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| Gibbons Ruark |
HYBRID MAGNOLIAS IN LATE APRIL
You bent to whisper to a small granddaughter,
Exposing the bald priestly back of your head,
Lifting her then and handing her to
me:
See you in
April.
Never the same, these northern magnolias,
As the great starred candelabra ghosting,
Even before I left them, the
deep-shaded
Lawns of my
boyhood.
And yet these too break wholly into blossom,
What somebody called the early petal-fall:
I walk out one day and the limbs are bare;
Then they are
burdened
With the flared tulip shapes of opening blooms.
Two rainy indoor days in a row, then out,
The sun is out, and a fallen
constellation
Litters the
grasses.
What would you be up to this April morning?
Muttering to yourself, looking high and low
For the good stick fashioned out of laurel?
I have it with
me.
Patience. Lean back and light another Lucky.
Whatever will kill you dozes in your rib cage.
Read a few more pages in the Little
Flowers of St. Francis,
Then throw a window open on the fragrance
Of even this, the northernmost magnolia.
By now the child you lifted in your arms
has
Slipped from
their circle
To cherish and polish your crooked old stick
Into a poem of her own so tender and deft
I can hold its wrong end and reach you the worn
Thumb of its handle.
Into a poem of her own so tender and deft
I can hold its wrong end and reach you the worn
Thumb of its handle.
Perhaps X. J. Kennedy put it best: Gibbons Ruark is a yea-sayer.
The son of a
trailblazing Methodist minister, the North Carolina native is the author of
eight volumes of poetry. Deemed by Elizabeth Spires “the most
accomplished formalist of his generation,” Ruark regards himself primarily as a
love poet and elegist. His poems, widely anthologized and acclaimed for their
attention to structure and music, eschew the esoteric and focus most often on
what is close at hand and to heart: family, his beloved Ireland, the beauty of
the natural world, and music itself, especially jazz.
In verses often praised for their
polish, grace, and authenticity, Ruark celebrates the milestone and the
day-to-day. Mementos – a bunch of cornflowers; a small glass swan --
become cherished gifts illuminating the bonds that tie across oceans and
generations. A vacant lot brings to mind dark, feverish memories, as well as images
of hope and reassurance. Violent deaths in an Enniskillen bombing are
cast against the fabric of the cosmos, the constellations in the vast night
sky.
Yet uplifting every poignant line is subtle praise for life itself, and a gratitude for human connection. It is a sensibility perhaps instilled in the poet through all those Sunday morning hymns and his father’s affirming ministry.
In honor of
National Poetry Month, we’ve asked Ruark to share his thoughts on “Hybrid
Magnolias in Late April,” a poem from his 1999 collection, PASSING THROUGH
CUSTOMS. As it turns out, his daughter Jennifer Ruark’s poem “Walking
Sticks,” a gift for her father, provided inspiration. We thank both for
permission to reprint here. Jennifer, with degrees in English from
Swarthmore and the University of Michigan, is a managing editor at The
Chronicle of Higher Education. She lives with her family near Washington,
D.C.
Gibbons Ruark
has been publishing poetry for 50 years. His work has appeared in many
publications, notably The New Yorker, Ploughshares, American
Poetry Review, and The New Republic; and has earned him prestigious
awards, including three Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts and a Pushcart Prize. A frequent traveler to Ireland, he counted
Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney among his close friends, as well as the
acclaimed American poet, James Wright. Ruark, Professor Emeritus at the University
of Delaware, now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife Kay.
Tell me about your
beginnings as a poet, the writers you read and admired, whose work most
influenced yours.
My beginnings as a poet are hard to remember. Randall Jarrell once
said that writing a poem is a way of making yourself forget how you wrote it.
That said, my earliest influences are probably the Methodist hymns we sang in
church and the passages from the King James Bible that were inevitably a part
of the church services I regularly attended as a child. In college I became
infatuated by highly lyrical poetry, especially the likes of Dylan Thomas, and
I suspect he was among my strongest earlier influences.
As I grew older, I began to be suspicious of or impatient with those
beautiful but limited lyrics, because they seemed to distance themselves from
our ordinary speech, and I grew to prefer the more conversational cadences of
poets like Robert Frost and Philip Larkin. This shift is actually documented in
verse in my poem called "Larkin," an elegy for the poet written not
long after his death. Yeats also has been extremely important to me, but he
seems more like a monument than an influence. It is easy to love Yeats's
poetry, but like Shakespeare he seems to exist at a level too high to imitate
or be of practical aid as an influence.
A poet with whom I feel more kinship, as it were, is Edward Thomas,
killed at 39 in World War I. He was, of course, encouraged to write poetry by
Frost when the two lived near each other in England before the war, so there is
a linkage there important to me. The two poems I have written for him show more
about his value to me than anything I say here could.
Tell me more about
your father’s influence.
My
father's influence is in part inseparable from those hymns and scriptural
passages mentioned in my earlier reply. But he always insisted on this: my
conduct was not to be judged because I was a Methodist minister's son, but
because I was his son. That, I need not say, was inconsistent with his
congregation's expectations. His intelligence, kindness, quiet carriage and
moral courage have always seemed exemplary to me, though I have not always
successfully followed his example. He was ahead of his time in many ways,
particularly in the area of civil rights. In 1947, during the first Freedom
Rides in the South, he invited the black activist Bayard Rustin to speak at the
Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, for which many in his congregation never
forgave him. It was this act among many others that made his next move
effectively a demotion. And he imbued me with a love of language that has never
left me.
Let’s turn to “Hybrid
Magnolias in Late April.” How did this poem come into being?
To
go back about as far as I reasonably can, in the early 1960's, when I was in
school at Chapel Hill and my parents moved from Laurinburg to Rocky Mount,
North Carolina, my father suffered a serious but relatively mild heart attack.
I wasn't at home so did not get full details, but suffice it to say that pretty
soon he was on his feet again and improving. He was supposed to take walks but
not to run, and that proved difficult because there were some fairly unruly
dogs in the neighborhood, and it was thought that he needed a stick to ward
them off. A friend brought an ideal stick, really a longish mountain laurel
root, I think, down from the Carolina mountains, and gave it to him. It had a
beautiful natural handle shape on one end, and my father sanded and sanded it
with finer and finer sandpaper until it was smooth as glass and quite beautiful
and he added to that by putting a clear varnish of some kind on it. I loved
that stick and at some point (I can't recall when) I told my mother it was the
only thing I cared about inheriting. I got other things as well, of course, but
when my father died after "successful" heart surgery in February
1970, the stick came to me.
I
often walked with it over the years, and eventually, about the time I started
going to Ireland in the late 1970's, I started deliberately looking in curio and
antique shops etc. for other sticks to go along with it. I got sticks from
Ireland, New Orleans, the Finger Lakes and other places, and then people
started making me gifts of sticks, so that by the time our daughter Jennifer
was in her Junior year at Swarthmore, I had quite a nice collection, gathered
rather like a bouquet in a brass umbrella receptacle of sorts I kept by the
door. (That eventually wore out and was replaced by a nice tall basket.)
Thus
the advent of Jenny's poem, which she wrote for me in the spring of 1986. I
loved it of course, and have her inscribed typescript framed and on the wall in
the study here. It stayed with me for a long time without my doing anything but
taking pleasure in it, and then, a notebook tells me, in late April of 1993,
the mystical seven years later, there appear the first inklings (I love that
word in this context) that I can find that I was on my way to writing a poem of
my own about my father's stick, but with Jennifer's gift much on my mind, as
the Irish say.
By
that time one of my cherished sticks was one made of cherry and sent to me by
Jenny from Hiroshima. (I might interject here that I saw my father last around
Valentine's Day of 1970 and that he lifted the 4-year-old Jenny up in his arms
and said to me "See you in April, boy." He was dead ten days later,
and you will see that those words got into my poem's first stanza some
twenty-three years later.) I see, looking at my notebook, that I did most of the
work on the poem in two days, April 24th and 25th, then tinkered with it off
and on and sent it to The New Yorker on the 28th. It must have been
summarily rejected there, since I was able to send it to Mary Jo Salter at The New Republic as early as May 11th.
Fairly
early I decided to cast it in the form of Sapphics, and equally early I knew
the last word would probably be "handle." Since the Sapphic stanza is
quantitative verse and English measures are traditionally qualitative, Sapphics
have normally been thought impossible in English, but one can try an
approximation anyway, as I have done in several other poems. I think that one reason my poem is in any traditional
form is that it is in fact about tradition, handing feelings
and standards down over the generations. I know I never thought about this at
the time, but the reason it is in Sapphics in particular may have
to do with its kinship to "Lecturing My Daughters," also a poem about
my father and, in that case, both of my daughters.
Salter
returned the poem to me on June 3rd, expressing the hope that I could work out
what she saw as the awkwardness of the last few lines. I did so to my
satisfaction, returned it on June 8th, and it was ultimately accepted and
published in The New Republic for October 4th. The final acceptance
letter and any proofs I received I cannot currently find.
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| Jennifer Ruark |
WALKING STICKS
There is a comfort in walking,
the easy rhythm of one foot
falling solidly to earth
and one foot surely following.
And with your newest walking
stick, a third beat, tapped out
by the shiny tip on the end
of a slender Irish blackthorn.
You left by the back door, pulling
it from the bright brass can,
shifting it in your hand
as you set out, to find
the proper place it held.
Your first one is still your favorite:
your father found
the root of a mountain laurel
with a natural grip,
worked it smooth
and polished it.
Now in the backs of dusty shops
you discover birch, maple and walnut,
some cool and clean as marble,
bits of light wood fit with dark,
others with the nub-ends of smaller
branches still attached,
and even one with a solemn-headed owl,
ivory carved to make a handle.
Now one by one you gather
them, but none like the first from your father;
walking with it you remember
one hand fitting into another.
Even as a young woman,
your daughter realized the importance of those walking sticks, especially of
that one you'd inherited from your father. Tell me more.
Jenny turned 5 the April after my father died in February, so
although she knew and loved him, she did not have that much time to get to know
him. So her strong feelings and high regard for him are significantly inherited
from me in the way that the walking stick was inherited from him. The movement
of the whole experience is interesting, I think. It starts out with my
inheriting that single stick, then the other sticks gather around it and prompt
Jenny to write her poem, and then in my poem I return to the single stick. I
say "stick" here rather than "cane" since the latter calls
up for me something more formal and not necessarily hand-made. Though several
of the sticks I have might not be "one-of-a-kind," a number are and
were just cut out of a hedge or off a tree somewhere and then finished to
varying degrees. For instance, the one Jenny mentions with the "nub-ends
of smaller branches still attached" is an old blackthorn worn by much use
which I found in a curio shop in Dublin which no longer exists.
Walking sticks are much in use in Ireland, or at least used to be,
and my great old friend Ben Kiely carried one routinely long before he needed
it for support. Walking sticks are company on solitary walks. In 1983 when I
was with Seamus Heaney in Dublin, I showed him the blackthorn I mentioned and
he went upstairs and brought down a stick that had belonged to Charles Stuart
Parnell and which had been given him by Conor Cruise O'Brien with papers about
its provenance and instructions to pass it on to another deserving Irish writer
when he thought it appropriate. More than just a few years ago he handed it on
in a public ceremony to the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who was the first woman to receive
it. So there's an Irish element in all this as well. Heaney has several poems
involving his father's walking sticks, which were likely used by him partly to
move cattle as he was a cattle dealer as well as a farmer. A little 3-line poem about facing the ice in
Cambridge when he was teaching at Harvard indicates that he inherited at least
one of his father’s sticks.
Regarding the element of support that sticks or canes provide, I
can't help thinking that it matters that my mother graduated over a long time
from a wheel chair to a walking stick in her eventual recovery from paralysis
owing to polio. The image of offering someone in physical trouble help by
reaching out with a stick must also be involved. I think offering someone the
handle rather than the other "wrong" end might be my invention. I don't
know.
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| Ruark's most recent collection |
Why does poetry
matter?
I've just spent an afternoon with my friends who play Irish music, so
my first impulse is to say that every poet is a failed musician. Walter Pater
said: "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music." At
a certain level I think that is true. When one writes a poem he is trying to
make a piece of verbal music.
But at another level poetry wants to be not equal to but somehow
better than music. Since, along with physical touching, we want words to convey
our deepest feelings, in one sense one wants a poem to tell something that
matters in the most musical way possible. So form has always mattered deeply to
me. It is a way of turning words into music.
The other feature of poetry that matters most to me is perhaps best conveyed
by the title of the old hymn which gave its name to one of my books, Rescue
the Perishing. What poetry does is to save what would be otherwise lost.
This interview appears in the April 2015 issue of The North Star Monthly. Check out their site:
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