The Dream of the Marsh Wren

by Pattiann Rogers

A poet, a mother, a lover of the land, and a student of zoology, Pattiann Rogers is at home in the vocabulary of nature. The Dream of the Marsh Wren reveals the genesis of some of her most admired poems as well as her conception of how and why she writes.

Genres: Poetry

150 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1999

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

And with my soul disguised
As the wide diffusion of the sun behind the clouds,
I want to give back the conviction that light
Is the only source of itself.

I really love this poet, and liked hearing her explanation or credo for her process; she is a soul sister to me, she gets it, the it that drives and comforts and inspires me to cherish the earth and its peoples. She uses a lot of words, though and the poems in this book really show it. Some of her words choices makes my brain stumble and I have to read it again and again to get it. Not in a deep, meaningful way, just a style way, I think. She is transforming what she has seen and experienced into a feeling of the sacred and holy without the religion, and I say hallelujah.

Full disclosure: I took a few liberties in excerpts and smoothed out some odd transitions and feel insanely arrogant to do so, but I hope not too brazenly. I actually love if there is a word like punctata that I have to look up, but it is not actually a thing a desert lover like myself knows, and is imprecise; could be lichen or a marine Gastropod, or snakeroot, or wild bergamot. Or punctate meaning studded with dots or tiny holes especially used medical terms for lesions. So I changed it to lichen so it flows.

Creating this litany of place, brought a strange, calm comfort to me, a joy I hadn’t expected, and during those movements I realized for the first time that I loved a landscape, loved it like my own body, that it was my own body, my body and my pattern of perception, that it had informed and constructed me, that I had defined myself by it…I also realized in those moments a power of language that hadn’t been fully aware of before, a power I could possess to enter and alter my soul.

I believe the world provides every physical image and sensation we will ever need in order to experience the sacred, to declare the holy, if we could only learn to recognize it, if we could only hone and refine our sense of the divine, just as we learn to see and distinguish with accuracy the ant on the trunk of the poplar, the Pole Star in Ursa Minor, rain coming toward us on the wind; just as we can detect and name the scent of cedar or sage, wild blackberries or river mud. Might it be possible, if we try, to become so attuned to the divine that we are able to perceive and announce it with such detail, too? And perhaps the divine, the sacred, the holy, only come into complete existence through our witness of them, our witness for them and to them.
Perhaps reciprocal creation, as I observe it operating in my own writing- creating the poem which simultaneously creates me which simultaneously the poem coming into being- is the same phenomenon occurring in regard to divinity. Maybe the existence of divinity in the universe depends in part on us. We may be the consciousness of the universe…
I believe we move through the sacred constantly, yet remain oblivious to its presence except during those rare, unexpected moments when we are suddenly shocked and shaken awake, compelled to perceive and acknowledge. During those brief moments we know bone-centered conviction who it is we are; with breath-and-pulse clarity where it is we have come form; and with earth-solid certainty we know what it is we owe all our allegiance, all our heart, all our soul, all our love.


PLACES WITHIN PLACE
A poplar stands outside the east window of our upstairs bedroom,
A part of my waking and part of my sleeping for most of the nights
And days of these years. The sound of its leaves turning in the batter
Of hard rain or wind, or dripping with the fall of lighter moisture,
Or its branches silent with the rigid silence of zero degrees, have
Become cadences in my thought and in my thought of possibilities,
Undercurrents of motion and presence like pulse or breath or passion.

I feel certain that the structure of this poplar against the sky,
Against the pale of predawn, or catching the sun of dusk, is
A factor partially determining the form and pacing of my
Words, the way I shape the music of my voice, my pleasure
In the particular rise and fall of logic or narrative, my interpretation
Of gesture, my vision of the bones of my stance.

But this tree is not always the same tree. It is
Not only the poplar of summer and the sharp,
Craggy poplar of leafless winter, and the poplar in
Snow, encased in ice, the poplar of seeds, full of
Yellow leaf or with one yellow leaf left, the
Poplar wounded, leaking dark sap, but it is also
The blind poplar i cannot see in fog, the gray
\and black poplar of night, the white poplar of
The moon, the mysterious, rock-shifting subterranean
Poplar chasing water above the melting core of the earth.

I know it is absolutely not the same tree
Standing inside the grief of my mother’s death
As the tree it was outside our window last night
During love, as it was a fire rocking in my anger
One evening, or the poplar shattered, splintered
And scorched by lightning on the plains before
I was born, the one that fell across my spine and
Left me face down on the earth.

What is the poplar in the eyes of the June
Magpie shrieking from its blue branches? What
Does the poplar become beneath Ursa Major,
Seven stars on each leaf? Where is the place of
The poplar of five years ago, half again as
Massive? Where precisely is the poplar of memory?

How should we comprehend the place of
this particular poplar latched here to this land
At this spot and then spun by the earth, carried
Also by the sun’s system, swung round again on
The outer rim of the Milky Way galaxy, itself
Speeding outward? From what place has the
Poplar come? To what place is it going? Is it
Necessary to imagine these truths too in order to
Fully comprehend and appreciate the poplar’s
Present place?

And how does intention interpret this
Poplar? How does divinity know this tree?
What benevolence juxtaposed to a leaf of
Poplar midsummer?

In one poplar in one moment are a million
Poplars in a million moments and a million
places,places within a place, each singular,
Each forebearing, each emphatic, all
Simultaneously in their contradictory and
Mutually exclusive natures.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WHALE IN THE FIELD OF IRIS

They would be difficult to tell apart, except
That one of them sails as a single body of flowing
Grey-violet and purple-brown flashes of sun, in and out
Across the steady sky. And one of them brushes
It’s ruffled flukes and wrinkled sepals constantly
Against the salt-smooth skin of the other as it swims past
And one of them possesses a radiant indigo moment
Deep beneath its lidded crux into with the curious
Might stare.

In the early morning sun, however, both are equally
Colored and silently sung in orange. And both gather
And promote white prairie guess which call
And circle and soar about them, diving occasionally
To nip the microscopic snails from their brows. A
And both intuitively perceive the patterns
Of webs and courseways…

If someone may assume that the iris at midnight sways
And bends, attempting to focus the North Star
Exactly as the blue-tinged center of its pale stem,
Then someone may also imagine how the whale rolls
And turns, straining to align inside its narrow eye
At midnight, the bright star-point of Polaris.

And doesn’t the iris, by its memory of whale,
Straighten its bladed leaves like rows of baleen
Open in the sun? And doesn’t the whale, rising
To the surface, breathe by the cupped space
Of the iris it remembers in its breast?

It is only by this juxtaposition we can know
That someone exceptional, in a moment of abandon,
Pressing fresh iris to his face in the dark,
Has taken the whale completely into his heart;
That someone of abandon, in an exceptional moment,
Sitting astride the whale’s great sounding spine,
Has been taken down into the quiet heart
Of the iris; that someone imagining a field
Completely abandoned by iris and whale can then see
By the heart within the whale within the flower rising
Within the breaching heart within the heart centered
Within the star point of the fields’s only buoyant heart.

THE VOICE OF THE PRECAMBRIAN SEA (EXCERPT)

During the dearth and lack of those two thousand
Million years of death, one wished primarily
Just to grasp tightly, to compose, to circle,
To link and fasten skillfully, as one
Crusty grey bryozoan builds upon one another,
To be anything particular, flexing and releasing
In controlled spasms, to make boundaries and
latch on with power as hooked mussels now adhere
To rocky beaches; to become godlike with transformation.
…
One yearned simultaneously to be invisible,
In the way the oak toad is invisible among
The ashy debris of the scrub-forest floor;
To be grandiose as deserts are grandiose,
With lichen and peccaries, Joshua tree,
Saguaro and the mule-ears blossom; to be precise
As a woman at her tapestry with needle and thread
Sews each succeeding canopy of the rains fore’s
And with silver threads creates at last
Creates the shining eyes of the capuchins huddled
Among the black leaves of the upper branches.

A SELF-ANALYSIS OF DUST
We know something about dust here on earth.
It makes its visible home on shafts of sunlight.
It can scatter unpredictably and float
In particles without wings. It can’t be caught by hand.
…
Some say dust is the beginning,
It slow accumulation and eventual density in space
Resulting in the formulation of great rolling nebulae,
In the emergence of expansive galactic clusters,
The collapse of heavy stars into themselves. Dust,
In the right circumstances, can make its own light.
Some say our bodies are composed of the dust
Of old stars, our minds are made from the dust
Of old stars born and disintegrated billions of
Years ago. If the atoms of our brains have
Already experienced that beginning and that end,
If they have already accomplished that generation
Of light, have already circumnavigated those far
Reaches of blackness separated and alone, then
What vision is it we must always have seen
Without realizing yet that we do?

Some people even believe that a measure of dust
Of any kind, when blown upon by the proper breath,
Can become a living soul. I wonder what soul
Might be created if the light from a billion bright stars
Were to be carefully gathered and measured
And blown here by living dust.

A few people are certain by the light
Of their own minds and souls that dust knows
No time, being the one pure synthesis
Of the beginning and the end.

THE GREATEST GRANDEUR

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
Of the purple tongued sand iguana,
For the magnificent translation
Of tenacity into bone and grace that occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
Desert-solid rust-orange rock
Like dusk captured on earth in stone-
Simply for the perfect contrast it provides
To the blue-grey ridge of rain
In the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonies of shifting
Electron rings to be most rare and some
The complex motion of seven sandpipers
Bisecting the arcs and pitches of come
And retreat over the mounting hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
Of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
Collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
Because they feel dwarfed
And appropriately helpless; others select
The serenity of the ceiling/cellar
Of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
Because there they feel assured
And universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
In every next moment that seems to me
The most singularly glorious gift,
That void which one is free to fill
With processions of men bearing burning
Cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
Or companies of black robed choristers;
To fill simply with hammered silver teapots
Or kiln-dried crockery, tangerine and almond
Custards, polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks,
Wailing walls; that space large enough to hold all
Invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
Definitions of god and more, never fully filled, never.

SUPPOSITION

Suppose the molecular changes taking place
In the mind during the act of praise
Resulted in an emanation rising into space.
Suppose that emanation went forth
In the configuration of its occasion:
For instance the design of rain pocks
On the lake’s surface or the blue depths
Of the canyon with its horizontal cedars.

Suppose praise had physical properties
And actually endured? What if the pattern
Of its disturbances rose beyond the atmosphere
Becoming a permanent outline implanted in the cosmos-
The sound of the celebratory banjo or horn
Lodging near the third star of Orion’s Belt;
Or to the east of the Pleiades…

Suppose benevolent praise,
Coming into being by our will,
Had a separate existence, it’s purple or azure light
Gathering in the upper reaches, affecting
The aura of morning haze over the autumn fields,
Or causing a perturbation in the mode of an asteroid.
What if praise and its emanations
Were necessary catalysts to the harmonious
Expansion of the void? Suppose, for the prosperous
Welfare of the universe, there was an element
Of need involved.

THE POSSIBLE SUFFERING OF A GOD DURING CREATION

It might be continuous- the despair experienced
Over the imperfection of the unfinished, the weaving
Body of the imprisoned moon fish, for instance,
Whose invisible arms in the mid-waters of the deep sea
Are not yet free, or the velvet-blue vervain
Whose grainy tongue will not move to speak, or the ear
Of the spitting spider still oblivious to sound.

It might be pervasive- the anguish he feels
Over the falling away of everything that the duration
Of the creation must, of necessity, demand, maybe…
Feeling the split of each brittle yellow wing of the sycamore
As it calls from the branch. Maybe he winces
at each particle by particle disintegration of the limestone…
….
Maybe he wakes periodically at night,
Wiping away the tears he doesn’t know
He has cried in his sleep, not having had time yet
To tell himself precisely how it is he must mourn,
Not having had time yet to elicit from his creation
Its invention of his own solace.

IN ADDITION TO FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY

I’m sure there’s a god
In favor of drums. Consider
Their pervasiveness- the thump,
Thump and slide of waves
On a stretched expanse of beach,
The rising beat of their crests
Against the shore, the rapping of otters
Cracking mollusks with stones,
The beaver’s whack of his tail-paddle, the ape
Playing the bam of his own chest,
The million tickering rolls of rain off the
Flat leaves of the forest.
…
But the heart must be the most
Pervasive drum of all. Imagine
Hearing all rougher every tinny
Snare of every heartbeat
In every mouse and vole and add
It that cacophony the individual
Staccato tickings inside kingbirds,
Kestrels, rock doves, pine
Warblers crossing, criss-crossing
Each other in the sky, the sound
Of the singular hammerings of
The hearts of cougar, coyote,
Weasel, badger, pronghorn, the
Ponderous bass of the black bear, and
In deserts too, all the knockings, the flutterings,
Inside snakes, whiptails, racers, and sidewinders;
Plus the clamors undersea, slow
Booming in the breasts of beluga and
And bowhead, uniform rappings in a
Passing school of cod or bib, the
Thidderings of bat rays and needlefish.

Imagine the earth carrying this continuous
Din, this multifarious festival of pulsing
thuds, stutters, and drummings, wheeling
On and on across the universe.

This must be proof of a power existing
Somewhere definitely in favor
Of such a racket.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this book because I love Pattiann Rogers's poetry. I think of its meditative qualities as panoramic doors leading to penetrating ways of perceiving the world. When I read the subtitle "Writing as Reciprocal Creation" I knew I'd connect with it. I believe that readers combine their experience with serious literary work to create meaning, so it follows that the act of writing creates at least in part the world the writer sees. Rogers herself says "The poetry has created me at the same time I was creating the poetry," her "reciprocal creation." I came to this book because I wanted to learn something about how Rogers creates the poetry I so much admire for its insight and perspective-shaping. I came to the book to try to discern how her "poetry of supposition" is learning how to look at everything in nature, meaning the cosmic as well as the marsh wren.

The Dream of the Marsh Wren is a 101-page essay in which she tries to explain her vision and how she goes about putting it on the page. It's an inquiry into how she thinks her important themes, therefore her worldview, have developed. Her essay is less about the technical aspects of her poetry, more about the ideas contained in it. She writes about realization, ways of seeing and recognizing "what obligations come with self-awareness." She writes big. A poem about the marsh wren's perception becomes epic in its dream of the sun. A poem involving vast galactic arrays will narrow to the observer on a tiny plot of earth.

As interesting as her ideas are and the explanation of how speculation, or even belief, where I think she starts, is translated to the page, the strength of her essay is in the many poems she uses to illustrate it. These poems are the backbone of the book. The proof of her explanatory pudding. Her poetry is breathtaking.

Following Rogers's essay is a biographical portrait of the poet by Scott Slovic. He likes a description of her as "priestess, a physicist, a natural theologian, and an erotic poet." Neither Rogers nor Slovic use the word, but I think her a bit of a transcendentalist.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I'm familiar with some of Rogers' work, this is the first of her books that I've read in full. This isn't a collection, but it does contain many of her poems: it is an extended essay, describing her writing life, and illustrated with her own poems, including some of her most famous. I have never read a book quite like this before: it's a good way to get an insight into Rogers' working process, and it also serves as an introduction to someone new to her work, because it collects many of her important poems. She is interested in science and the numinous and how these two things intersect: how science can inform us about gods, and how science can illuminate encounters with the divine. The central idea is that creativity is reciprocal, as she says, "creating the poem which simultaneously creates me which simultaneously creates the poem coming into being -- just as the marsh wren created by the marsh simultaneously creates and dreams the marsh of its creation and therefore creates itself."

This is a worthwhile book: I'm not always convinced by Rogers' philosophy, and some of her ideas about science and society lack nuance, but she's always interesting. Her poetry is more mixed: she mostly manages to avoid being too high-concept, but some of her poems are too theoretical to really stick in my mind. I also find her language and use of line breaks can be clumsy, which is unfortunate, because she can wield both these tools sublimely.

[Katie Karnehm-Esh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was grateful this essay was only 100 pages, because there's a lot here to think through. I would describe this book as Rogers's exploration of her writing process, with poems to help visualize that philosophy of writing. Read carefully, and consider reading her poems twice, to fully appreciate them.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite awards and recognitions, Pattiann Rogers is still an under-appreciated poet of the latter 20th and early 21st Centuries. In this prose essay, Rogers describes how her writing creates her as she creates it, and that this mirrors our place in the natural world, which creates us as we give it consciousness. She shines her words on the sacred in the smallest detail, and with passion and sensuality, makes a marriage of art and science. This small book is worth reading more than once.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

From Milkweed's "Credo" series.... Pattiann Rogers goes through poems and process, muses on why she writes, what she hopes from her writing. She refers extensively to her poems, which I appreciate -- it's a nice introduction to some of her work, for those unfamiliar.