I am not quite coherent, right now... I am (for lack of a better word) gleeful!
Maureen Hynes sent me (US) a response and she has let me know that I can post it here. I, who was so bold, now feel incredibly shy... unsure of exactly how to thank her for giving us this incredible gift! She is allowing us to not only see what she crafted, BUT HOW AND WHY!
This is the kind of opportunity that comes around so rarely for newer poets.
As our dear Debbie would say, "Huzzah!"
If you haven't read my earlier blogs, I suggest you do so...
I also now know the etiquette involved in posting an educational blog, thanks to Maureen and I, again, thank the curators of "Canadian Poetries" for forgiving my blunder! Their journal is lovely and filled with incredible glimpses into the minds and workings of Canadian poets.
http://www.canadianpoetries.com/
So, here is Maureen's reply.
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Maureen Hynes responds:
First of all, so many thanks to Cyndi MacMillan for her extensive attention and thorough analysis of my poem – it is so gratifying, even exciting, for a poet to find an audience, especially an appreciative one! I really do agree with Cyndi that poetry should startle and intrigue, disturb and tantalize – so I am glad this poem has done this for a lot of the readers on Poetry Soup.
I’ve truly enjoyed the various interpretations of the poem’s images and of the poetic strategies I took in writing the poem. Some of them are not really the ones I intended, but I am not at all bothered by that, but rather intrigued at how readers create their own text from what is presented to them and what is their own experience and knowledge.
Many of my initial choices – words, phrasing, images, slant or near-rhymes – are initially made instinctually, without considering precisely how they sound or how they build towards a coherent and musical whole. I see it as the task of successive revisions to bring each of these choices to a conscious level, to make all the elements of the poem work together, to weigh and balance all these elements, to discard the parts that don’t contribute or that, well, klunk. So it’s interesting to see how Cyndi has taken the poem apart, like a small mechanical thing, to see how it works – and I must say I’ve learned a few things from how she’s done it.
I’ve always been drawn to the historical realities of the scriptoria, those mediaeval and pre-mediaeval sites where Biblical and religious texts and missals were copied and sometimes illuminated. Mostly because of my heritage, I’ve been especially drawn to the history of those working their lifetimes away in mediaeval Ireland’s scriptoria.
I’ve also always understood this work to be exclusively done by men, and this to be another arena of work that excluded women (so it was interesting to me that Cyndi tracked down a reference to a woman who had done this work!).
So when I ran across this section in Ann Waldman’s suite of poems, “Matriot Acts”:
“…be that little girl with her tiny instruments who investigates the magnificent cosmos be next to her as she works overtime in the scriptorium…”
I must say my blood sort of raced, imagining a little girl, or a woman, doing the demanding work of illumination, especially when I read that invocation to the reader to “be her,” and to “be next to her.” (http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-203232614.html). Hence the image of the empty stool in the final line – that is the place I imagine the reader is taking, beside the scribe, to read and write with her.
For this, I wanted a quiet and contemplative poem, perhaps one that is whispered with a somewhat wistful note (or as Cyndi reads it, a kind of longing) playing through it; or perhaps an under-the-breath kind of rebellious commentary -- because I realized how grueling and exhausting the life of copying out religious texts could be in places without central heating! (hence the need for layers and hoods, and the cold fingers and the fire). And truly, when I first encountered information about this work, I read of how the scribes would write marginalia complaining of their sore backs and aching eyes, moans and grumbles that ring true for us as computer users centuries later.
Some people have commented on the imagery – the magpies, the open-mouthed fish, the towers, sand dunes, etc. I intended to include some images common in illumination, and some that people could have seen looking out a window in mediaeval Ireland.
“…sleep she writes in an alphabet of trees…”
From taking a course recently on Seamus Heaney taught by a mediaeval scholar, Ann Dooley, at the University of Toronto, I learned that the letters of the classical Irish alphabet, Ogham Script, drew their forms from trees and it is sometimes known as the “Celtic Tree Alphabet” (and of course we know that many languages use natural forms for the bases of their written language). I found this piece of knowledge slipping its way into the poem. Also from Ann Dooley, who has studied and handled many of these original and mediaeval vellum texts, that some are still fragrant with turf smoke from centuries ago.
I also feel I owe a lot to Ann Waldman for her term, “overtime in the scriptorium,” for linking our work with those in the places of arduous scribing.
And I do want to say again that I see the final line as an invitation to the reader: and I am so pleased so many readers and writers took up the invitation. Again, thanks to everyone who read and commented, but especially to Cyndi MacMillan.