Imprinted Life discussion

Reading this volume of poetry The Ginkgo Light by Arthur Sze and noting the references to ginkgoes and other botanical plants, I needed a refresher about the gingko tree, its history, and its uses East and West, which I found at http://e360.yale.edu/feature/peter_cr... It has been around thousands of years, has a worldwide distribution, and has survived in terrible environmental conditions.

With good fortune, I listened to Sze giving a reading @ http://en.wikipedia.org.advanc.io/wik... . His final poem in the lunchtime program is 'Spectral Line' from The Ginkgo Light. He starts describing and reading this poem at 22:49. Since listening along with the author and reading with the book, I will reflect on 'Spectral Line' a little more as I reread it.

Illustration of Ginkgo Tree

The long poem 'Spectral Light' proceeds from topic to topic in free verse, so appears difficult to digest or summarize. References to the (ghostly) light in the title are:

...From light to dark
is a pass of how many miles? Together they sowed
dark millet and reclaimed the reed marsh.
As we entwine in darkness-beginning-to-trace-
light, dew evaporates off tips of grasses. [§3]

In § 9, the phrase "dissolve/s into air" echoes in four stanzas, each stanza a couplet, followed by the ending line of the poem, "and stillness, as we stir to dawn light, breaks."

The poem turns from light to dark to dawn.

§ 5 comprises a list of forty Indian tribes from Acoma Pueblo to Inupiat, their histories part of dark times during European settlement in North America, the memory of those times now as insubstantial.

To read Sze's poems even once is a beautiful experience in the capture of language and images, the more so reading aloud the lines of poetry. To describe them is another matter. Some poems in part III are:

'The Double Helix' boils down to Nature, to the details in sea and on land of people's and animals' activities.

"...but, before I know it,
the tide swerves back, starts to cover

the far shelf of exposed blue mussels;
gulls lift off; green sea urchins disappear

beneath lapping waves--my glimpse expires.

Skunks pass by a screen door in the dark;
once they ravaged ripening corn in our garden

and still crisscross us because a retired
violinist used to feed them..."

"Equator" hints at the sky and constellations as a guide.

"...I try to constellate points
by which I could, in clear weather, hike
across an immense lava flow, but find
elegy and ode our magnetic north and south."

"Pinwheel" is founded in Chinese New Year's celebrations.

Firecrackers pop in bursts of white light and smoke; a cymbal crash reverberates in air...

Though it is Year of the Rooster, I pin there

to here: a line of dumplings, noodles, rice cakes
disappears...

"Power Line", the light glinting off of it, becomes the moment of multitudinous activity--garden fruits and vegetables, owls, shaggymanes, words of a microbiologist, children, bowling strike, ballet, Navajo weaving, sous-chef.

"Grand Bay" depicts the sights seen from a boardwalk in the wetlands, perhaps in Alabama, Mississippi, or Georgia.

"Departures and Arrivals" draws on imagination while awaiting an airplane.

Maryanne Hannan's review of The Ginkgo Light says,

"Sze’s spirited vision, as a poet and a thinker, puts certain demands on the reader. As with any worthwhile destination, though, remaining with the poems for longer than a brief perusal yields increased understanding and pleasure. I can honestly say that every time I read them, something new quickens my interest.

Another interesting analysis of "The Ginkgo Light" is Dana Levin's “I am Happiest, Here, Now!”. She points out some characteristics of Sze's style, some of which is written in a list-like form to emphasize the "endlessly proliferating life". I noticed an example of the continuance of life in part 7 of the last poem 'After Completion', but that predominating point of view is evident in other poems, too:

"If joy, joy; if regret, regret; if ecstasy, ecstasy.

When they die, they vanish into their words;
they vanish and pinpoint flowers unfolding;

they pinpoint flowers and erupt into light;
they erupt and quicken the living to the living."

The starkest example is the Ginkgo biloba, found in fossils. It's not only plants which Sze notes (even the "mushroom of immortality" lingzhi) but strange life in the deep sea, historical evidence of long ago, and all categories of fauna and people.

Levin also mentions the succession of opposing images which become connected by conjunctions and similar words, by punctuation, and by their occurring simultaneously in the poem's time. In reading the poems, life is evident in multitudinous details, in disappeared/ing people and culture, and in resurgence of life.