the moon & the poem

by Joe Fritsch

One learns once, usually at an early age, that the moon’s light is not its own. Is a reflection and therefore belated, secondhand, adjunctive. Though I too learned it, I find this fact inadmissible to my poetry. Repulsive. One of any number of such facts that I bar from the poem: that the brain is made of networked neurons; that matter is endurant; that the heart is an organ suspended in bone. I have experienced neither the brain, nor matter, nor the circulatory system distinct from the body. All my life, I get to know my mind. It changes. Find that the soul is what endures. And really feel that the heart is the emotive core blazing from within. 

The body is what is felt. The body is what is perceived.

One learns too the trivia of one’s paideuma: the preferred metaphors and axioms. One spends a lifetime learning from experience a different knowledge, based in the language of experience. That the moon’s light is sovereign. Has as many types as a metropolis. Is different depending. I resist knowing the moonlight as a passive intermediary for scientific fact.

Zhu Shuzhen, whose poems were first collected in the twelfth century, begins her series of six poems, “Feelings Evoked by an Autumn Night,” with “A sliver of new moon hangs in the dusk, / In the secluded chamber, a heart is about to break.”

No causal relationship between the external and internal environments is asserted here and none would suffice. There was once a critical term called the pathetic fallacy, whose exact fallaciousness deserves to be interrogated, but this is not what I mean. No causal relationship would suffice because nobody—be she alone and restless because heartbroken or heartbroken because restless and alone—has ever been able to say why the moon is her companion. At least, she cannot say it in a way that would satisfy anybody else’s intellectual curiosity. But Zhu’s treatment certainly feels right.    

Zhu concludes her second canto with a blurry sensibility consonant with moonlit nights and uncurable sorrows:


Beyond the eaves the autumn chill penetrates the lattice window. 
Mist shrouds the chrysanthemums speckled with their moonlit dew, their scents floating in the chill.
In the cold, the fifth watch sounds, 
And in response, my sorrow stretches as long as the night.

In this shrouded world, nothing terminates exactly. Windows do not keep out the cold; moonlight amplifies inside a droplet; scent and mist and sound suffuse the off-dark; and emotions spread through time and space. That an emotionally disturbed person has difficulty sleeping is so commonplace, we overlook it. But it is the kind of experience of our collective being we would do well to revisit and revise often.   

The moon’s figural inconclusivity enables the curious ritual in Linda Gregg’s “Of Absence”:


I climb the mountain.
Up steps the moon has already taken.
Of absence. Of things broken.
To see if the moon is a mouth.
To see if I am what it wants.


Gregg’s metaphor is not this poem’s triumph. As month derives from moon, the poet does not have to reach far, phonetically, to come up with mouth. And as bare image, I think the Cheshire Cat did it first. Here, the achievement is one of mood. Had the poet chosen the indicative—to see that the moon is a mouth—instead of the subjunctive, then we’d be muscled out of the poem as participants. We’d have to either decline or accept the metaphor’s logic, becoming either sceptic or believer, respectively. Instead, we are there on the mountain with the poet. Looking. Searching. Wondering. 

The moonlight creates its own forms and species of knowledge. Shakespeare dramatized this capacity. The Bard, whose principal thesis, I’m convinced, was that humans are poor assayers of reality, used the moonlight as proof positive that our senses are dull and their truths tenuous. More interesting than Shakespeare’s allusive (read: conventional) descriptions of the moon or moonlight is the role the moon plays in deforming the world of his plays.  

Under Shakespeare’s protean moon, faeries befuddle a promiscuous knight or an heir apparent’s spectral father haunts the parapets. Falstaff, Hamlet…they believe, with good evidence, in the otherworldly. For them, the night creates different rules. In the moonlight, socially unacceptable love thrives, identity is mistaken, and people behave in unexpected, strange ways. Diurnal creatures in an electric world, we can too readily attribute the truth in these scenes to creative liberty.

Certainty is a tragedy. 

Like most poets I’ve met, I prefer the anecdotal to the canonical when it comes to literary history. In 1969, James Dickey read his poem “The Moon Ground,” on air for ABC on the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing. In the poem, he imagines he is an astronaut standing where no human has been. Here he is, blurred, in front of a rotating moon, a space shuttle on a collision course with his melon, intoning, “You and I are in Earth-light / and deep Moon shadow / on magic ground of the dead new world.” 

This bizarre broadcast is risible and hard to square with the self-serious Dickey I know. Dickey was a social conservative. He worked in advertising. He was a drunk. A womanizer. He was a veteran of two wars. A poet laureate and a Guggenheim fellow. He made a ton of cash off Deliverance…In fact, this was one of several poems Dickey wrote about the moon and space travel, and he demonstrated elsewhere in his career a serious preoccupation with the moon.

One afternoon, reading some of Dickey’s letters in the archives at Emory University, I encountered his correspondence with his HM editor, Jacques de Spoelberch, concerning the publication of Dickey’s novel, Deliverance. In one letter, Spoelberch complains of Dickey’s overwriting, stating, “You are also too devoted to sequences of multiple adjectives and the use of certain words (“image,” “thing,” “eternity,” “air,” “sky,” “water,” “moon”) the latter bringing you perilously close to a kind of superficial mysticism.” After the completion of the novel’s manuscript, Dickey wrote Spoelberch with urgency concerning some of the moonlit episodes in the book: 

There may not be much moon. Could you look in an almanac or something and find out about this? I’d like the moon to be almost but not quite full, which is the way most of the moon imagery is cast. We need this and we need it to be right…if we have to move the date…say September 24th, 25th, and 26th.

“We need this and we need it to be right.” At a late hour, with the print date approaching, Dickey needed to be certain. I read this nervous need for certainty as a symptom of an institutionally sanctioned poetics. How many times had Dickey been told in his life to avoid anything that resembled his so-called superficial mysticism? In what esteem might we have held a hypothetical Dickey fully committed to poetry’s deep, vatic roots? How might that commitment have changed his life?  

There can be no singular poet of the moon any more than there can be one poet of the heart, or the mind, or the soul. These are common in equal portion to all poets. The history of philosophy and the history of art, I think, prohibit the suggestion that commonality can be a property of an object. I mean that one would say that whatever is held in common is common through relation rather than attributing commonality to a thing like the moon itself. And less theoretically, I notice that, in general, the artist and artworks are involved in a special way with the juridico-economic dynamics of individuation and laying claim. Van Gogh’s moon; The MoMA’s The Starry Night. 

Six decades on, an inane flag post on the moon has not changed the relationship between the moon and humankind in any significant way. Yet, Hannah Arendt’s gloomy prognostications resulting from the launch of Sputnik seem ever truer: “we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do.” Since at least Plato, with important pitstops in Keats and Heidegger, it has been a poet’s job, for ill and good, to run athwart technical knowledge. As the New Critical mesalliance between poetry and the university finds its dowry increasingly scant, poets, in the academic context, are being asked to deny or at least distort our unique form of knowledge: the one derived from freely available human experience. It happens each time a cowed poet is made to leap, caper, proselytize, beseech, or bloviate before a dean. As science—predicated upon evidence and replicability—reveals its knowledge through more specialized, more expensive, less intuitive processes, its practitioners will face the proportionately daunting task of thinking and speaking about the things they do, particularly if they need the public to accept their findings. Poets needn’t. For no matter how strange, quirky, ethereal, or autobiographical a poem may be, it is always self-evident if it is worth its ink.          

The universal assembly of deans demurs before Lorca:


La luna vino a la fragua
con su polisón de nardos.
El niño la mira, mira.
El niño la está mirando.

En el aire conmovido
mueve la luna sus brazos
y enseña, lúbrica y pura,
sus senos de duro estaño.

Huye luna, luna, luna.

*

The moon came to the forge
in her skirt of muskroot.

The boy looks. He stares. 
The boy is gawking at her.

In the shocked air
the moon unfolds her arms
presenting—call it oiled 
or fierce and pure—
her breast. Hard tin.

I am that boy.

Run away
moon moon moon.

[Translation mine]

I want to write a poem so beautiful that it comes through—moonlight through cloud cover—in two languages. Though I am a student of language—its untranslatables, its embedded histories, its political powers—that goal of mine seems to depend not upon a faith in the recalcitrance of signifiers and the processes of translation, but upon the unassailable sovereignty of the signified. I’ll never touch it. I am bound to the earth. Human. From earth. So distant. If I know something of this earth and that moon, it is only this: No poet, upon viewing the moon—full in mountain air, on an irresistible city night, or over the talkative sea millennia back—could ever mistake its light for starlight.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 3.

de Spoelberch, Jacques. Letter to James Dickey listing editorial suggestions. June 18, 1968. MSS 745, Box 35, Folder 3. James Dickey Papers. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta.

Dickey, James. “James Dickey reads ‘The Moon Ground,’ 1969.” YouTube, uploaded by user jamesdickey501, March 29, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UNzoEeYhJI. 

Gregg, Linda. “Of Absence.” Sacraments of Desire. Graywolf, 1991. 

Lorca, Federico Garcia. “Romance de la luna.” Edited by Christopher Maurer. Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. 

Shuzhen, Zhu. “Feelings Evoked by an Autumn Night.” Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism. Edited by Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy. Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 104-5.