Foreword
Muddy Rivers and Canada Geese
Lyricism has come to mean several things, including the playing of
emotions as if they are the lyre and are capable of music without
stringed instruments. When accompanied by music words can be
challenged, or they can so dominate the space that the music cannot be
other than subordinate. The power of the poet is in his sensitive
nature, a nature that remains mysterious. Hopefully, this will always
be a mystery, this business of why a poet must be so sensitive, so open
to experience. We ask whether a poet’s work can be assessed accord-
ing to the depth of this gift, this whirling. The poet is more likely to
ask this question of himself or herself at various points in life. I have
asked it of myself when I have felt weighed by the whirling, and as
someone who appreciates Chinese poetry and culture, I have turned to
that tradition in considering questions of lyricism and the sublime.
My thoughts on the subject of lyricism and the sublime have taken
me to T.S. Eliot’s later thoughts on the sublime in poetry and Stevens’
efforts toward the same in poems such as “The Snowman.” Although
each speaks to a profound moment of maturity in their lives, a
reckoning Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” I
suspect there is more light to be shed on this from the perspective of
Chinese poets, traditional and contemporary. There is a translator’s
space, a river of forgetfulness between the two traditions where the
difference between Chinese traditional spirituality and Western Judeo-
Christian ways ask that we look more closely at the sublime and what
it may mean.
Blues musicians with their emergence from the Mississippi Delta
bring us one image of the struggle of the wellspring of emotion and
experience to rise above emotion and manifest as art that survives
sentimentalism, as I think now of America’s struggle to define itself
even as it possesses so much power. The American poetic is full of9781403976079ts01.qxp:Layout 1 11/9/07 8:47 AM Page ix