book review
Original Echoes: The art of poetic compost in Nathan Hauke’s Indian Summer Recycling
“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Circles,” one of the Sage of Concord’s more enigmatic meditations on spiral cosmology, “that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” Anticipating Whitman’s “If you want me again, look for me under your bootsoles,” and Thoreau’s “There is more day to dawn,” “There is no end in nature” is at once a recognition of the dynamism extant in any/every instant of being, a condemnation of the detestable human impulse to restrain or confine another, to fix another’s life to a cruelly rooted spot, and also a provocation—a challenge to not stop too long looking at oneself in any moment of reflection, lest we miss the next best thing just ahead. Emerson’s writing in “Circles” doesn’t garner the breathless fanfare of his transparent eyeball in “Nature,” or his exhortations to self-reliance, but as a reminder of the importance of looking forward, and not mistaking any moment of punctuation to be the end-all of time or space, it’s hard to beat.
Emerson’s open-eyed affirmation of the inexhaustibility of nature—and thus of us, of our materials, our forms—has sounded and resounded in my mind so often that it’s very likely physically imprinted behind my eyelids. I see the words when I’m not looking for them. And so it has been, from the very first time I read the line, after being recommended the piece, a lifetime ago, by my friend, Nathan Hauke. It is fitting, then, that Emerson’s formulation rose once again to the surface of my mind as I was reading (and rereading) Hauke’s most recent collection, Indian Summer Recycling (The Magnificent Field, 2019) this spring, as the whole feeling world felt to fall. Inside the convulsions of the year, the concept and practice of recycling have taken on a new charge, a keener edge, linked to survival, to perseverance; taken on the deeper, grittier meaning of the word’s true root, for better and for worse, as we seem doomed to repeat our own human history while also bearing witness to the ways in which the larger history of the universe plays out in our lives in unfolding repetitions. “Cycle’s” etymology speaks to an infinite circulating period, upon the intervallic completion of which certain phenomena return the same once again. It draws on the Old French cicle and pulls directly from the Late Latin cyclus, from Greek kyklos—speaks to a circular body, a wheel or returning celestial projection; it invokes circular motion, a cycle of events. Or, as Hauke frames it in “If somebody don’t help me”:
Language
s Torn
Weathered
Screen
Dewy
Mosquitos
…
Creation alone as each tree folded within
The gleaming ordonnance of wide evergreen rows
Grief you can’t see the end of
Stray feathers unsettled along the periphery
The rest is decomposition
To revolve. To move around. To see something once, and then see it again, anew, another way (as is apparent in the two simultaneous readings allowed concurrently in the last line of the poem above: 1) “All else is decomposition.” 2) “Decomposition is a kind of repose.”) This is what it feels like reading Indian Summer Recycling. Traipsing through the wilds and weeds of Hauke’s new book, tripping over “the irregularities of a web” (“Day swell (horsing around with a toy piano)”) catching a new appreciation of light as it shows itself through “Hole-punched leaves/ A greasy roottiller wed to wakefulness” (“Like a handsaw with a piece of black rag tied to the handle”). The reader is literally refreshed—the staid definitions and associations of a scene, of a word, of a tone, are abandoned and in the empty carapace of their form, new life finds footing. Like Emerson’s incitement in “Circles” that nothing is ever truly over, that the world, and the universe—as well as our hearts and our art—is always in a state of continual recycling, stars exploding lightyears away to say something to us, coalescing in the rare arithmetic of our peculiar lived bodies and consciousnesses, so too is the work in Hauke’s new collection a paean to place as place (and time) shifts beneath the poet’s feet. As he writes in “Day swell (horsing around with a toy piano)”:
It’s all in one ear
And out the other
………..
We’re hunkered down together in weeds like killdeer
To be harrowed by heat bleating through the irregularities of a web
To learn a song about old latticework
That’s worn dirty full of holes
Corroded aluminum pitched to weather headwinds
Verses a mangled roof that wouldn’t give
Kiss it goodbye
A luminous
Gold leaf
Falling
Two beats
After a sparrow
In Hauke’s work, echo is everything—nothing on the page or in the ground can be read as other than a palimpsest. Echo as philosophy (Thoreau: “The echo is, to some extent, original sound”). Echo as way of life. Echo, perhaps most vividly in these poems, as sonic ars poetica—all in one ear, and out the other, like how the very word “ear” above finds new aural home as resonance in “killdeer” a few lines later. This eponymous recycling is the philosophical and formal driving force animating Hauke’s new/old collection (as the weathered, Xeroxed journal pages that begin and end the book aver, this is a book born of an older book, born of books older themselves, and on and on). Compost is the principle, and the poetry in Indian Summer Recycling is as much about allowing things to break down and spread out entropically as it is the usual “creative” writing endeavor of generating new content. Material, for Hauke, is always near at hand. It can be, it is, literally anything:
INDIAN SUMMER RECYCLING
STALLION BELT BUCKLE
Dry leaves in grainy heat startled like a toy duck with a shredded orange bill
Time abandoned to eternity a knot unraveling
Melody that disintegrates through the same old fucked speaker
(“A dog wrings the neck for gladness”)
In fact, and thankfully, in Hauke’s work, there seems to be nothing new under the sun—every scene, every phoneme, is reborn and revised, again and again, from the level of the line to phrases that appear and disappear multiple times throughout the book, like repurposed twine wrapped through a bird’s beak, then its nest. Nothing is “new” because it doesn’t need to be. The binary of “old/new” is demonstrated in Hauke’s work as being ultimately little more than obstinate silliness, outdated, fallacious, needless, and the tool only of commercializing/consolidating power, if any tool at all. Nothing needs to be new if everything already is, Hauke tells us. We are all already hand-me-down stars.
However, it would be wrong to assume, with such a clear-eyed sense for how matter is made and remade, life born and reborn unto itself ad infinitum, that Indian Summer Recycling is therefore a book primarily composed of easy happiness or facile comfort. It isn’t. Some of the echoes here are devastating and disconcerting, to say the least (one of the most oft-repeated refrains in the text pertains to “The tender flow of sap and aluminum shine/ Windows cut into the barn like velvet/ Where X hung himself after he lost all the family money” (“Bury me deep”)). The tone here is threadbare, vocal-strained from holler, oxidized, effaced, and while much finds new purpose in the poet’s reordered eye (the barn where X hung himself is also framed in stunningly beautiful visual terms above, and elsewhere in the book), there is a fundamental understanding always beneath the surface of these poems that, in order to be recycled, something must die. I would hazard that it is precisely this sense—this awareness of death not as a threat, exactly, but as an ineradicable natural fact, commingling creation with its counterpart destruction, innocence with experience, heaven with hell, visible with the invisible, in coeval ways, always—that gives these poems their charge, their spark. While nothing is “new” in Hauke’s book, nothing comes easy, either, as we see in the collection’s opening poem:
Some people have it made and some people don’t
Funny dog named Pink (“Pank”) playing in the street near a blind corner
Metallic aftertaste of sunlight
Streaming through broken glass
Waking sawdust like smoke
Kid in the next room says, It’s a vampire
How do you write ghost rusty flowers
(“Like a handsaw with a piece of black rag tied to the handle”)
American poetry has long had an affinity for recovery, but it is very much an affinity rooted in a love of, or at least perpetual awareness of, death. This sensibility is inherited by Hauke in his poetry, and it electrifies otherwise straightforward lines with an eerie, wavy new significance. Vampires are the living/unliving dead, as Keats has nimbly pointed out, unable to hear new music or love because made to live forever, and thus completely divorced from the joys and pains of actually living. Like “a grape burst upon a palate fine,” in Keats’ formulation, being alive is bittersweet, both difficult outer skin and luscious inner flesh all at once, and this beguiling quality is lost on those who don’t intimately understand the prospect of loss in this life. That’s kind of the deal. The same street where a funny little dog plays has a blind corner, making it desperately dangerous, a collision waiting to happen. Even the rusty flowers are haunted. Some people have it made and some people don’t. Hauke never forgets that in order for something to be recycled—a summer, a substance, a book, a self—it must have, at one point or in one way, expired, outlived its previous usefulness, been thrown away in some way. It must have transitioned from one life or mode of living use to another. Which is, of course, a kind of blessing. But it is also a tragedy—or it certainly can feel that way to us in the living realm who must endure it. The emphasis in thermodynamics—the first law of which governs Hauke’s work at every turn—is not heat. It is motion. Dynamism changes things from what they once were, and depending on how you felt about those things, in that former form, this fact can land with radically different punch. Some people have it made and some people don’t.
But it would also be wrong to suggest that Indian Summer Recycling is essentially a sad book, a book overweighed with the heft of “Grief you can’t see the end of.” As much hardship as is read into lines like “Buoyed bright debris of personality/ Caught in rocks and roots all the way/ Coughed up shards of glass/ Meant to do better/ Rememberence a swollen hive/ Crawling with bees” (“Leaves where light carves your eyes”), and as rightly as we ought to feel empathy for a world where, “Like a sad dog’s face in the window/ You want to kiss it//You get lonely/ When other people are sick” (“Dog Creek”), the truth is that Hauke’s collection is as much shocking sunlight busting through rotten logs as it is the rotten logs themselves. It’s a collection that proves out time and time again that “Heaven is/ The perception/ Of heaven” (“Pastoral (years later)”). It’s a book of shed skin and new beginnings, even if the skin that was shed maybe was torn off, or was taken without our asking—a world where “A molted fawn surfacing through ragwort near the bank/ Picks its way toward a wet black nexus of barbs below the trailer/ Choral work as sunrise eats the wood she disappears into.” (“Bands of strata”) Sure, Hauke says, it’s not an easy heaven, this world, but that doesn’t make it any less heavenly. The line between ecstasy and terror, which is literally delineated in a poem like “Wakefulness more like a stammer,” is indeed a fine line, but for his part, Hauke foregrounds the ecstasy first and foremost, as in the beautiful “Shine an apple”:
You can hardly pick
Which record
Shines an apple
Will sharpen the needle
That ferries us
From one side/
To the other
Ceramic birds cackle near the handle
Oblivious to deer we startle from breakfast
It’s hap a bent corner post
Allows a body into the cemetery
For rest or winter grass
Which is to say, finally, this is a book about love, in its manifold states. What else is the embrace of hap above—of circumstance, of occasion, whatever it may be, of cemetery, even of death—if not a kind of arms-wide adoration? Hauke’s book blossoms from such affection. It is built on a love of the world, love of the other, love of words and of rough melodies and time. The fear that bubbles up in Indian Summer Recycling also stems from love, in a way: it is the fear that compounds when love compounds, proportional anticipation of loss linked to the amount and intensity of our care. There is love rippling through the very fabric of these poems, and there is music, played by a hand tendered with a sense of humility, an almost guarded outlook that feels hopeful, but also born of grief and difficulty. Doubt is a big part of these poems—stylistically, the very characteristic strike-through motif that book-ends and binds the collection, where a word is struck and then a replacement is often quite surprisingly appended, is a kind of revision, a kind of uncertainty. Certainty in these poems is recognized as a violence, and one with a quiver of attendant dangers, like oppression, delusions of grandeur and of superiority, and the profound poetic risk of not seeing the ever-shifting world, with all its joys and sorrows, that is always in front of you, and never standing still.
Elsewhere in “Circles,” Emerson agrees with Hauke’s overarching poetic worldview in fairly explicit terms. “Nature looks provokingly stable and secular,” Emerson writes, “but it has a cause like all the rest…Permanence is a word of degrees. Everything is medial.” In Indian Summer Recycling, Hauke proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is a poet who has internalized and personified this lesson of impermanence, this medial degree. The poems in this collection are both appreciations of an ephemeral world, and also lessons in how to gracefully comport oneself in an existence that never for a moment sits static. They are entreaties not to a better world, but this exact one, complete and broken down as it ever was, and will be. Indian Summer Recycling teaches a reader how to “Gallop wildly/ To compass a/ Turbulent center” (“Ridge cross horses”), and it feels like a gift that won’t stop—cannot stop—giving.
Eryn Green’s first book, Eruv (Yale University Press, 2014), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and his second book, Beit (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2020), was recently published as the Editor’s Choice at New Issues. Currently an Assistant Professor in Residence at UNLV, where he is the Coordinator for the World Literature Program, Eryn lives near the desert with his wife and daughter.