From The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World

Leaving Sarajevo
by Susan Rich

The bus driver stops to pick plums
from an abandoned late summer garden,

the pale blue carrier bags pulled from his bed
where he sleeps underneath the bus.

All night we watch movies,
drink beer in the dark, cross borders

where Bosnians, Croats and Serbs
will read and re-read our passports,

our papers:  the litmus test of war.
We travel Prijedor, Banja Luka, Tuzla,

toward an airport light of home;
past  minefields and orchards

fueled by sweet Sarajevan plums
Our hearts are no longer our own.

As writers, we have much to learn from Susan Rich’s poetry about why we write poetry, about how we can find our poems, and about the way our poems take us beyond the places where we begin writing.  In last week’s article, Susan shared the story of writing and revising a poem inspired by an in-class exercise she gave her students.  This week, we’ll learn more by taking a look at her collection of poems published in 2000 by White Pine Press, which is publishing a second collection of her work very soon.

The Cartographer’s Tongue won the PEN West Poetry Award as well as the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award. It is not the poetry of a tourist reading a map and finding her way, but the poetry of a monitor (Susan has been a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia and a human rights trainer in Gaza) looking outside and inside for data about the world as home. The poems explore the data and the ways we open ourselves to allow the data in. Sometimes, as Susan points out in her poems, we frame what we see to make foreign places home.  Whichever view Susan’s poems explore, we not only come to terms with the many terrains of sadness in the world, but also witness strength of character built by acknowledging and exploring the real condition of individuals and humanity. In one reflection, Nigerian women beggars with leprosy work together:

 Skin tough as old meat, eyes bright as well water
the women have been standing like question marks
against the post office wall and a little to the right,
longer than any one can remember.

(from “The Beggars”)

In another poem, “The Woman With a Hole in the Middle of Her Face”, a woman with leprosy begs alone in the bus station: “With no nose at all, just one black hole / expanding where her nostrils used to breathe,” and “Everyone bypassing experience/to persuade her to move away.” It is not surprising that the poet who wrote this realizes, “The daily accidents that bring the poet, the traveler, into unexplored territory may offer new experiences that knock us off balance, literally and figuratively so that we no longer know who we are or where we stand ” (from Susan’s website).  The new person who rises from the unknowing is clearly strong and present; she is someone who takes responsibility for what she has reflected upon, someone who knows that others will be re-evaluating experience based on her symbols and images:

the cartographer knows
it is her maps which form the images
in everyone else’s mind.  She knows
the language of maps is constantly changing.

(from “The Language of Maps”)

The new person understands this because she understands that the map maker “knows her projection/must distort the geography of the world” and “Tracking distance and direction/on parchment, paper, or cloth;/she chooses the one which best suits her purpose.” (from “In the Language of Maps”)As poets and writers, many of us learn that travel forces us to ask more acutely several questions that drive our writing:  Who are we when no one we know is looking?  Who are we when everyone we don’t yet know might be looking? Who are we when in the dead of night we stop to take a good look? Susan sees her purpose exquisitely:  In “Sarajevo”, she writes:

Rest assured, recast, burnt-out, impaled–somehow cleansed; as I write only
of what I cannot leave, a body awakening in the contours of waste and disease.

In “Oslobodjenje”, a poem named for a Sarajevo newspaper, she writes:

Yet, on that last bus out of the city,
no one wanted to leave.

The paper migrated from yellow to blue to green.

There was just bread and paper,
and there were many days without bread.

Who are we when we put ourselves to paper, when we surrender our needs and look inside? We see that we are in a position to acknowledge the human life of which we are a part and that we write for this part of ourselves to surface and survive:

Whatever happens to the bodies still alive?
Whatever exuberance may they hold?
Whatever dies returns to be retold.

(from “Whatever Happens to the Bodies…”)

Following her own directive, Susan is at the height of her poetic powers when she reflects on the loss of her mother and the memory of her late father.  In “The Scent of Gasoline”, she writes of finding excuses in Gaza to frequent the  “Gas Palace” and watch the men at work and study the “reckless slot machine eyes” of the pumps.  She articulates the loss of her father’s world and her childhood–the flying horse, Gulf, Texaco, the words “fill ‘er up,” remembering inhaling fumes of gasoline when she rolled down her back seat window, a childhood of wanting to go to Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont.  Now she writes:

And to conjure him I breathe in
the dangerous, clock the miles to the gallon

before the needle stops traveling backward–falls
unencumbered, empty, lost.

In “Last Breath'” Susan recounts her moments at her mother’s deathbed, helping her breathe, concentrating on commanding her to breath until:

But I was showing her,
with exaggerated sighs, shouts. Breathe!
___/
And then nothing more.
Just a body in a room.
The rented wheelchair moved against the wall.
Morphine to pour down the toilet, a paper to sign.
___/
Cover the mirror, remove all rings
and earrings, nothing other-worldly at all.
Breathe, keep her corpse company for the night.
Breathe, it’s up to you to keep her alive.

And it is up to us, as poets and as writers, to keep ourselves and our loved ones, our observations and our sense of connection to the world alive.  May we have the courage, as Susan does, to do our job. And may we take a few lessons from Susan that will help us do so:1) Use Susan’s poem “Leaving Sarajevo” as a model.  Think of a place you have traveled to or from that held emotion for you. It doesn’t have to be an exotic or dangerous place.  It can be a bus ride from your home to work.  Imagine yourself on the particular mode of transportation you used during that travel. What is the most idiosyncratic thing you observed? Start the poem there.  In Susan’s poem, the bus driver, who sleeps under the bus at night, has stopped to pick plums. Who was doing what during your travel? What were you doing?   Write about that, using the details of time, scenery, and travel companions. How does all of it link back to the idiosyncratic action you opened with?  Using the couplet form as Susan does in her poem can help you–the simplicity will help you boil down the images to their essence and that essence will move the poem forward.

2) At the end of her poem, “The Scent of Gasoline,” Susan writes:

“I miss the flying horse,
the nether worlds of Gulf and Texaco.

I miss the road maps, key chains, Rubbermaid cups;
the belief blossoming behind the words fill ‘er up.

My father’s world is gone now,
his body returning to the oil fields underground.

Using Susan’s couplets as a model, begin a poem about someone you have lost by listing items and features from the world that you associate with that person.  You might start with the phrase “I miss” as Susan does if you are sure you are writing about missing the person you are writing about.  But if you don’t know why you have selected that person, write, “I conjure the ….”  The things that people buy and surround themselves with or the things people have given to them resound with meaning when selected by the poet.  Whatever is fueling your selection of the particular person as your subject will direct the choices you make in your list and the emotional connection you have to the person you are describing will come through.  This exercise will also work for starting a prose piece.

3) Susan is interested in maps, how they are made, what they represent.  Is there some art or craft that interests you, one that you don’t practice?  Find out as much as you can about its practice and practitioners:  weaving, welding, print making, CAD, candy making, carpentry, pruning and coffee roasting come to my mind.  When you have done a little research, start a poem as Susan starts “In the Language of Maps”:

The mapmaker is measuring the earth,
seeking the accurate.  She knows her projection
must distort the geography of the world.

What is the practitioner you are describing doing? What does the practitioner know?  Once you write that down you will be launched into a piece of writing. You will further discover your connection to the art or craft that interests you.  You will be collecting data from the outside to research the inside.

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Note: In 1999, Susan Rich’s “In Search of Alternative Endings” won second place in Glimmer Train’s annual poetry contest. There are links to more poems by Susan on her website.