Get Out Tuesday: Linda Bierds @ the UW Bookstore
For a MacArthur-proclaimed genius, Linda Bierds is fairly low profile. She lives on Bainbridge Island, teaches in the English department at the University of Washington, and has had tons of poems published in mainstream literary magazines such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker, the holy grail of "someone who's not an MFA student has read my poetry" achievement. Tomorrow night she's at the UW Bookstore (7:00 p.m., free), reading from her new book, Flight.
But then, even in her poetry Bierds is low profile. She's emphatically not--and never has been--a confessional poet. Flight brings together poems from 1985 to the current day, and you would be hard-pressed to find a self-portrait of Linda Bierds in them; rather, there's Mendel, Durër, Darwin, Tolstoy, Vermeer, Wordsworth, and Van Leeuwenhoek. Not all of her poems involve historical celebrities. But most do suppress the reader's connection with the writer of the poem. That infrequent "I" is as likely to signal Erasmus Darwin's ego as Bierds.
There's a poetic term, ecphrasis, that suits her mode: originally applied to poetry that described an artwork, its usage has widened to include the kind of exegetical eye that Bierds casts on chosen moments (that could be subjects of paintings or sculptures, it's just that no one's gotten to them yet and why should she be held up by that?). But all the same, it is rare to find a writer who subsumes themselves so totally in the researched-and-yet-imagined world of another's consciousness.
And yet does not--after all, the cinematic virtuosity on display owes more to a documentarian's desire for a kind of authenticity than the immediacy of personal experience. Her poetry, too, aspires to prose's authenticity, not poetry's slipperiness. You note the precise vocabulary, correct for the era, the place names. From "Testament: Vermeer in December," comes this: "To my wife, the yellow jacket, silk and fur-trimmed, / that warms, through the mirror of a linseed wash, / a hazel-haired woman eternally lit by a pearl necklace." Hard to argue with the accuracy of that vision.
Bierds' poems are like spiritual possessions--as if she could look out through Tolstoy's eyes, feel what Nancy Lincoln felt, but without granting the mediation of their personality, either. This lucid flat control is typically privileged over sensual sound, over lyric joy--though occasionally poems elevate. Again, Vermeer in "The Geographer": "They are burning the flood fields--such a hissing hissing, / like a landscape of toads. And is that how blood / circles back in its journey, like water through / the body of the world?"
So these are not poems to have a beer with, à la Oliver and Collins. They are, to quote our soon-to-be-ex President, "hard work." They are dense and the opposite of breezy, and at the end you close the book--having learned much more than you anticipated--with an almost grudging recalibration of humanism. It is not simply the warm circle of shared experience, but the icy resistance of things, even things of thought, to knowledge of them, clarity of viewpoint notwithstanding.
Poetic image of flight courtesy of Seattlest Flickr pool member sonek321.
