(LYRIC PROSE)
BAMBOO OR JUST A BIT OF PROSE
LISA DART
BAMBOO OR JUST A BIT OF PROSE
LISA DART
‘Well, that was fun, but you can’t really write a poem about it can you?‘ And I knew what you meant. There was the bluntness of the sun and the dull brownness of the sand and some of the bamboo bowed over all untidy next to the rubbish tip which smelt pretty bad. And the long leaves of the bamboo were bent at odd angles and in your hand were the metal secateurs with their orange hand-grips. And, anyhow, we had argued all afternoon about the colour of some poles in the house which was crazy really since it was the first day after the rain.
The bamboo — we wanted it to hang our blinds and, if I am not mistaken, the day before we’d got pretty close to arguing over the colour of the blinds too, and that’s to say nothing of the shade of green, or blue, or finally, shade of white, that would look best on the wardrobe — the bamboo you cut broke easily under the pressure of your hands and the secateurs and you gave the straightest part to me after you had deftly nipped off the leaves and tossed them into the rubbish tip. The inside of the bamboo wasn't hollow but green. I said, That’s the living sap.
I wonder about poems sometimes. About what can and can’t be one and this morning when I put the car right up by that same bamboo, I wasn't even doing that — wondering, I mean. I was going for a swim and in the morning sun the sand looked yellow. The water was blue. Though I expect you would have said it was green. Anyhow, it was very still and cold. Even so, I liked the way it stretched out the bay. And the orange of the handles of your secateurs were actually a pretty strong orange now I come to think about it.
Right near the bamboo is a line of hollyhocks which is pretty unusual for Greece actually and made me think of the ones we had at home behind the small wall when I was a kid. Sometimes a whole summer is in the sound of a nuzzling bee. And I like the way the hollyhock flowers are like girls’ skirts. You know how in a playground small girls spin round and round and their skirts splay. A little further on are the oleanders. They are everywhere in Greece. I like the pink ones most. Pink and spring-fresh. By August they are dusty and the pink is yawning a little. But right now they are pristine even in the raggle-taggle of a wind.
And, by the way, bamboos look quite beautiful to me sometimes — sharp cuts of green in sun-sheen. Was that almost a rhyme? And, you know, I wouldn’t confess it to many people but the way the odd shoots droop and bend over makes me think of a dancer. (At Sadler’s Wells once a woman on stage. Her dress, a red satin. She has a spade. Digging and digging. The lithe arc of her body. The frenzy of the digging. Graves. Holocaust.) Grace might be the word if I felt comfortable with saying it. And, you know sometimes, I even see that bend as an ache, a heart-ache — the leaves sad, pulling the stem down.
I liked the way you straddled awkwardly to get at the right place to snip the secateurs and the way your green shirt (it is definitely green) wrinkled as you leaned forward and your strong warm hands reached and smoothed to find just the straightest part and not too thick either for the hooks for the blinds. And I liked the way you handed them to me and I could see the ridges and rings and rub the smooth of their polish. I wondered how long it took for the sap, all the livingness to dry out. And later in the evening as we walked down the little white path to our house when we were getting on better you even said: I think the early flutes were made of bamboo. I didn't know, but could imagine they might be And you don't know this but this morning as you walked back from your swim along our little white path, I was behind you. And somewhere far off there was unheard music.
I think if you want to write a poem about cutting bamboos you maybe need to think about the way they move in the wind (wind-tussled, or wind-rustled perhaps?) even if they are next to a rubbish tip. Their soft tops, their feathers, if you like, though perhaps ‘plumes’ is a better word than feathers; either way, maybe think of their featheriness; or their plumey-ness (which makes me think of a horse’s headdress— the horses all poshed up for the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, although that might be going a bit off beam and take the poem into a one-way street) and maybe you should think about the finey-ness of the feather-plume tips and think about the way you can see small glimpses of the yellow field behind the thick swathes of the bamboos' clumpy-ness as sometimes that field has a cockerel with a red comb and about how there is blue sky between the long green leaves, even if we have argued so badly all afternoon. The leaves are green, aren't they? Full of sap. In a poem you might say the leaves were gold-hued, mightn’t you? And why not, it’s your poem after all. And you’d say something about the aria of the skylark, rising and rising unseen and then something about the encompassing infinite and you might mention love and even death might be sauntering along in there somewhere, why you might get plume and tomb as a rhyme going and all kinds of poetic stuff like that anyhow. And to be sure I would like your poem very much.
But to get back to the main thing, this morning as you walked back from your swim when I was behind you and your green shirt was even greener in the morning sun, there was a huge noisy rusty old lorry right outside our door and from another big noisy metal-toothed machine some Greek men were lowering into the lorry huge mounds of earth. I was pleased I had bought you your green (well, green and gold-hued maybe) shirt as a present a while back. And since you were already in the house ahead of me and the earthy-dust in my nostrils, I slammed the door shut to keep the dirt out. Well, you can’t write a poem about that, can you?
Lisa Dart is a published poet, a named and published winner of the Grolier Prize 2004. Her first full collection was The Linguistics of Light, preceded by a chapbook The Self in the Photograph. She lives and works in the Southeast of England.
Chila: Why bamboo? How did you come up with this as an essay subject?
Lisa: I am always challenged by remarks which suggest any subject can’t be the material for a poem. My partner is a poet and I suppose he was thinking aloud when he made the remark ‘Well you can’t write a poem about that…’ And since we often have different ideas about what is beautiful, I wanted to draw out the possibility of beauty in the ordinary, the daily, even the dull. Bamboo is always appealing to me — even if it is, as it was on that day, right by a rubbish heap.
Chila: You've beautifully weaved the bamboo idea with the concept of poetry. Talk about that a little.
Lisa: I am very interested in the work of Wittgenstein. His idea of language games makes me question the kinds of language we use in different contexts. So here in this essay I wanted to show how the language we use for poetry is, often, of a particular type that strives for a luminosity of experience. And, I wanted to juxtapose such language with the ordinary: bamboo and by association soil. And, in so doing reverse the process, if you like; make something lyrical out of the refusal of potential. I also like the way freely associating brings unexpected richness. The movement from bamboo to dancer to ‘digging’ and grace enriched the piece in my view quite unexpectedly as I was writing.
Chila: What are you currently working on, writing-wise, that you'd like to share with us?
Lisa: I am just embarking on a new project to write my own poetics. I want to examine some of the ‘golden rules’ of writing and see how far they apply to writers today. I also want to try and make explicit the things I have learnt from writers I admire, for example: Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Anne Carson and connect it to my growing understanding of the philosophy of Wittgenstein.
Chila: Why bamboo? How did you come up with this as an essay subject?
Lisa: I am always challenged by remarks which suggest any subject can’t be the material for a poem. My partner is a poet and I suppose he was thinking aloud when he made the remark ‘Well you can’t write a poem about that…’ And since we often have different ideas about what is beautiful, I wanted to draw out the possibility of beauty in the ordinary, the daily, even the dull. Bamboo is always appealing to me — even if it is, as it was on that day, right by a rubbish heap.
Chila: You've beautifully weaved the bamboo idea with the concept of poetry. Talk about that a little.
Lisa: I am very interested in the work of Wittgenstein. His idea of language games makes me question the kinds of language we use in different contexts. So here in this essay I wanted to show how the language we use for poetry is, often, of a particular type that strives for a luminosity of experience. And, I wanted to juxtapose such language with the ordinary: bamboo and by association soil. And, in so doing reverse the process, if you like; make something lyrical out of the refusal of potential. I also like the way freely associating brings unexpected richness. The movement from bamboo to dancer to ‘digging’ and grace enriched the piece in my view quite unexpectedly as I was writing.
Chila: What are you currently working on, writing-wise, that you'd like to share with us?
Lisa: I am just embarking on a new project to write my own poetics. I want to examine some of the ‘golden rules’ of writing and see how far they apply to writers today. I also want to try and make explicit the things I have learnt from writers I admire, for example: Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Anne Carson and connect it to my growing understanding of the philosophy of Wittgenstein.