Photo credit: Wanda Balzano | Interview by Zoë Brigley
“She noticed my predilection for rhyme and then warned that using it should sound ‘blindingly inevitable'”
Hands
Our hands are the most difficult to draw Of all the body, but lovely to behold. Whether figuratively or in the flesh (Hearts are warm when hands are cold). While in the arts they trouble every law Of perspective as fingers clasp and mesh. Sometimes on the table, they seem calm, Uniquely ours, and then a finger lifts. Or when the ungloved back turns its palm Suggesting the dearest of all human gifts It welcomes another to read a life Calloused from labor or soft from the mind. Touch is a link between the bodily senses And the theoretical. Art is rife With tactile awareness. Sculpture designed By hammer and chisel. Painting recompenses Vision with texture. The hands that make Conform to the hands they seek to wake Whether on paper, canvas, in clay or stone The manufacture models flesh and bone.
I loved this poem, and it put me in mind of an exhibition I went to see years ago in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain called “Hablando con los Manos”. It was an incredible collection of photographs and paintings of hands, and it made me realise how expressive our hands really are. I wonder what inspired this poem?
My oldest brother is an artist and my mother used to say to him that he had trouble with hands (which he overcame) because hands are the most difficult part of the body to draw. And, looking at one of my brother’s drawings framed in my living room (ironically, a landscape without human figures), I remembered my mother’s comments. I am in the process of putting together a volume on the relationship of art and nature, among other topics, and so hands seemed to me a potent source for a poetic contemplation. In the poem I tried to reflect the complexity of drawing hands in the lines of the poem themselves by breaking some lines in the middle in such a way as to capture the relationship of fingers to fingers as well as fingers to palms. Not that I was more than nominally conscious of this when I wrote the poem. That sounds like a great exhibit. I would love to have seen it.
Your phrasing in this poem is very elegant – invisible but creating a gentle urgency in the line. Which poets do you admire for their phrasing?
Well, I touched on the rationale for the phrasing above. The body clearly had to be central to the poem and in particular the bodily senses (smell, taste, touch) versus the theoretical ones (eyesight and hearing). Touch is seen as a sense that straddles the two types, which is important to “Hands.”
Yeats’s “passionate utterance” means a great deal to me and his notion that meter and rhyme matter because of their significance in the history of poetry: “ancient salt is best packing,” as he says. Frost is important to me and to this poem because of his belief that poetry is akin to physical action, to the second nature of the athlete. Poetry is “the life of muscles rocking soft” in the swing of the axe, as he describes in “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” In more contemporary terms, it would be Richard Wilbur, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and the virtuoso rhyming of Muldoon. The gentle urgency perhaps comes from my life-long love of Emily Dickinson. There are many poets to whom I feel beholden. As I seem to be so drawn to rhyme (though I do write blank verse sometimes), Irish and English poets remain important to me, from the Devotional poets to the Modernists and beyond. But Canadian and American poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Christian Wiman, or John Koethe are also exemplary even if perhaps they don’t rhyme as much as I do. Recently I have been reading the English-American Anne Stevenson and the English poet Alice Oswald. My academic specialty is Irish poetry and so contemporary Irish poetry is the subject of my reading and the object of my admiration. This brings me to your next question.
You use rhyme here, but with subtlety. How do you decide where rhyme might work or not?
I took a course with the late Irish poet of the Irish (Gaelic) language Máire Mhac an tSaoi in the early ‘90s. She noticed my predilection for rhyme and then warned that using it should sound “blindingly inevitable.” Not so sure I always or even most often fit that bill, but I do find ways to make it sound natural, I hope. One way is to employ rhymes at different intervals using envelope forms (such as abba, or even abca), or spacing them from 5-7 lines to complement couplets and ballad forms. Sometimes I place rhyming words at such distance from one another that the demand of doing so works as a test of my ear and the discipline of my technique. We must avoid “writing to the rhyme,” as formal poets are often accused of doing, but for me finding the rhyme helps to call forth meaning. There is an element of primitive association and the subconscious.
In “Hands,” there is only one echo 3 lines away (“law” and “draw,” two words with a strong enough sound to be heard at even greater distance than where they are placed in this poem. The rhyme draw/law emphasized the laws of drawing, which the poem is courting). The distance can be overcome by the force or harshness of the sound (such as truck and muck if you will). The sound comes through though far away (if you are listening). Similarly, the proximity can be offset by a subtle mixture of sound (as I hope “bodily senses” and “recompenses” do in “Hands”). Of course, pacing is of paramount importance for formal or free verse poetry, as Pope teaches us so well in his use of the former. Most of the rhymes in “Hands” are spaced conventionally, so in that instance, as really in any sound scheme, rhythm must be used wisely to avoid the kerplunk of bad rhymes. So, as not to sound like doggerel. Hope that answers your question.
