It began during one of those amazingly passionate times in my life when the past and the present collide like great movements of water, merging, sweeping me off.
—Joe Enzweiler, on the origins of his poem cycle, A Curb in Eden

It’s a writer’s grace or good fortune to find a community of supportive fellow artists. Several years ago, while writing more poetry than prose, I was welcomed into such a group, an invitation leading to important and lasting friendships. This Friday evening, several of us will be reading at a benefit for one of our members, Joe Enzweiler, a fine poet and good friend, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor this summer.

Joe grew up in Cincinnati, where he studied physics and mathematics, writing his first poem at seventeen. After college, he moved to Alaska, where he received a Master’s degree in physics. He lives in a self-built log house north of Fairbanks, returning to Cincinnati roughly every other summer to stay with family and continue his long-term project of building—by hand—a stonewall along the perimeter of his brother’s land in Northern Kentucky. This was meant to be a wall-building summer for him, and though that’s on hold, he’s grateful to be among family and friends for his treatment.

As Joe’s habits suggest, he takes craft seriously, making him both example and mentor for those of us who’d be thrilled to claim half his talent. Joe’s poetry collections include closely-observed moments from an Alaskan winter, musings over a first kiss or a credit card rejection letter, and a guided tour of empty frames in a Hermitage gallery during the siege of Leningrad.

His revised and distilled “new version” of a poem sequence, A Curb in Eden, weaves memories of young love into an elegy of a father’s long passing.

I’m sure Joe will be embarrassed by the attention this Friday, not to mention in this post. He’d rather you read his poetry, which you can and should do.

He’d also want me to write about one of his enduring concerns: the power of well-crafted words. I’ve been pondering this very thing since I was unexpectedly and graciously included among the readers for Joe’s benefit. It came as a surprise because I don’t write much poetry these days. I can think of only two that made it past rough draft stage these last four years. There are people who make hundreds of dollars a year from poetry, but I’m keeping my day job.

But I know what words are capable of. I can even remember when, after several years of putting poems aside to concentrate on medicine, I became reacquainted with their potency.

I lived in Arizona at the time, and listened to cassette tapes (yes, my children, this happened in the Late Middle Ages, before the invention of the iPod)—mostly lectures or classes—on evening walks along the abandoned airstrip that divided our small town in two.

On one of those tapes, Gil Bailie (one of my mentors from afar), read part of Richard Wilbur’s “A Hole in the Floor.” Interested, I looked the poem up and read it through. Then read it again. And again—a dozen times in quick succession—putting it aside at last, more out of exhaustion than satiety.

Wilbur’s poetry reads easily enough to suggest textual transparency, but each reading here revealed something new: a deepening, palpable mystery. It was like entering a darkened room only to find, as my eyes adjusted to the light, that I was standing in a cathedral, antechamber to an unexpected universe.

The poem itself is, of course, about a sudden, disorienting expansion of awareness: discovering, through a tiny entrance, “the buried strangeness / Which nourishes the known.” Some years later, when Scott Cairns spoke of a poem participating in the experience itself, about being the experience rather than a mere denotative account, I had—through Wilbur—resources to comprehend. Long before the phrase “It is what it is,” achieved inexplicable omnipresence, “A Hole in the Floor,” was the thing itself, the very woods it wanders in.

I won’t presume to nail that experience to the wall with definitive explication (if such a thing were possible), but permit me to name some instances in the poem when I felt that sense of passionate collision, “like great movements of water, merging, sweeping me off” (Enzweiler’s words, not Wilbur’s).

When Wilbur includes Christian elements in his poetry, he does so indirectly, rather than by frontal assault. The reader, presumably, decides how to receive them. It’s the “carpenter” who makes the hole, and it’s by “kneeling” that the narrator looks farther in and who later asks, “For God’s sake, what am I after?” Yet we soon meet Schliemann excavating at Troy, and discover “Hesperian apple-parings.” Just which mythic universe have we entered?

Similarly, the joists that “go into hiding,” a “pure street” entering “the long darkness, / Where its parallels will meet,” describe a paradox, but what? Theological imponderables? The counterintuitive geometries of Bernhard Riemann underlying the General Theory of Relativity? Something stranger yet?

And what doors of perception must be opened to discover a damask love seat “inflamed,” and the whole room rendered suddenly dangerous? Is this about physics? The Incarnation? All of that and more?

I could go on, but that would be doing your work. If you’re intrigued, see what Wilbur’s poem discloses to you. Or return to the poem or poet who first awakened you to the buried strangeness in words. See what’s still there, waiting to be discovered by your archaeologist’s eye. Joe will like that.

 

Image produced above is by Ben Seidelman, licensed by Creative Commons.