How is it
that Connie Wanek is a Minnesota neighbor, and yet I'd not heard of her. We labor in hidden fields, don't we? We do our work whether anyone is looking or not, because that's the kind of people we are, the kind of poets. The poem's the thing, not being well-known.
I saw Wanek read from her work last October at the Marshall Festival: A Celebration of Rural Writers and Rural Writing in Marshall, Minnesota, and her persona at the podium was that of a restrained middlewesterner, typically self-effacing to suggest that it is not, as I've said, about the poet, but about the poem.
It is small wonder that Wanek appears to be middlewestern: she was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and lived on a farm outside Green Bay for a fair part of her childhood. Her family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, then. Wanek returned to the middlewest, to Duluth, Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and raised two children. She works at the public library.
Wanek's poetry comes highly praised. Linda Pasten has said Wanek's poems "may start with a lemon or a field of barley, continue on their quirky journey, and end with at least a touch of wisdom." Louis Jenkins says they "always remind me of poems by the ancient Chinese poets.... no wasted words.... the poet's love of the natural world and the unsentimental way in which she renders it.... the poems embrace and somehow transcend all the sad inevitabilities of life, with wisdom and joy." Joyce Stuphen notes that Wanek "noticed everything, from a look that passes over her daughter's three-year-old face to the way a nail stands waiting for the hammer to descend."
I wouldn't quibble with any of these versions, but I would add that Wanek's poetry has heart in addition to wisdom. (Or perhaps wisdom is knowledge with heart?) I mean this in the sense that an old plough horse has heart, pulling and straining at the harness when the going gets tough. Not a grin-and-bear-it kind of heart, nor the grit-your-teeth sort, but strength and endurance and a passion for living. By "heart," I mean partly that these poems pull towards mystery; I mean partly that they don't give up or give in, they don't take the glib answer; and I mean partly that they are wide-eyed and embracing, willing, necessary.
It seems in each life
a moment comes that the heart adheres to,
when light floods in to assemble
a single image in the dark.
These poems are assembling those images, holding them, not letting go.
Those who make "regional" an accusation would be wiser folks if they understood (1) that such moments can occur anywhere, even here in the middlewest; and (2) that all which is great and human and universal occurs in the vessel of such instances as Wanek finds, the small moments great with beckoning.
How is it that I have known nothing of Wanek's work over the years? I don't know. It has been my sad loss, now happily corrected. When I heard Wanek read at the Marshall Festival, I had already spent $240 that week on books, yet I went off and bought a copy of Hartley Field. I had to: Wanek was that good. Her poems have been published in a wide range of journals, from the Minnesota Poetry Calendar to The Atlantic Monthly, so this is not just my opinion.
Mystery is that which is larger and great than we are, that which is beyond us, and beyond the surface of the things around us. Wanek's poems hold such mystery, made of the ordinary stuff of our lives, which looks plain vanilla on the surface but which means more than we know. The opening poem of the volume is such a one: "The Coin Behind Your Ear" pictures a magician doing an ordinary magic trick, pulling a coin from behind someone's ear. Yet in Wanek's handling, it seems more than trick:
You felt vainly behind your ear
but there was no second coin,
nothing to tempt him back.
No one cared to know why he did it,
only how....
So, too, Wanek's poem "The Ventriloquist" is about more than ventriloquism; it may be about life, relationships, a world beyond the "wooden woman/who came then into his arms." That "nothing she said ever surprised him" speaks beyond the ventriloquist and his dummy.
And "Jump Rope" is about more than jumping rope:
The rope, like a snake,
has the gift of divination....
What if she never misses?
"It hurts to watch her now," Wanek says,
her will stronger than her limbs,
her braids lashing her shoulders
with each small success.
"Beware too much happiness!" Wanek warns in "Horses in Spring:"
I was just a girl and couldn't understand
how they could hesitate at the edge of something
so intoxicating....
"No one had ever broken my will," the speaker says, "forced me into the traces." And the horses in spring?
They tested the earth with their sensitive hoofs
and didn't like it - too cold, too soft, too unpredictable.
"Poodles don't know they're ridiculous," Wanek writes; they "think they're still dogs, the way people my age/still think they're sexy."
"Dogs like this are our fault," she adds.
"Long Nights" proves Robert Bly's maxim that "It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God." Wanek takes us from the half cup of cold tea at the window where she nursed her first baby to her own mother's struggle "wrestling babies from the Creator."
You might remember pulling petals off daisies to find true love. Wanek does. "In the democracy of daisies," she says,
every blossom has one vote.
The question of the ballot is:
Does he love me?
and she comes to some greater realization:
We can't possibly understand
what makes us such fools.
I blame the June heat
and everything about him.
"I could easily be honest," Wanek thinks, "if I were certain of the truth."
I honestly don't know why I had children
or why I sew, or garden,
except that if it's true we're made in God's image
we are born to create, or to try....
The poem is about a spat between husband and wife perhaps. An hour passes, and:
We're together in the kitchen,
a friendly bumping and we wash and slice
the green and red, yellow and white
ingredients, and stir them all in the kettle
until nothing is exclusively itself.
Wanek has a keen eye for the telling detail, the best dab of truth, enough, not too much. Around the campfire, the family "deliberates the shortcomings/of the absent sister-in-law."
The least wind makes the young aspens nervous -
they are so sensitive. They take things so seriously.
Shouldn't they be asleep by now?
Or:
Someone says you can't be gentle
and still be a man....
You lose a finger in the combine, it's gone.
She is speaking about more than water skiing when she says "It's far too late to say no."
"These are your people" applies to all of them, the whole day, everything.
How deft her artistry: how quickly and fully she can paint a picture. "The Midwife," Wanek says, is:
a medium, a fortune teller,
or an emissary sent to God himself....
accustomed to resting when she could...
like a traveler crossing the frontier
between tragedy and comedy....
The midwife is witnessing
a reenactment of the moment
the first amphibian took a breath;
the tadpole of a child
swimming eagerly into her hands.
In "Woman Knitting," we leap in an instant from a partially finished sweater on the woman's lap into a notion of ocean, a lovely place to be pulled:
Then your wrists tilt
and empty another drop
into the sea of the sweater.
From "Wild Strawberries:"
Bearded with seeds
the berry has a long face,
a short life, and no house at allYet, such sweetness....
"All raccoons are one raccoon, private, cautious, clairvoyant," Wanek says in a moment of such clarity.
In the "Summer Yard," the heavy clay is "dense as an encyclopedia," not just any encyclopedia but one "filled with discredited eighteenth century facts." And she exclaims:
But the air in late July!
Thank God I am alive to breathe it.
From "A Field of Barley:"
Dread is our inheritance.
But what sprouts out of the earth
is our consolation, the good yellow grain,
heavy in our arms.
In "So Like Her Father," Wanek is scrubbing the floor as her daughter reads to her; she recognizes that, come autumn, her young lady "will leave this house." She says, "I scrub with water mixed with tears."
"I'm sorry," I say, "I wasn't listening."
She takes a sip of tea and begins again.
Wanek and her husband are canoeing on "Boulder Lake."
The wind seemed to remember us.
It raised my hat brim to see my face;
it felt me all over.
They talk of their children,
nearly grown. Their fates.
It will be no different for them.
Their wake will disappear behind them
as ours has, maps useless,celestial navigation
discredited....
"Crude work," Wanek writes, "is in the hammer's very nature."
In a poem about "Tag," we start in a child's game and we end in the far reaches of philosophy: "Your only hope of redemption/is to doom another to the same fate."
In "The Fugitive," we also learn that "the rules apply to everyone,/yet how different are our fates."
Of cleaning leaves out of the gutter in "Ladder," Wanek can say:
I see us struggling, as amateur clowns do,
to establish a superior foolishness,
to make of near disaster a laughing matter.
Once again, it's not just cleaning leaves out of the gutters that she's talking about.
Lines from "Autumnal Tennis:"
I recall summer's heat as from a previous life....
-
... the alembic of the chest
wherein body and soul are emulsified.
-
Leaves skitter across the court on their fingernails,
each casting tomorrow's shadow.
In "Late September" we see "a plume of smoke hand-feeding the wind." The poem urges the image of leaves growing lighter and lighter to that of a cat and its "nine consecutive lives without remorse."
In "New Snow" the crocus bulbs are "white as ovaries."
In "These Times," Wanek recognizes the world at war - it is October, 2001 - and a shadow crosses the sundial. "Deep in a peat bog," she observes,
a corpse is discovered, preserved for millenia,
having perished by strangulation.Already snow has come to the Dakotas,
snow in Winnipeg, snow in Warrod.
It will start here tonight....
We're also going off Daylight Savings Time; "some day," she says of the clocks that have to be re-set,
I'll come across one that I forgot...
a ticking oracle
with a face plain as a child's
that cannot hide what is wrong.
In "Chistmas Fable," the woodcutter's daughter marries the prince,
but this is hardly the end.
Wherever she walks she leaves a trail
of pine needles and the tack of sap.
And the title poem, "Hartley Field," is a love poem, as fine as any you'll find. Sure-footed. Lovers stood at the open pond:
I wanted that hour with you all winter -
I thought of it while I worked,
before I slept and when I woke,
a time when the tangled would straighten,
when contrition would become benediction:
the positive hour, shining like mica.
At last the wind brought it to us across the pond,
then took it up again, every last minute.
It has become so rare for me to read a contemporary poet and recognize in his language, or hers, only words I would choose for my own speech and for my own poetry. Wanek's is such a language. We speak the same tongue, accented a little differently perhaps - mine with the weight of Iowa dirt, Wanek's with the cold of Minnesota winter - but the same language, essentially, out of a similar understanding of the world and how it is.
Across the miles, across the years, it is good to find another speaker of truths I have seen, another poet who holds up the ordinary beauties of life and sings of them - a sister of mine, yes, who can look at the world and say: "It is good."
____________________
* Connie Wanek, Hartley Field. Holy Cow! Press (PO Box 3170, Mount Royal Station, Duluth, MN 55803). $13.95.
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