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Show , Spring/Summer 2003 page 19 St. Catherine of Siena Courtesy Mary Francey at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts Even in flight above I am no longer free. You've sealed me with your love. I'm blind to other birds. The habit of your words Has hooded me. In this love poem, Gunn plays with the common vocabularies of falconry, the monastery and love (even its slang, as in "I'm blind to other birds") to express how tightly the speaker is bound to his beloved-a tightness also reflected in the poem's closely circling form. Though the stanza's meaning is multiple and complex, it is also beautifully within the poet's control, and this control allows both poet and reader to engage in linguistic play. Such deftness occurs not in the abandonment of rules but in their mastery. This is the difficulty of poetry-and, as in so may disciplines, difficulty and value arise from the same source. Through discipline, the poet learns to deploy and manage complexity, to tolerate and then to use ambiguity, and to shift her attention away from her own troubles and joys so she can begin to imagine what might create an experience-of trouble, of joy-for someone else to enter, learn from, participate in, play with. "So, what's in it for me?" the student may ask. As I've suggested in talking about Gunn's stanza, the poet's rewards are not so different from those she creates for her reader: surprise, emotion, not so much expressed as achieved in the poem, pleasure. Pleasure, not to communicate some urgent message to the world, is the primary reason most of us write, and the expression of this pleasure in the poem becomes, after all, a kind of self-expression. But it turns out that the pleasure and its expression do not reside where most new poets think it will-in the reader's recognition of the poet's sensitivity. Rather, it resides in the more rigorous delights available to anyone attempting to perfect a disciplined work, whether that person is an artist, a scientist, a philosopher, or an athlete. In this case, the delights involve the exploration of the ability of language to chart that place where the human mind meets the world, to create from that meeting a new intuition about reality, and to open that intuition to readers, to restore them to themselves by offering them the chance to examine their own experiences within the poem. KATHARINE COLES, Associate Professor in the Department of English, has won several awards in recognition of her outstanding work in the field of creative writing. Her recent published works of poetry include The Golden-Years of the Fourth Dimension (University of Nevada Press, 2001) and A History of the Garden (University of Nevada Press, 1997). Photo courtesy Francois Camoin. |