"To F. and our children, and their families, especially all of our grandchildren"
BY REBECCA SANDBERG
Many great poets have the ability to take seemingly mundane objects and quotidian moments and turn them into something illuminating, truthful and full of hope. Among them, is the wonderful Anne Porter (November 6, 1911 - October 10, 2011) who, in her lifespan of nearly one century, married artist Fairfield Porter and raised five children in a lively and artistic home. Porter was amongst the still life that her husband reflected via his paintings of landscapes and figures elevating the sacred nature of domestic life.
In her reminiscent collection, Living Things: Collected Poems, Porter captures presence and still life, illuminating the meaning making of the human experience. Or as David Shapiro, in the book’s forward, wrote, “If we have problems because so much of the language of belief has grown connotatively encrusted, then we wait for the poets who believe enough and can freshen this dialect.”
Repetition is Reality
In her poetry, Anne Porter’s evocative elevation of the everyday signals a deep intention of embracing repetition – an echo of Kierkegaard who nearly one hundred years prior stated that “repetition is reality”, and Kathleen Norris who reminds us of the sacred potential in a mundane task, as well as how poetry excavates the ordinary – that it is in the ordinary that our stories unfold: tales of conceiving, bearing and giving birth, of trial and death and rising to new life out of the ashes of the old.
Roofs in Paris
Porter’s charming poem “The Roofs in Paris”, for instance, captures Edouard Vuillard’s creation of “Le rues de Paris” (1908 - 1910).
ROOFS IN PARIS
By Anne Porter
In the year 1900
More or less
Vuillard the painter
Finishes a little landscape
That he called
The Roofs of Paris
Thew' the gray pearl
Of the Parisian sky
Black chimney pots
And scaly-slated gables
Whose stormy gray
Is tinged with violet
Beyond them and above them
Are the mansard roofs
High in the crusty russet
Of their roofing-tiles
Vuillard has painted
A dormer window where
Like a white crocus
Blooms
The figure of a child
In a white smock.
Leavetaking
And here, in “Leavetaking”, Porter gives us a brief glimpse into entering old age. Her husband has died and her own body now grows weary, yet she can nevertheless hear the still life – the crickets on a starry night and the strong silken threshing sound of wings.
LEAVETAKING
By Anne Porter
Nearing the start of that mysterious last season
Which brings us to the close of the other four,
I’m somewhat afraid and don’t know how to prepare
So I will praise you.
I will praise you for the glaze on buttercups
And for the pearly scent of wild fresh water
And the great crossbow shapes of swans flying over
With that strong silken threshing sound of wings
Which you gave them when you made them without voices.
And I will praise you for crickets.
On starry autumn nights
When the earth is cooling
Their rusty diminutive music
Repeated over and over
Is the very marrow of peace.
And I praise you for crows calling from treetops
The speech of my first village,
And for the sparrow’s flash of song
Flinging me in an instant
The joy of a child who woke
Each morning to the freedom
Of her mother’s unclouded love
And lived in it like a country.
And I praise you that from vacant lots
From only broken glass and candy wrappers
You raise up the blue chicory flowers.
I thank you for that secret praise
Which burns in every creature,
And I ask you to being us to life
Out of every sort of death
And teach us mercy.