you read it out loud to a friend or to yourself in your head. An italicized "is" carries a different tone, one of resignation here, than the same word, unemphasized, would convey. The effect created by a semicolon is similar to, but subtly different from, that of a comma followed by the word "and"—and very different from a dash or colon.

In the case of "Staying Power," since she was re-re-publishing the poem (it first appeared in Poetry, then in her collection New Tracks, Night Falling), Walker had an opportunity to reconsider her choices. As it turns out, instead of a semicolon she had previously favored a dash between "improbable" and "all right." Rather than setting the dialogue in quotation marks, she'd used italics—which meant that the "is" of "is improbable" had to appear in a regular typeface and lost some of its effect. On the other hand, there are places in the earlier version where italics stand out less than quotation marks and even seem to represent an intermediate ground between spoken and unspoken words. Compare

I whisper, God.
God, I say as my heart turns inside out
with the later version:

I whisper, "God.
God," I say as my heart turns inside out.

Is it only poets who find these matters both fascinating and consequential? For me at least, studying Walker's choices was part of the enjoyment of reading her new collection. I carefully compared all of the poems selected from three of her previous collections (I would have gone on to a fourth, but discovered that my copy of A Deed to the Light was missing from my bookshelf, probably loaned out to a student and never returned). This gave me an opportunity to, in a sense, watch her argue with herself—possibly argue with herself and her editor, Marci Rae Johnson, whom Walker credits with re-sequencing many of the poems, and who may also have influenced some of their re-writing, too. I sometimes agreed, sometimes disagreed with the decisions. I'm sure several productive hours could be spent in a Poetry Writing class discussing whether the poem "While the Men Are Gone" works better with four five-line stanzas and one of four lines, as it appears in Coming Into History, or as one single stanza, as it appears in Helping the Morning; if the end of that poem is better off broken up into two lines as "on City Hall, & one foot on the Wissahickon / & one foot on Baring Street" or left as a single long line—not to mention the debate that would likely arise over using ampersands so liberally in a poem. Almost every selected poem that I compared had at least a few small changes, most commonly with line breaks and punctuation, very rarely a change of wording (an interesting study of this kind would be "Paddington Station at Midnight," the most heavily revised of any of the poems I studied). But any change, every change, in a poem makes a difference.

It is understandable for a poet to want to reconsider her previous choices, and interesting to see what she decides. It is also important for a poet as gifted as Jeanne Murray Walker to be given the opportunity to provide, down to the minutest detail, her preferred versions of her poems. She is, as Daniel Hoffman said some 25 years ago, "among the best poets of her generation." When I read her poems, I want them to sing in my head just the way she intends for them to. Thank goodness WordFarm has made this new work—of new and old and revised work—available to us.

Thom Satterlee taught creative writing at Taylor University from 2000 to 2011, and is now a full-time writer. He is the author of Burning Wyclif: Poems (Texas Tech University Press) and The Stages: A Novel (Crooked Lane Books).

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.… (meer)

You walk down the same lane through fresh snow over many years late at night. You have no doubt that tonight's stroll will be unlike any other, until a stranger passes by. Who is this stranger to have invaded your space?

The stranger appears out of nowhere and goes nowhere beside. You divert attention from a startled feeling inside to a little curiosity about the stranger. What's the stranger doing about now that he's out of sight? Is he thinking about me, even as I think of him?

"Snow drifted over him as he dozed in the cold breezeway
in his Naugahyde recliner. From here
he looked like a character sealed in a snow globe
representing one way a man could freeze to death.
On days I phoned him, I imagined him
brushing snow off, rising like a great walrus
to shuffle inside the kitchen and pick up."
'Elegy: Lloyd Aderhold, d. September 12, 2001' (p.4)

Jeanne Murray Walker places this poem near the top of her first section named 'Separations,' in this 2009 book of collected poems. Walker is a prolific and engaging poet,essayist, and playwright. She dedicates the poem to her "tall bachelor uncle," who spent the day prior glued to TV. Had he seen a stranger?

Back to the stranger--Is this lane the same lane of fresh snow I have walked before. On another late night walk "you" were rattled by two fiery infernos on Manhattan's south side. Her uncle named Lloyd Aderhold, the "object" of this poem, is seated before the spectacle that turned every "you" on September 11th upside down like flakes inside a snow globe scatter an isolated "I" and "he."

The sudden emergence of "you" in the third stanza confuses subject and object, so keenly distributed by "him" and "me" up above. Whose heart breaks after "we flew to bury him?" The answer to this riddle of pronouns deftly resists every attempt to tease out.

We cannot be sure. Certainty in the way we think about individuals and autonomy like "I" and "he," rostral columns of one general's victory and everyone's defeat, fall down into heaps. Prior they stood tall and proud, but now scatter like unpacked snow, like it was "...all day watching airplanes inside your TV penetrate the Towers."

Sudden awareness that an unknown but familiar stranger watches your heart break--a silent witness--helps you to write down "...what you had no words for." What is on the mind of the silent witness now? We do not walk the same lane again.

Not all 14 poems of 'Separations,' part 1, develop along the lines of abrupt disturbances as do a handful devoted to catastrophe on September 11th. However, cataclysm arrives fast or slowly, nonetheless, in the rest. For example, the poem 'History' (p. 15) "starts as an ache in the throat." Like a sore throat puffing up the head until pain puts one to bed, the history of Moses leading a haggard crew "...through the Red Sea" brings with it realizations too painful to swallow. Gone are people whom Moses loved dearly, and "...these limping slaves..." Moses discovers, "...are not stupid."

Separations ignite consciousness of the one who has always watched your back. Always unsettling, these separations of Walker's poems make me aware that I am not alone as I read them. That alone instills at least a little consolation for the so named 'Choices' to make in part 2.

`Choices' (part 2) consists of 13 poems. Varied in reference to choices that prominent biblical characters made--such as a remarkable choice that Adam did not make in selecting his mate ("Adam's Choice")--and in reference to events that befall even the most ordinary character, `Choices' depicts quotidian and tedious occasions when we decide which choice it will be. I might add upon further reflection in reading these poems that not only must we decide which choice it will be, but also who we will be and become in the choice that we make.

Part 3 (`Tracks') parallels the metaphor of a familiar lane that you walk at night, which came to me after first reading Walker's introduction to this text. There she entertains how "...reading a poem is like following tracks to an interior realm" (p. x). She portrays a solitary walk across a snow-covered field, where one discovers tracks and inner curiosity to see where they lead. "Praying for Rain in Santa Fe," midway through 13 poems collected in part 3, represents well the poet's description of the sense that I am not alone.

This sense of someone is here with me is what happened to me as I read this poem. Someone listens to me in "solitary" prayer, for there is no arrow to shoot without a target to strike:

"In prayer lies prayer's answer. In the calling out,
the visitation. In the arrow lives the target's eye.
So water rises from its knees, believing water

will come." (p. 45)

`Resolutions' (part 4) holds 16 poems, which makes it the largest part of the book. Doubts return in "Resolution' to unsettle poet and reader. Maybe the unseen maker of the tracks, the one whom I identify as the "stranger," forgot to show up before anxiety spelled despair. All too familiar, some events crank up the volume of suffering in us that only a consoling poem might relieve. Among others, burying a loved one is one such event.

"Helping the Morning" in part 4 comes toward the end of this magnificent collection. It frames resolution the way that the poem frames the poem in part 1 about the uncle who had died. Welcoming the dawn after the burial and the ride home, the poet notes that the winter has brought drought and locked her heart. However, morning opens:

"Like the aperture of a camera, the morning opens
and keeps opening until the room is filled
with rosy light and I could believe

anything: that grass might turn green again,
that clouds the size of my hand
might swell, might drift in, bringing rain. (p. 60)

Read these poems aloud in seasons of plenty and drought. Cherish them without care that one or the bunch might wither in memory. Return to them with friends and loved ones in sickness and health, gathering your senses that you are not alone, indeed.… (meer)

NCLA Review - If you are looking for relevant, contemporary poetry for your church library, Jeanne Walker's collection would be a good acquisition. Murray offers a short essay on the purpose of poetry at the beginning of the book. She believes poetry is a "wistful groping toward truth" (xiii). Many of the poems are written in the shadow of 9/11. They are responses, consolations to a world that fears that "night is falling." Many poems are powerful. For example, in the poem "Ritual," the narrator is on a twelve-seater plane when an alarm sounds. In her fear, she wishes for a ritual, some way to connect with the other passengers. Instead, they are each alone, potentially passengers who die separately, without ritual or touching. An excellent testimony to the power of poetry, and the importance of faith for the composition of it. Rating: 4 —CS… (meer)