On Looking into Hutchison's "Sacred Stories"

It's always been a habit of mine to read transfixed to a single impression, to one significant moment and place: to the one truth that seems to speak for the rest. And when I'd found it in Joseph Hutchison's book of verses Thread of the Real, I knew I could now begin. "Sacred stories" is that bearer of truth and a starting-point, seeming to me marvelously representative of an entire work and perhaps of an entire body of work (though I've known the poet for only a few short years and am unacquainted with his other writings). And yet it is its own singularly unique self at the same time. Heraclitus is the work's epigraphical center, and with good reason.The single poem I've chosen--or rather the primacy of the poem-- must serve as a first and final step into the poet's Heraclitean waters.  And it does. In fact, any line from it will always suffice to give you a marvelous sense of the whole opening before you. Such as.

     "But true to your class,/you keep on dreaming of being let in" (Impression)

Reading from "Sacred Stories" will make Hutchison's world look neither illusive nor allusive. Words do stand for things. But things just don't follow after, servilely obedient to plain succession. It's a chronicle of "sacred stories" and sacred stories here are never at outs with the world.The whole (in true conflux) preserves a significant sameness--call it tradition, perhaps-- though respecting life's bruising particularities. And people, places and events have made a world of difference in the poet's life. To be found expertly interlaced in every poem are biographical details, excursions through landscapes and the generous lyrical insights they give: such as the admonition from a dear mentor George McWhirter and his rhapsodical "foothills and plains" to let it "be enough" ("Thread of the Real,or the old woman "with stick-legs" found adrift in a poet-narrator's dream ("Adrift"), or the "crazed razor" tribute-poem to South Korean poet Ko Un ("After Ko Un's Flowers of a Moment") or even a sense of the latter's own misplaced Eastern ritual settling uncomfortably on the poet himself. Impressions as beguilingly varied as these always suffice.

     "Breezy golden light/on the mountain"(Place)

Such things as "smoky quartz" and "mauve thistles" ("Three Sentences Toward Evening After an Early Spring Storm"), "mesmerizing" waters ("Kooser Creek") and an old woman's "ragged cards" ("Solitaire") come up hurriedly to the poet who's always attentive enough to fix them as parts of his own uniquely rough idyll.  But, despite even the "Sacred Stories" beginnings and a line like "Breezy golden light/on the mountain", there's no jump over the border into convenient symbolism or metaphor. There's no resting in cozy southern hemispheres. It's not easy to go beyond the gravelly experiences of the poetry alone, somewhere to rest the Yeatsian head. And it takes a kind of daring to move on with the journey, following the thread of the real, into places like the winsome murmurings in a spring ("The Spring"), "blazing bees" in Montana ("Winter Sunrise Outside a Café Near Butte, Montana): and, perhaps most daring of all, the derelict behind his "cardboard sign" ("Crossroads"). Wherever you go and look, there's a type of claritas that stings rather than sings ("Claritas").

     "...how bleak/this valley was before/their ancestors sailed" (Moment)

What a faithful gathering there is of American soldier, jihadist and torturer("Tests of Faith") now that the Signifier and Signified have finally split! And wherever there's the show of some poetic justice, with imaginative truth put forward, the reader still asks how this ghoulish mélange's possible at all. The answer is fated to come, of course, as the equation in public opinion of severed child limbs with one caged dictator, who picks at his lice ("Opinions"), of "slaughtered fighters" with skillful CNN camera work ("Ambushed by a Scene on CNN"). The American audience is always assured of media objectivity, notwithstanding the glaring two-headed monsters, assured typically to a point of numbing imbecility. Hutchison discloses an American media that do not reveal shadows on the border: but that rather crackle and burst with their own deadly "shock and awe". To read is to see more of the same pathetic resumption of war glory. Here is the stream's silent treacherous deep end.

    "Sacred Stories"(Truth)

But there is truth in the poet's heart, the sense of sacredness in change itself that the whole work never lets go, of which I take his "Sacred Stories" poem at the end to be the embodiment. But not in the sense of being transcendent over the Colorado mountains and plains but as just this abiding restless permanency to be found everywhere (which I take is Hutchison's own sense of the sacred). Take any line from it and read: the real that threads through begins and ends here  Take an impression such as that given by the narrative obstinacy of "pine tree/people" and "iron-jawed" settlers and see it refracted in an old woman's "ragged cards"; take a moment such as when "big desks" and "pistols" in 1929 successfully substitute rapacious "Easy Street fortunes" for aboriginal stillness and see even here the same two-headed beast in CNN coverage of severed child limbs.

Since "No stories here/mention you" there is entrance only through imagination. None of the self-absorbed "technics" of contemporary poetry here. To be "let in" is to both be a part of the unsettling dust up of history and rely on your own imaginative wits. The stories, though no longer constant to paradigms of the past, can be yet as pleasant as folksy Niedecker tributes, biblical passages and "rough-barked" characterizations; as houses and yards, valleys and ancestors. But we shouldn't be taken in. There is a truth keen as poet's westwarding dreams that's never veiled or only half revealed, for poetic effect only. Again, though something may appear independently, like good camera work or a signifier/signified split, it can only be a reflection of everything else. When everything's already known, you don't seem to matter at all, only "dreaming of being let in."

I admit my reading of Thread of the Real may be a little fanciful but then it does take some imaginative effort to follow what I've seen as the most skillful threading of parts. And picking "Sacred Stories" as a beginning may seem even more wilful (even self-absorbed). But if this were true, Hutchison would have stopped me at the gates. I do urge anyone to repeat my little inquiry into Hutchison's "Sacred Stories", and feel the same tenacity of impressions, moments and events I've felt: the same Heraclitean truth at work. Or choose another poem, such as "Mortality", my favourite in Hutchison's collection.  And having dropped the intrusive you, to step courageously into the stream.

Sacred Stories

Breezy golden light
on the mountain.
Breath by breath,

you climb the rope
of listening and vision
down into the valley,

where the pine-tree
people have already
slipped into a tall,

swaying sleep, while
(in their slim shadows)
the grass people lean,

whispering their most
sacred story: how bleak
this valley was before

their ancestors sailed
an ocean of wind
into its barren folds.

                  *

Your ancestors came
from Germany via Ukraine,
from Ireland and Scotland.
Dirt farmers, mostly,

mostly half-assed about it,
buying rocky ground (sight
unseen, but cheap), then
trundling west in Conestogas,

iron-jawed women birthing
and burying along the trail.
Wherever they settled, they'd
one day head to town and glare

into a lens for a family portrait.
What can you buy with joy,
their lampblack eyes would ask,
on this enemy Earth?

                        *

Here where Arapaho and Ute
hunted deer in summer, cut poles
for tents, told sacred stories--here
your people platted cramped parcels,
hammered cabins out of scabrous

pine logs, so that moneyed types
could flee the flatland swelter
and odious foreign laborers. Then:
1929. At big desks of burnished oak,
ruined men pressed pistol barrels

to their heads, leaving only a stench
of saltpeter and scorched pomade.
Soon the elite sanctuary's gates
were flung wide to almost anyone
with cash. If not for those shattered

Easy Street fortunes, there'd be no
you pondering these pines, that grass,
that ginger-furred fox, that Taoist
flash of a magpie into the leafy brush.
Why this melancholy, then? You grasp

the meaning of your past, the present
with its evening sun bleeding down
beyond the ridge. No stories here
mention you. But true to your class,
you keep on dreaming of being let in.