Patricia’s Poetry Pick No. 4
Wanting Sumptuous Heavens
by Robert Bly
No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.
Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want
Heaven to be, and God to come, again.
There is no end to our grumbling; we want
Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.
But the heron standing on one leg in the bog
Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.
“Every poem, of course, has to have images and ideas and some sort of troubled speaker. But I began more and more to shift attention to the little mouths that cry out their own name.”
I’ve been drawn to poetry for as long as I can remember. Before I was mature enough to fully comprehend the meaning behind what I was reading, be it Shakespeare, Plath or Pound, I appreciated the words and the way they were arranged. I loved the feel of the words in my mouth and the sounds they made in my mind.
My first entry into poetry came through my attraction to the musicality of language. Obviously, this was subconscious; I think it’s just the way my mind is built.
As I build my connection to and knowledge of poetry over time, I am reminded that the simplest approach to appreciation can sometimes be the most worthwhile. I’ve come to believe you can have a full experience of a poem just by tuning in to its sonic qualities. Wanting Sumptuous Heavens in both meaning and style is one such reminder.
(I also believe that poetry has limitless capacity for depth—there seems to be no end to how much meaning + enjoyment one can derive from a single poem—but that’s another blog post…)
As Robert Bly moved through his career he began focusing on the sonority of words and introduced a new form of poetry he titled “ramage”. From my understanding a ramage is a brief poem (longer than couplet, shorter than a sonnet) built around sounds which call out to each other. Here’s an excerpt from the preface of his book of ramages, Turkish Pears in August:
“A few years ago, I began to hear inside the Stanza individual sounds such as in or air or ar call to each other. An er is a sort of being that cries out. What could we call a union of a consonant and a vowel? The word syllable is a ridiculous name for it; it's too Latinate and mute. These particles have more energy than the word syllable suggests. Hearing these cries put me into a new country of poetry. I was not hiking among ideas or images or stories, but among tiny, forceful sounds.”
In the recording, listen to how Bly introduces the poem: “This is a poem called, um, Wanting Sumptuous Heavens”.
Um?? Come on.
At first I thought he was just a forgetful old man reading his poetry on a recording no one had bothered to edit, but then I realized um is that “tiny, forceful” sound upon which the poem is built.
grumbles - summer - thumbs - come - comfortable - sumptuous - etc
I’ll admit, I was drawn to this particular poem for its thinly veiled “meaning” after I had just spent a luxurious weekend in Rhode Island, yearning for all I didn’t yet have as I was sitting on the balcony of Matunuk Oyster Bar looking at heron while I devoured oysters and what felt like the 10th lobster roll of the weekend. Is that a run on? Needless to say, the poem, um, captured something elemental about it all.
