Dialogue:
Connie Wieneke and Jason Barry
No Revelation: Jason Barry on Connie Wieneke’s “Today, Beyond The Back Forty”
The first thing a reader will notice about Connie Wieneke’s remarkable poem, “Today, Beyond The Back Forty,” is her intricate, elongated syntax and her sophisticated use of enjambment:
Today, beyond the back forty—which to be honest remains
half an acre of tired pasture—a dozen elk have broken off
grazing a neighbors’ newly-laid and trucked-in sod. Look
how the elk, not the rolls of sod, unbend themselves, graceful
perhaps, more likely a weary longing what articulates
when they move. How easy to think they are like pilgrims
and must hunger for more to eat, the quiet of fewer dogs, and
even better footware. I envy them. The angles of their four legs.
Seven enjambments off the bat. The last word in each line (‘remains,’ ‘off,’ ‘look,’ ‘graceful,’ ‘articulates,’ ‘pilgrims,’ ‘and’) is like an unresolved gaze, a taut anticipation before breaking off. The lines in this stanza are powerful and well-honed, despite the poet’s tendency to hesitate, to qualify, to reposition. Wieneke continually redirects the reader, or redirects (unbends?) her own poetic thinking on the page. Notice that the back forty is no longer just a stand-in for the backside of a farm, but is instead “a half an acre of tired pasture.” There is also a real-time nixing of associations, as if the images we are conjuring on a first read are unwarranted, hasty, or cliché: it’s the elk who unbend in this poem, we are told, and not the sod.
What should we make of the declaration that it’s easy to think of the elk as being like pilgrims? Well, maybe it’s easy for Wieneke, a poet with an extraordinary imaginative capacity. For those of us with lesser powers, it’s difficult. Or, at least, it would have been difficult for me before I encountered this work. As Wieneke envies the elk, so I envy her boldness—comparing elk to pilgrims is risky, but when coupled with a reflective, inquisitive tone and a fresh sense of humor (‘even better footware’), it works. This is a poet who’s anticipating our moves before we do, who sees our imaginative shortcomings and forces us to picture something different, something unexpected.
The elk, which are not moose, but wapiti, lift their hesitant
gazes to this day’s offerings, eyes and ears alert to what we—
behind our fences and gates, hedges and sheetrock—cannot
see or want to hear. . .
Back to the unbending. Elk (or “wapiti”—a name, I’m told by Wikipedia, derives from the Cree Indian and Shawnee word for “white rump”) are not moose, and for this Wyoming-based poet the two animals would never be confused (those readers living in the American West will get the joke). What do the elk know that we don’t? What is the nature of their experience? Of their particular way of being on earth? Do they, like pilgrims, have a special connection with the divine?
Today, I must say I know no more of what emotions they gnaw
than what my father thought fifty years back, that day
he stood beside a fence, the forecast rain soaking through
to our bones, wetting any devotion my siblings and I might have
made up, to earn his transient approval. Even when our father gestured
toward those elk, he offered nothing more than, Well, look at that,
and we did, still obedient, doubtful that he was speaking to us or the elk,
or even into the divorced air, our mother no longer between us.
After all that qualifying, all that questioning, the poet finally declares “I must say I know no more of what emotions they [the elk] gnaw / than what my father thought fifty years back . . .” I can’t help but to notice the congruence between these lines and those in my poem, “Maybe in the end it isn’t longing,” which also appears in this issue of Ballast. As in my piece, Wieneke gives us an image of a reticent father—a father who, like the grazing elk, is fundamentally distant or disconnected from the speaker; we are left at the end of the poem with a sense that, even after many years have passed, the father’s hard-earned wisdom will remain withheld or concealed from the poet forever. Language, it seems, comes up short. Or is an unnatural, uncomfortable communicative medium. The father’s gesturing in “Today, Beyond The Back Forty” is not to be understood as a proposition, I submit, but rather, as either an injunction or a habitual side utterance. We are not told how to interpret it. I salute Wieneke’ restraint in this stanza, her way of having us look—and look again—but offering no tangible perceptual knowledge, no revelation beyond the tired pasture.
Connie Wieneke in response to Jason Barry’s “Maybe in the end it isn’t longing”
There are so many things I admire about Jason Barry’s poem, “Maybe in the end it isn’t longing.”
Let’s begin with that “Maybe” as the first word in the title, which it is followed by “isn’t.” Wait a second, I think.That open-ended sentence demonstrates how important a title is to reading what follows in the poem, any poem. It prepares me, sort of, for what follows.
Without punctuation, without an ellipsis, without capitalization in the title, I wonder what the poet is speculating about. I fill in the blanks with a very personal list of my “maybe’s,” some of which I cannot name. Who among us doesn’t hunger for the unnameable, the ineffable, for the story that was never told to be filled out, resolved “in the end”?
The first stanza with its winding road draws me up a pass I don’t know. Guanella’s three syllables lull me into thinking I am headed to a place I’ve never been or imagined. A foreign country? A different ecosystem? However, the inhabitants of the next three lines are as familiar to me as my home ground: larkspur and penstemon, elk and sedge. And again, that elk that “skipped the sedge” reminds me this poem is about longing for what is not on the menu.
I begin to wonder if the poem is going to be just another nature poem, until the volta in the third stanza. “My father, who turned seventy…” offers a different emotional resonance, and one I relate to. The poet’s father’s “issues” remain and seem to echo those of the poet with his own father. I read into the poem my own father and a longing—unrequited—I have to know more about my ancestors.The silence of twenty years back remains unanswerable.
By the fourth stanza—the “flame in the window, / the way a hawk – in sheer gray dawn - /”—strike me as refrains of that generational silence, of the ephemeral, of the unknowing that haunt us. We all read into a poem something of our own lives, no? And reading and re-reading this poem I was struck by how we often tap into the natural world to make sense of our story, whether writ-large and a specific memory. And though the natural world provides metaphors, the inhabitants of that world are living their own lives, without our say-so, without our understanding. It seems so spot-on.
In the penultimate stanza, the hawk “descends. / .” This one word line—abrupt and with a sense of finality—almost promises resolution. I say almost. What follows though—“I feel it tighten now, // the air thinning out, a wet vole shaking / in the cleft of two rocks.”—makes me feel that the poet speaker is stuck. I wonder if the poor vole is trying to escape or is bereft or just cold and wet. I love being in the skin of that vole. The wonder of it all.
Thank you to ballast for the opportunity to delve into a poem, line by line, word by word. I loved the contrast between my own work—often dense and a pile-up of images—and these marvelous couplets that “breathe.” A lesson in the lyric. I learned much from taking time with the poem. I also welcomed the conversation that Jason and I had on the phone, and on the page. I think it is so important to find intimate readers who are not in your regular cohort.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.