Sunday Poem

ROAD ENDING 

At the end of the road a hunter’s hut
boarded all summer, the fraying bush
backing against it, a ragged fringe
of beggar’s ticks, rust tassels, thorns,
and boulders pushed to the water’s edge
where the graders turned.
There was no one home. 

And no one in the water. Overhead
the white threads spidered from a jet
drifted across where the evening star
was not yet shining. 

What were the words I could not use,
the thoughts I could not think to say?
The white lake shook in the early dusk. 

Something was lost we were waiting for,
summer, perhaps, or snow.

By M. Travis Lane, from The Essential M. Travis Lane 

(ed. Shane Neilson, The Porcupine's Quill, 2015)

Written in Blood

M. Travis Lane fires the inaugural salvo in Anstruther Press's new Manifesto Series. Her pamphlet, Truth or Beauty, is, among other things, a call for poetry that can give us "the truth about what it is to be human."

Recently a new literary magazine, whose name I omitted to write down, declared that it would “eschew” publishing the “overly personal.” But the personal is where all poetry begins. There are, I agree, some subjects not suitable for public chatter, but poetry and prose fiction, demanding as artworks more of our private attention, should not be so confined. Should we censor the musings of Leopold Bloom? (Perhaps what the magazine meant by “overly personal” were feminist subjects like menstruation?) There are no subjects and no emotions unsuitable for poetry. There are only two kinds of poetry: poetry that seems to have been written with ink, and can be intelligent, charming, serious or cosy—but always cool, and poetry which seems to have been written in blood: passionate, personal, and sometimes uncomfortable. As Walt Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, “Who touches this, touches a man.”

The Church Poet

Shane Neilson wonders if M. Travis Lane's reputation as a Christian poet has harmed appreciation of her work:

[B]y choosing to write about religious themes, Lane faces a problem that any poet would face: she is often ignored. As Eliot wrote, “For the great majority of people who love poetry, ‘religious poetry’ is a variety of minor poetry.” Yet Lane is special: a major poet who bucked the trend away from religion. She stubbornly took it on, along with any number of other subjects. Stubbornly, she wrote well on topics few are disposed to read. Lane’s natural gifts with image, sound, pacing, and argument took on the challenge of writing spirit as poetry. Despite these formidable gifts and the successfully met challenge, Lane’s not received her due.