Kingfisher
 a Journal of Northwest Art and Literature
Winter 2002

page three

STONE'S CAPACITY
(Continued from page 2.)

Very nice, but Sund is not done with the scene.  As a truck whisks by, the magpies take to the air and disperse.  They have been feeding on roadkill.  Once more the poet is specific—it is a dead pheasant.  “In the truck’s wake, one wing rises like a sail.”  The poem is over, nicely closed, but it continues on a bit, describing the loose feathers being caught by the same gust of wind and sailing out over the field and gravel shoulder.  I think those four lines are superfluous and weaken the poem’s full impact.  The wing rising like a sail is plenty enough for us.  In the future, Sund would prune his work of these redundancies.

In Poem 42, a white butterfly visits a yellow flower—the Star Thistle, whose name he has recently learned—and the sight mimics the effect of sunlight on fields of wheat, seasonally green, seasonally gold.  The butterfly rises from its flower, revealing “a green field, immense, and never visited.”  It is a glimpse of eternity, we are led to think—illusionary, or at the least intentionally indistinct.  It remains, a memorable image.

                      4
Ish River doesn’t appear for 14 years (1983), but the poems go back in time to his early days, the years that produced Bunch Grass.  They include more mature work, plus poems that were apparently written much earlier and seemingly overlap the ideas and attitudes of his first book.  Others anticipate his very different future lifestyle.  At the start the poet is still living in Seattle, and hating city life, but looking forward to the move to rural Skagit County.  The preface beautifully describes what he means by the title:

"Ish River—

like breath,
like mist rising from a hillside.
Duwamish, Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Samish,
Skokomish, Skykomish . . . all the ish rivers.  

I live in the Ish River country
between two mountain ranges where
many rivers
run down to an inland sea."

He dated the poem March 29, 1979, Cloud House.  The book contains 31 poems—about sixty percent as many as Bunch Grass.   Ish River won the Governor’s Award for the year’s most outstanding book of poetry.  Already he is showing the economy in both his lifestyle and manner of writing.  A few individual poems are dated about the same time as Bunch Grass came out—an important and joyous time for him.  Yet he is now writing either very little or else throwing a whole lot away.  Maybe he chose to publish only a portion of his output and to hold back publication until the third and final book, ten years later.  This is in keeping with his seeming change in attitude and his withdrawal into a reclusive life.  During that time he taught himself painting, played various stringed and keyboard instruments, practiced calligraphy, and lived the life of a knowledgeable primitive.  He became recognized as an eccentric and one who practiced what he exemplified but didn’t preach.  He was always ready for a poetry reading or an evening of music among friends.  The autoharp became his favorite instrument.

He lived in numerous obscure places, often with friends or in the empty buildings owned by friends.  He required very little.  He soon settled in one or another of the shacks on the lower North Fork of the Skagit river.  This was popularly called Fishtown.  But he soon found a place downstream more to his liking.  It could only be reached by boat.

Ish River is a collection of keen poems, which the poet divides into three groups or books.  The first, “The Hides of White Horses Standing in Rain,” takes its title from the close of the initial poem in that group, “Nights Along the Columbia, Days in Blewett Pass, Going Home.”  It is a beautiful poem, longer than most and one of his best.  In it he moves freely among dissimilar scenes and seemingly unrelated groups of images.  To do this well—and he does it well—is the sign of maturing poet.  Let me illustrate.  This is the fifth stanza, but the stanzas are short:

    "I think of
            anonymous Chinese poets, old poems on silk,
            the pleasure of being alone,
            walking through a herd of cows asleep in scant alfalfa,
             the last crop of summer."

Close.  Period.  End.

There is an echo of the Williams’, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” but it has become Sund’s own wheelbarrow, highly personalized, quite different, with rain again falling on the earth beneath, but a different rain.  In Eastern Washington there is little rain and seldom.  Rain in Ish country in ubiquitous and accepted.  It is an essential part of life West of the Cascades.

Those “pure of heart” is, of course, for others to judge us by, but if one feels that he is pure, in that way, he doubtlessly is, at least to himself, and that may be all that matters.  The poems here are youthful and heavily autobiographical.  Family—Swedes and Finns, farmers all—figure in the subject matter strongly. There is his grandfather’s barn in Chehalis, his grandmother’s house, his father's grave outside of Elma, his brother Don, his mother’s hospitalization.  These are his roots.   He is about to leave them, but they will remain with him as strong influences wherever he goes.  His newfound lifestyle is reflected in the last poem in this section, ”In Praise of My Ink Bottle.”  It marks a turning point, while at the same time tying itself to an old tradition, that of Blake and Burns, among others.  It is also the poet speaking out in an original voice, announcing the life he is determined to live in the future.  Listen to him:

                 1
"Life flows on, I go from place to place.
I carry this ink bottle with me
wherever I go.  

                2
 At the dinner table in some friend’s house,
eating and drinking wine, I look down
 and see the ink on my fingers."

This is the voice of a modern-day Walt Whitman.  He is mobile but he is rooted, if only rooted in water.  He can live anywhere there is paper and a makeshift table.  He carries his ink bottle with him.  Ink is, of course, with what the poet writes down the poems he carries in his head, if only to be rid of them and to gain a moment’s peace. It is the calligrapher’s wellhead, as well.  And it is what the painter of Sumi dips his bamboo brush into.  Sund is now so much of all three personages, or professions, that his fingers are apt to be permanently stained with the common medium at all times.  And he is the workman again, who comes to the dinner table straight from completing his tasks.

“Book 2:  Stumbling Through Towns” is a mixed bag, containing poems (it would seem) written earlier, or in a style left over from the time of Bunch Grass, the locale still Seattle or Everett or Issaquah, or Eastern Washington.  He is in a period of transition, not quite at home or having permanently arrived in the Ish river country.  Some of the poems are less than special, but some are fine achievements.  

“Mean Dog on a Country Road” shows him at his best, able to mix dissimilar elements from an immediate scene.  He is at Harris’ place on Grand Ridge—wherever that may be—and a police dog is coming forward, barking furiously and perhaps going to attack him.  It’s owner, a woman, calls it back.  The dog is named Trouble.  This triggers Sund into thinking of a poem by Dr. Johnson, and he quotes, or paraphrases: “O excellently named creature!”  The literary association is so strong to him that it takes precedent over the present threat of danger, which is real.  But the poet cannot dismiss the association, not even in the face of danger.  Dr. Johnson “step(s) out from behind the trees,” followed by other “famous men.”  It isn’t important to name them—perhaps they don’t need names.  He cannot remember what they say to him, either.  He is inexact on purpose.  Names and words are not really important here.  It is the scene that is.  It is their company, the literary companionship of the old, dead, famous people that lifts the event out of the ordinary.  He makes it special to us, too.

Some of the intentional inexactitude I mentioned in the preface to Shack Medicine that exists between the poet and juggler shows itself here.  It is a witty, sophisticated banter, very light-hearted, meant to be funny.  The famous men attempt to outdo each other in their brilliance.   Sund doesn’t give us examples or their names, but says he thinks you would know them.  The vagueness is intention, a literary device.  They can be your private literary heroes or figures, if you wish.  They appear when needed, in times of trouble, such as when you are attacked on lonely roads in the country, when all you want to do is get back to the surety of a troubled city.  It is a complex poem in a style he is to carry into his last book.

There is another fine poem at the end of Book 2, as the Ish River countryside makes its presence felt more and more strongly in the poet’s life.  It is spring and two robins have nested in a vine maple across the creek from their nest in an alder.  Note the specificity.  The poet spots the nest.  He reaches up, out of sight, and feels for the eggs.  There are four.  The nest is of soft feathers, he tells us.  He lifts out one egg, lowers his arm slowly, and stands still “appalled.”  Appalled is a powerful word here.  He is appalled at himself, his act, his audacity.  How dare he seemingly steal a robin’s egg?  Well, we know he doesn’t.  He puts it shamefully back, or so we presume.  He doesn’t have to tell us so.  From the experience, he has gained useful knowledge and done no real harm.  He “sees the true shape of my hand.”  It is something he has never known or experienced before.  It is knowledge.  (Or is it sinful knowledge?)

The final poem in Book 2 is a lament in which he states at the beginning, “In the lost valleys of a man’s life/there is always a small bird asleep.”  Wow.  The bird is holy, one of “the sad creatures,” living alone “at the edge of the deep woods.”  Okay; we are with him so far.  Then, suddenly, the small creature, and others like it, is transformed into prayer beads held in “the hand of holy men, chanting endlessly.”  Where did they come from?  And what are they chanting?  Te deum laudamus?  I suppose so.  The poet tells us, “A lonely warrior stands/at the brink of morning.”  Is it the small bird, or is it one of the priests who is chanting without stop?  Is it both?  Does it matter which?  If so, there are no contextual clues to help us find out.  We too stand on the edge of the deep woods, alone and lonely.  It is the universal situation.  But it is brilliantly stated.

 (Continued on top of next column.)

Book 3 is "Love Poems."  The first one is for Susanna in Santa Barbara.  It’s refrain line is “Newly come to love, . . .” The tag end of the line varies and seems to be progressive in terms of their relationship.  It defines the course of the two lovers and the third entity, the one that is uniquely theirs and binds them.  It might be called, Love Itself.

The poem is not entirely convincing as a love poem.  It is full of literary illusion (Cezanne, Berthe Morisot), and Susanna may well be the poet’s muse on a walk through the green and yellow fields in a season that only seems to be summer.  Well, Santa Barbara can be like that, granted.  The poem is pretty much a nature poem.  It is not until the final three lines that the poet remembers there is a girl beside him and leans to kiss her.  He sees “a stranger blossoms in your eyes.”  The stranger is, of course, himself, the poet reflected back to him in her eyes.  Her eyes are but a mirror in which to regard himself.  Narcissus?  I think, Poor girl.

Perhaps it is a different girl and not Susanna he is with, or not with, in the woods above Issaquah.  Something went wrong between them evidently, for the poet states, “I don’t know what happened.  One night, no use knocking on your door.”  He steps away from the front porch, as the rain falls, and “the grass woke up.”  Nice image.  As for the girl, “your face was/ a small round stone/falling through dark water.”  In other words, she is gone (if she was ever really there) and the poet is alone again.  One feels that is the way he wants it.

Sund seems happier when the love object is some woodsy creature.  In “The Widow,” he concerns himself with a mouse. It is a beautiful descriptive poem, very short, the kind of thing he does well, does better than almost anybody else, when it works.  Two disjointed images are brought together and a synthesis is formed.  Or is it?  

"A mouse has climbed down
the wall, into
a coat
hanging on a nail,
into the sleeve.

The phrases
of love are long phrases.
Too long."

The technique is one learned from the Chinese poets.  Syntactically it makes use of devices he will use it more and more often.  Its brevity appeals to him greatly.  When it works, it is wonderfully illuminating.  When it doesn’t—and I think it doesn’t in the poem above, with its wonderful Eighteenth Century "mousie"—the poem is a dud.  It falls flat on its face.  Most often, however, Sund makes the device work, and we are the beneficiaries.  I wish the poem had simply stopped with the first stanza.  The conclusion, the coda, is unneeded and weak.

               5

Shack Medicine (wonderful title by the way, when you recognize the situation) is what one takes as an antidote for the multiple illnesses of modern life.  Life in the city, for instance.  A life that includes running water, electricity, telephones, garbage pickup, TV.  Round up the usual amenities.  Life with no Ish River in it.

Though he lived for a while in the newly rediscovered grounded shacks at Fishtown, along with Charles Krafft, he soon moved about a mile downriver to a more permanent location.  He called it Disappearing Lake because when the tide went out the lake seemingly vanished.  The place was locally known as Ship Creek—which no doubt was an intentional mispronunciation.  His shack was built up on stilts that helped it escape the Skagit’s periodic flooding.  I had thought it a cold, wet existence, but Arthur Greeno says it was only that at first, and soon Sund had improved it greatly and “my many visits there were to a remarkably warm & welcoming, comfortable, tidy, aesthetic experience.  The neat little iron boat stove, fed by abundant alder,  could heat the whole place and cook up breakfast for sixteen.”  Still, the life was primitive by most standards.  Sund kept it neat, clean, and monastic.  It was the ideal place to write, practice calligraphy, draw, and paint.  Not many could have done it.  Some people admired him for living this way, but others thought he was nuts.

Ill health required that he move to a place where doctors were nearby.  This was the "boom shack" on the corner at Nelson Lumber Yard.  It “was a miserable place, indeed,” according to Greeno, and the poet was “at the bottom of his luck and the peak of his indulgences.  It served fine in summer, but, with no heat of any kind, it was” wet and miserable.  Thus, “he spent most winter nights in town at our house, or on the nearest available couch.   All in all, he was never too miserable.  He was a more than welcome guest at many a household, until [perhaps] he outwore his welcome.  [This] usually took a good long while, and he was usually the first to realize it.”

Shack Medicine contains 19 poems, some of them only  three lines long.  Even the long poems are fairly short.  Book by book Sund has seemingly reduced his output.  He may be writing less and less, or he may be holding back poems for reasons hard to fathom.  The long silence is a way of disappearing, or appearing to do so.  Friends say he wrote poems, wrote lots of them, but chose not to publish.  The poems are available, but need to be brought together from a number of sources.  There are plans to publish them in more broadsides, perhaps even to produce a volume of collected poems.  Tim McNulty  and Chip Hughes are in charge of this project.  I sure hope it is successful.   I and others look forward to such a book.

Brevity has its charms.  A haiku is but three lines.  More and more of Sund’s late poems seem to hinge on a phrase or an idiom.  Or else a shout of enlightenment.  Sometimes it works (for us, too), sometimes it does not.  Oddly, a short poem can sometimes be overwritten, as in the case above.  The first poem in Shack Medicine is “Ink Bottle,” and goes: 

"1
Somewhere
inside this ink bottle,
There is a starry sky!

2
Don’t keep the lid on
your ink bottle
Too long."

The first three lines, (part 1) are perfect.  The next three lines, (part 2) are really unnecessary and don’t do much for the poem.  Rather than be reflective, meditative, the poet is didactic and qualificative.  The message of not keeping the lid on the bottle is okay, but could be stated in some other way.  And the “too long” is weak; it is an example of managed inexactitude that doesn’t work.  How long is too long?  Or how short?  It echoes “the phrases of love” in the mouse poem that are “long phrases.”  How long are they?  They are, he says again, “too long.” 

The use of exclamation marks to end a sentence, end a poem, is a questionable device.  They are meant to indicate an epiphany, I know.  They are little shouts of joy and can be tolerated as such.  But the terseness and concision of the lines alone indicate as much.  The punctuation is unnecessary as, say, the use of italics or underlining.  And some of the sentiments are, well, bourgeois.  A skunk cabbage “upgrades the whole neighborhood!”  It is a fine example of the pathetic conceit intentionally misused.   It is meant to be funny and is, sort of.  (I don’t think a thing can be sort of funny.)  The poem is “For Laura’s Birthday.”  We are all concerned with keeping up with the neighbors, he is saying, but the skunk cabbage in bloom classes up the neighborhood more than anybody’s competitive effort of assembling yard bric-a-brac.  Or so I read it.  But the poem contains a snide sentiment and evokes the middle-class world we are never long rid of.  The effect of the yellow bloom is lost.

So are the three daffodils that are “up by the porch” in April.  The poet could be next, he exclaims.  What, up by the porch?  Popping up out of the ground?  I don’t get it.  Maybe I wasn’t meant to.

The next two short poems work quite nicely.  Sund echoes Ezra Pound’s “sing we for love and idleness.”  It is a classic theme.  He handles it in his own fine manner.  Very short, with no extra words:

“Enough

Guiding a stray bee
out of the house—

Enough work for one day!"

And the next poem:

It's been a busy day.
First
one hummingbird, then
Another!"

It cannot be improved on.  Nor can a single word be omitted.  I don’t even begrudge him the exclamation marks used to end each of the poems above.  He has earned them through his concision!

This slender book (no page numbers, no numbered poems, though oddly some short poems of half a dozen lines have two numbered stanzas to them) is sandwiched between two long pieces; the one that is a preface is a fine piece of prose delineating the simple life in the shack colony on the estuary, the flora and fauna (beavers, blackbirds, willows) and what life there was like.  It is too long to quote in its entirety, and taking lines from it seems decidedly unfair.  At the end of the book is a poetic statement covering much the same ground and constituting the poet’s unifying vision.  It is very fine, and though I shouldn’t I am going to quote only its beginning and end, in hopes that these few lines will induce the reader to find his own copy and enjoy the entire poem:  

"Shack Medicine, for Dan'l Stokeley

 The river glides in silence.
The night is deep, like a
            loving mother,
A silence goes back and forth
            through the marsh.”

The same silence that he found in his shack is always there, waiting for him.  When he is gone, it will be there still.  Kitchen implements and chair, the window with a moon in it, are lodged immemorially in his mind. Now they are lodged in ours.  They are eternal.  Then comes the astonishing benediction:

’Nothing can ever
be taken from you
now.’”

At the Movies
(Continued from page 2.)

The restored version runs 3:22 hours, or about a third longer.  There are four sections that have been expanded:

1.  The upriver journey is interrupted for an interesting slice of historical involvement about the French occupation of View Nam, which (at least for artistic purposes) is permitted to go on, at least in isolated pockets.  Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is halted in his journey to the Heart of Darkness by a contingent of armed Frenchmen, who bid him and his men to disembark and accompany them to an ante-bellum mansion, where they are treated as honored guests, but it is only Willard who eats the multi-course dinner with the aristocracy; his men are fed and billeted at a lower tier.
 
During the meal he is attacked verbally by his  host over how America wants all the credit for everything, going back to World War I, and the French are perennial losers, all along the historical line.  Willard hears them out with style and patience.  Meanwhile, a beautiful French widow casts him long glances across the linen that can mean only one thing.  That evening she treats him to an opium pipe (in Nam, nobody turns down drugs) and we presume sex in a canopied bed.  We rejoin him on his boat the next morning.  The twenty-minute scene adds an important dimension to the movie and the war's place in world history.

2.  Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) had a small but memorable role in the earlier version, and everybody remembers his ebullient, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!  It's the smell of . . . victory."  His role, and that of his airborne troops, is expanded and the absurd element increases--he attacks and destroys a "ville" simply in order to watch his world-class surfers ride the great curl to be found there.  However, a small error in timing (ever present in war and offense) brings him in at low tide.  There is the familiar accompanying blast of Wagner on the speakers as he and his men depart the place in disgust, leaving it in flames,  bodies of women, children, old men, and Cong fighters  strewn about.  Captain Willard's men steal the Colonel's surfboard as a practical joke and one of Willard's men skis in the patrol boat's wake,  as it continues its allegorical upstream journey into darkness and horror.

Interesting and fun, but it doesn't add much to the already rich film.

3. In the earlier version, there was a scene of high impact when the Playboy Bunnies were helicoptered in to entertain the troops.  The performance was so erotic that the men rioted and the Bunnies were lucky to escape with their bikinis.  In the new version they run out of helicopter fuel and have to set down at a storage depot.  In a monsoon the Bunnies barter sex for fuel--it seems to be diesel oil, and I don't think that is what powers copters, but never mind.  (Perhaps this is more Coppolian irony and what they get will be of no practical use to them.)  The scene is weird, surreal, but then the entire movie is.  The girls--so saucy and provocative earlier-- have become timid, frightened creatures when out of their element.  But that's all right; the men only want them to pose provocatively, as they did in the magazines they carry upstream with them, as though a treasure horde.  At the same time there is the suggestion that the girls have been used over and over by the troops and have no other expectation in the jungle.  The added material doesn't really add to the story and serves more as a diversion that even in this mad movie seems unreal and unacceptable. The movie would be better without it.

4. And then there is the important added footage at the end, when Willard reaches the nihilistic camp Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), where bodies dangle from the trees and heads lie on the ground like soccer balls.  We are treated to a little more explanation of what happened to the superb officer on his road to madness and anarchy.  Structurally, Dennis Hopper as the gonzo photojournalist is needed to explain to us and to Captain Willard that Kurtz is a holy man, a kind of Zen master of the highest order, whose simple utterances contain thoughts too deep for comprehension by the likes of us ordinary mortals.  Uh-huh, thinks the unbelieving Willard, and is not deterred from his mission, which is to "terminate with dispatch and extreme prejudice" the life and reign of the colonel.  Which he does in the great, bloody, surreal scene that closes both the earlier and later version of the movie. But it is better here.

The movie ends differently, too.  In the original version, Willard gets back to his patrol boat and the decimated crew.  Mission accomplished, it is presumed he will return to the general and the colonel who gave him his assignment and, perhaps, become a major in the process.  And there is an echo of the beginning of the film, when the jungle is set aflame by napalm; we expect this to happen again because a massive air strike is scheduled on Kurtz' s camp, if Willard doesn't report back by a certain time. 

In the new version we don't follow him back to his boat, and there is a strong suggestion that the air strike will take place as is predestined.  Captain Willard, with the collected writings of Colonel Kurtz under his arm, as though it were a bible, stands coated with blood, soot, and grime.  Whether he will carry on the teachings of Kurtz or become Kurtz himself, or perish in the conflagration to come, we do not know.  And us not knowing will not detract one bit from our understanding and appreciation of the film.