"Musseling" by Jan Schreiber

Text of poem here (Note: this is an older version, and some lines have changed). 

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-My Ryan Wilson episode

-My Mark Jarman episode

-Ryan's corrections and very gracious explanation

-The Contemporary Poetry Review

-Jan's wonderfully kooky website 

-THINK Journal's Critical Path Symposium

-The aquastentialist poem

-"The Slow Pacific Swell" by Yvor Winters

-"Le Cimitiere Marin" by Paul Valery

-Ukiyo

-Ask not for whom the bell buoy tolls

-"The Bell Buoy" by Rudyard Kipling

-An etiology of sirens

-Artist vs. Mystic

-"No Man Is An Island" (a sermon excerpt, not a poem) by John Donne

-Aware and Aware 

-De Profundis

Transcript

Versecraft 6-2: “Musseling” by Jan Schreiber

Thank you for joining me, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back, or welcome to, Versecraft. Before we get started on today’s feature, I do have a little bit of unfinished business from last week that I’d like to address first. I pride myself on the fact that, thus far in the show’s history, every contemporary poet whose poems I’ve analyzed has been pleased and sometimes even thrilled with how I’ve interpreted their work. I always tell these poets that if there’s anything big that I’ve missed, I’m more than happy to address it. The façade of perfection is far less important to me than doing justice to a work of art. 

I had a feeling that I was probably going to miss something in Ryan Wilson’s poem from last week, simply because Ryan is such a learned and allusive craftsman. And so it was that Ryan wrote me a very sweet, gracious, and enthusiastic letter last week, chock-full of praise for the show, but also gently explaining a key aspect of his poem, “Disobedience,” which I had obliviously glossed over. Now, it is chastening enough to hear that one has overlooked something, but, as I told Ryan, it was also deeply frustrating to me in this particular instance, because the main reference I missed is something I actually know a fair amount about, and which I spoke about at length on my Mark Jarman episode—namely, Lurianic Kabbalah. Before I get into Ryan’s explanation, I’ll first also mention that the version of his poem that I used is slightly different from the final one which appears in his new book, In Ghostlight. As Ryan pointed out, several of the metrical oddities that I noted in the episode were actually tweaked in the new version. Regarding his poem, Ryan had this to say: 

“There’s an important figure linking the ‘chivalric white’ of the sea-gulls to ‘jagged shards’: suggesting a broken glass—hopefully (and, of course, I don’t get a say in this) both a broken (golden) bowl, in the spirit of Kabbalah, and a broken mirror. In either, or hopefully both, cases, these ‘shards’ are theologically significant to understanding the violence of the sea-gulls, which is not quite to be admired: the sea-gulls are ‘jagged shards of light,’ broken pieces of light, not whole, lacking integritas, and the lack of integritas informs their violence. They do not reflect the light, at least not the fullness of its radiance. They are broken, and their brokenness makes them dangerous. (As is always the case with human beings, or with any broken thing.)

The implicit argument here is, ultimately, one against Manicheism—a heresy which is of course, alas, central to our time’s thought—and one in favor of Christian mercy. And this brokenness points back to the broken people seeking salvation via tourism in the ‘dream of light’: the tourists seeking their own apotheosis, or transcendence beyond the metaxu state of man, are like seagulls pecking their real selves (pigeons) to death. In pecking their real selves to death—their sinful real selves—they parody by counterpoint the communicant, eating viciously and gluttonously instead of sticking out their own wounded pink tongues to receive the Christological Host, the Eucharist, the Bread of Life, and becoming by communion His real self. The retreat into dreams of the Romantic mind allows us to view ourselves as chivalric saviors—thus usurping the Godhead—and to destroy others ‘for the greater good’ because they are inconvenient while imagining ourselves to be ‘light-bringers,’ even as we destroy ourselves, along with others, in the process. Hence the juxtaposition of ‘wound’ and ‘bird.’ The way to transcendence is acknowledgment of sin & imperfection, not the avoidance of them to pursue illusory glamour/power.”

One of the wonderful things about corresponding with the Wilsons, both Ryan and James, is that, with the right provocation, you can guarantee they will plunge the conversation into deep theological weeds very quickly, and this is a perfect example of that. I absolutely love it. Thank you so much Ryan for your insight, and I sincerely apologize for glossing over this important detail.

            Before we get to our main event, let me remind you as always that if you enjoy this episode, please do consider either donating or becoming a member of the show, or else showing your devotion by purchasing Versecraft shirt at the merchstore. Links to all of these portals of patronage can be accessed in the show notes. If nothing else, your homework for this week is to find just one person and recommend the show to them. This sort of grass-roots effort really does make a big difference, and I really appreciate it. Thank you!

            Today’s poet, Jan Schreiber, is, along with former feature N. Scott Momaday, one of the last people alive who studied with Yvor Winters, and, perhaps more than any other original Wintersian yet living, has made his career an embodiment of the values of the Stanford school, though always supplemented by his own insights, concerns, and preferences. His preoccupation with moral choice, willpower, loss, formal rigor, local detail, and marine themes are tokens of his Palo Alto background, while his careful analyses of domestic situations and marital psychology mark a unique achievement in this mode of writing. Throughout his career, Schreiber has also quietly been one of the best and most consistent critics of poetry that we have. His many articles in the now defunct Contemporary Poetry Review, all of which are available online, are a treasure trove of good sense judgements on poetic subjects, all the more valuable now as an oasis in the current wasteland of poetry criticism. 

            Born in 1941 in the humble lakeside village of Fish Creek, Wisconsin, Schreiber, determined to become a poet, hustled his way to an undergraduate at Stanford, where he met Winters, and followed with a Masters at Toronto and a PhD at Brandeis, where he, like Timothy Steele, studied with fellow Wintersian J.V. Cunningham, whose salty tone and epigrammatic wit are often evident influences in Schreiber’s own work. Following graduation, Schreiber continued to write poetry, but professionally, led an eclectic life outside of academia. For a time, he was an editor at Godine Press before becoming a government-sponsored researcher in criminology, founding the Social Science Research Institute and eventually producing an influential study of terrorism, The Ultimate Weapon: Terrorists and World Order. He then pivoted from social science to computer science, founding the software company MicroSolve, which provides administrative support to local governments. After twenty years, he sold MicroSolve in order to focus on writing full time. Over the years, he has produced five books of original poetry, as well as translations of the work of the Minnesänger Walther von der Vogelweide, and, most recently, Paul Valery. He has also released a selection of his critical essays entitled Sparring With the Sun, a fascinating study of the development of post-war American poetry. He helped found the Symposium on Poetry Criticism at Western Colorado University, as well as the Critical Path Symposium at THINK Journal, where he serves as advisory editor. In 2015, he was elected the Poet Laureate of Brookline Massachusetts, and currently teaches at the Lifelong Learning Institute at his alma mater, Brandeis. 

            Today’s poem, like poems we have seen by David Yezzi, James Matthew Wilson, Joshua Mehigan, A.E. Stallings, and Richard Wilbur, employs aquatic imagery partly in order to advance a contrast between human limitation and a hazardous, inhuman, mystical sublime. Clearly I am partial to this kind of poem, and I have written in this microgenre myself, including a poem which has recently come out in The Alabama Literary Review, entitled “Coney Island.” Some of these instances are influenced by Yvor Winters’ marine symbolism, particularly in his poem, “The Slow Pacific Swell,” and Winters in turn, as well as Schreiber himself, were no doubt influenced by Paul Valery’s supreme poem, “The Graveyard By The Sea.” What is amazing is that despite sharing some broad similarities, all of these poems have something beautiful and unique to say, which is why I keep talking about them. Schreiber’s poem, entitled “Musseling,” is no exception. “Musseling” is also a perfect example of what Winters would have called a post-symbolist poem, a poem which functions equally well on literal and figurative levels simultaneously. It goes like this: 

Musseling

Through the causeway sluice

The sea pours with the tide.

In rubber thongs I brace

Myself for cold and wade

Into the shallows on

Up-ended blue-black shells

Of mussels. As I lean

Over their draining pools

They’re savoring the current

Through parted beaks. Jammed tight,

Barnacle-crusted, ancient

As time, half-calcified:

An underwater lea

Endlessly spreading. In knots

Of rock and fiber, they

Remain immobile, bits

Of armored flesh with habits

Of plants. I’ve long been waiting

To pick these flowers, snippets

Of sea life for a floating

Basket.

            But those who dine

On what the oceans yield

Have learned a fine disdain.

And knowing that these wild

Mussels are slight of flesh

I search the crowded beds

For prizes. In the crush

Of shells and stones the odds

Of great gain while the tide 

Permits are small—and yet

One hopes. And so I load

The basket weight by weight,

Taking what vision, reach

And chance bring to my hand.

In this attentive crouch

I scavenge in no end

Of plenty with the gong

Of bell buoys in my ears.

I have been scavenging

In truth down all these years,

With worry at my back

Waiting for the random

Hand at last to pluck

Me from the salty garden

Where I’ve grown old and sipped

A fraction of the vast

Surrounding sea.

                        So rapt

In sea dreams I’m possessed

By rhythms of waves and feel

In ebb and flow of blood

And air a tidal pull

Straining the old divide.

Entranced, I might have drowned,

And willingly, for shadow

Shimmering just beyond

The surface beckons, widens,

Promises. Instead

I wake to wariness

And take up what I’ve made

A substitute for loss.

Though I’m not done, it’s time

To leave these timeless pools

Where, bent and intent, I’ve roamed

Gathering onyx shells.

Regaining a land-bearing,

I make my way to shore

And like a laggard day-

Dreaming schoolboy, hearing

The bell and dimly aware,

Head home the longer way. 

 A quietly powerful auto-elegy, a poem of mortality and old age, this poem was written when Schreiber was approximately seventy years old, and the poem itself is seventy lines long. It is in iambic trimeter, and is mostly stichic, meaning that it is broken up into verse paragraphs rather than discrete stanzas. The end is an exception, which is an ABCABC sestet. In short-lined poems, especially ones without obvious rhyme, it is easy to blur the line between accentual-syllabic and purely accentual verse, and while we frequently see purely iambic lines, we also frequently see trochaic substitutions in the first or even second position, acephalous lines, and feminine lines. These are all par for the course. 

The one exceptional thing to note metrically is the penultimate line of the penultimate section: “where, bent and intent, I’ve roamed.” It is possible to make an argument that this line is trimeter, reading it as iamb, anapest, iamb: where BENT and inTENT I’ve ROAMED. Given the comma after “where” though, when we speak this line we are most likely going to give “where” an accent, resulting in the following scansion: WHERE, BENT and inTENT I’ve ROAMED. Acephalous iamb, trochee, iamb, iamb—a line of tetrameter. I suspect that Jan was too taken with the internal rhyme of “bent and intent” to care much that this line might pose a risk to his metrical scheme. 

Speaking of rhyme, if we don’t pay close attention, we might assume that the poem is unrhymed, or at least unorganized by end-rhyme. In fact, however, Schreiber makes use of lowkey partial and slant end-rhymes throughout, and even ends with a true rhyme between “day” and “way” which is sonically if not visually hidden by compound word enjambment. Some of these rhymes are more obvious, like bearing and hearing, habits and snippets, reach and crouch; others are fainter correspondences, like shadow and widens, random and garden, gong and scavenging. Schreiber also frequently avails himself of alliteration, which increases the poem’s quiet and undulating musical force, akin to the lapping of waves. 

Let’s now go back and read the first 38 lines again. 

Through the causeway sluice

The sea pours with the tide.

In rubber thongs I brace

Myself for cold and wade

Into the shallows on

Up-ended blue-black shells

Of mussels. As I lean

Over their draining pools

They’re savoring the current

Through parted beaks. Jammed tight,

Barnacle-crusted, ancient

As time, half-calcified:

An underwater lea

Endlessly spreading. In knots

Of rock and fiber, they

Remain immobile, bits

Of armored flesh with habits

Of plants. I’ve long been waiting

To pick these flowers, snippets

Of sea life for a floating

Basket.

            But those who dine

On what the oceans yield

Have learned a fine disdain.

And knowing that these wild

Mussels are slight of flesh

I search the crowded beds

For prizes. In the crush

Of shells and stones the odds

Of great gain while the tide 

Permits are small—and yet

One hopes. And so I load

The basket weight by weight,

Taking what vision, reach

And chance bring to my hand.

In this attentive crouch

I scavenge in no end

Of plenty with the gong

Of bell buoys in my ears.

Our scene involves an old man going down into the shallows of the sea to gather mussels, a kind of mollusk, for consumption. I suspect a good number of you are immediately wondering what a “causeway sluice” is. A causeway is a strip of land, often built up artificially, which extends into a body of water upon which a road is paved, often functioning as a land bridge. A sluice is an aperture through which water flows. Thus, a “causeway sluice” is a tunnel through which water flows from one side of a causeway to another. In line 3, “thongs” of course refers to flip-flops, not to racy lingerie. In the phrase, “I wade into the shallows on up-ended blue-black shells of mussels,” it’s obvious what the speaker is talking about, but we may also hear the faint and punning suggestion that the speaker, an aging man, is upholding himself on his own “shells of muscles;” “blue-black” may even suggest the tendency of aging flesh to bruise easily. 

He then describes the mussels as “savoring the current.” This may literally be what they are doing, but it is also, more figuratively, what the speaker aspires to do—to savor the current moment. This is contrasted with the fact that the mussels are “ancient as time.” An obvious hyperbole of course, but mussels do have a lifespan similar to modern humans, and here too the aging speaker may be playfully identifying with the mussels he is hunting for. They are so plentiful on the seabed that he describes them as an “underwater lea”, a veritable meadow of mollusks. Later, when he describes them as “bits of armored flesh with habits of plants”, we are correct to infer that he is saying that mussels live a botanical lifestyle, but we might also envision the mussels as being enrobed in plants, like nun’s habits. 

The speaker continues the botanical comparison when he says: “I’ve long been waiting to pick these flowers, snippets of sea life for a floating basket.” It is in these lines too that we get our first concrete sense of what the mussels figuratively refer to—poems. As I’ve mentioned on the show before, the connection between poems and flowers is well established in the literary tradition—the word “anthology” literally means a gathering of flowers, and here the speaker says in so many words that he is looking to create an anthology. The mussels are “snippets of sea life,” but so are poems just like this one. He plans to place the literal mussels in his basket which floats on the water, but one can also think of a book of poems as a floating basket, an evanescent receptacle for what actually matters, the poems themselves. In Edo Japan, sophisticated urban society was often referred to as ukiyo, “the floating world” a Buddhist reference to the transience and insubstantiality of such a life. Here too, “floating” may refer to the notorious insubstantiality of poetry collections as such. 

Now that we know that this poem is not only an Ars Mollusca but an Ars Poetica, we are better equipped to appreciate what follows. “Those who dine on what the oceans yield have learned a fine disdain.” That is, those who have cultivated a diet of reading poetry, that mysterious art form which originates in the oceanic unconscious, have learned how to distinguish the good from the mediocre. When the speaker describes “knowing that these wild mussels are slight of flesh, I search the crowded beds for prizes.” he is not only for the juiciest mussels, but those poems of his which he thinks are most likely to win prizes, despite his own humble self-assessment. 

Touchingly, he says: “in the crush of shells and stones the odds of great gain while the tide permits are small—and yet one hopes.” In other words, the odds of producing great work in the hustle and bustle of life, during the brief intervals when inspiration strikes, during the brief span of one’s life, are small— but the hope for greatness leads one to endure in the hunt, and to write as much as one can, “loading the basket weight by weight.” In the end, however, all the poet can do is “take what vision, reach, and chance bring to his hand.” The poet, like all, is subject to the limitations of their own genius, ambition, and luck. Like a bird of prey, he “scavenges” upon the bountiful products of his former selves, looking for the choicest morsels.

 All the while, like a maritime John Donne, he has “the gong of bell buoys in his ears” – the bells which toll his imminent mortality, the dangers of the sea from which he draws. We should note that the title of one of Schreiber’s early collections was “Bell Buoys,” and so here, the reference recalls not only the dangers of the sea and the association with funereal church bells, but the promise and nostalgia of the poet’s early aspirations. 

Finally, it is possible that Schreiber is thinking here of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Bell Buoy,” in which a personified buoy defiantly claims that it would rather wrestle with the powers of nature directly than the powers of religion, exemplified by the church bell. Here, the gathering of mussels and the writing and gathering of poems are both acts of spiritual significance, both existential encounters with oceanic nature, whether of the world or of the mind. 

Let’s now go back and read the second half of the poem. We concluded the last section with the sound of bell buoys in the speaker’s ears. We now reach a volta, sonically marked by the first of only two true rhymes in the poem, between “ears” and “years.” Now he says: 

I have been scavenging

In truth down all these years,

With worry at my back

Waiting for the random

Hand at last to pluck

Me from the salty garden

Where I’ve grown old and sipped

A fraction of the vast

Surrounding sea.

                        So rapt

In sea dreams I’m possessed

By rhythms of waves and feel

In ebb and flow of blood

And air a tidal pull

Straining the old divide.

Entranced, I might have drowned,

And willingly, for shadow

Shimmering just beyond

The surface beckons, widens,

Promises. Instead

I wake to wariness

And take up what I’ve made

A substitute for loss.

Though I’m not done, it’s time

To leave these timeless pools

Where, bent and intent, I’ve roamed

Gathering onyx shells.

Regaining a land-bearing,

I make my way to shore

And like a laggard day-

Dreaming schoolboy, hearing

The bell and dimly aware,

Head home the longer way. 

            In a dazzling reorientation, the speaker now directly compares himself to the mussels he is gathering, a connection he had only hinted at previously. In identifying himself one rung down on the food chain, the speaker now adopts a more passive view of life— perhaps, instead of actively gathering physical or literary sustenance from life, he has merely been filter feeding, taking what comes by dint of tidal necessity. Speaking from the mussel’s perspective, the gatherer of mussels now takes on a menacing significance. Indeed, the gatherer of mussels is now Death itself, the random hand which will pluck him from the world, where he has sipped only “a fraction of the vast surrounding sea.” 

            Envisioning himself as a mussel, lulled by the repetitive beatings of the tides, which he identifies with the beatings of his blood, the speaker’s sense of identify begins to slip as he enters a kind of imaginative trance which “strains the old divide.” This “old divide” is the divide between self and other, human and world, life and death. As many have remarked, including me, the ocean often has this kind of hypnotically monistic effect. 

            Becoming caught in a vision of non-dualism can be profound, but it can also be perilous: “Entranced, I might have drowned, and willingly, for shadow shimmering just beyond the surface beckons, widens, promises.” Here the sea itself is a siren, luring the speaker to his death, and it is easy to understand psychologically how the myth of the sirens could have originated in the first place. At the last minute, however, he snaps to his senses, and takes up his basket, his anthology of poems, which he has made “his substitute for loss.” 

            In this small scene of spiritual drama, Schreiber outlines what I have always felt is one of the most fascinating tensions in life— that between the artist and the mystic. Both seek to develop an intense and intimate relationship with reality, both seek to transcend everyday life, and both seek to ultimately bypass rationality to reach more profound depths of experience. And yet, the artist is of this world, and revels in the materials and experiences of this world, whereas the mystic dedicates themselves wholly to a world beyond. For the mystic, art is merely a ladder by which to scale to the heights of communion or unity with God, a ladder which can then be discarded after it has served its function. For the artist however, art is valuable in itself, and the world’s appearances are too important to discard altogether—truth is found within them, not outside them. Thus, to the mystic, the artist is one whose heart is in the right place, but who is unwilling to take the final and necessary step of cleaving to the ultimate truth which lies beyond language and appearances. To the artist, the mystic is one who, in seeking to gain all, has lost the most sacred thing of all, the taste for living in the world of multifarious experience. In this poem, the speaker is tempted to end life’s suffering through mystic annihilation, but ultimately sobers up, and looks to his poetry for consolation instead. 

            To everything there is a season, as the preacher saith, and the speaker recognizes “though I’m not done, it’s time to leave these timeless pools.” Is this a farewell to poetry, or simply a recognition that one can only swim in the metaphysical ocean for so long before one must return to the sober forms of everyday life? We have already scented the whiff of John Donne in this poem, and here Schreiber might be playing with that suggestion— he might be saying “though I did not, in my own estimation, reach the level of Donne, I nevertheless gave a good crack at poetry.” We may also recall Donne’s famous statement that every man is “a part of the main,” that is, a part of the sea. The speaker has been tempted to see himself as “part of the sea,” and almost drowned because of it. No more of that. “A landsman, I” as Winters said. 

            Spiritually vivified by his time in the sea, the speaker nevertheless recognizes the importance of “gaining a land-bearing.” Despite his age, the experience of the Romantic child has awoken in him again. We end with a poignant contrast between the youthful spirit of the “laggard, day-dreaming schoolboy,” and the old body’s dim awareness of encroaching death. As a side note, one of my favorite linguistic coincidences is the fact that the word “aware” is spelled the same way as the transliterated word aware in Japanese, which means pity, especially the pity associated with the awareness of life’s transience. The speaker, very much aware of life’s transience, seasoned by the beauties and vicissitudes of a life in poetry, seeks to savor as much of the world’s “salty garden” as he can, and takes the scenic route home, filled with the hard joy of one who has reckoned with the depths. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

Musseling

Through the causeway sluice

The sea pours with the tide.

In rubber thongs I brace

Myself for cold and wade

Into the shallows on

Up-ended blue-black shells

Of mussels. As I lean

Over their draining pools

They’re savoring the current

Through parted beaks. Jammed tight,

Barnacle-crusted, ancient

As time, half-calcified:

An underwater lea

Endlessly spreading. In knots

Of rock and fiber, they

Remain immobile, bits

Of armored flesh with habits

Of plants. I’ve long been waiting

To pick these flowers, snippets

Of sea life for a floating

Basket.

            But those who dine

On what the oceans yield

Have learned a fine disdain.

And knowing that these wild

Mussels are slight of flesh

I search the crowded beds

For prizes. In the crush

Of shells and stones the odds

Of great gain while the tide 

Permits are small—and yet

One hopes. And so I load

The basket weight by weight,

Taking what vision, reach

And chance bring to my hand.

In this attentive crouch

I scavenge in no end

Of plenty with the gong

Of bell buoys in my ears.

I have been scavenging

In truth down all these years,

With worry at my back

Waiting for the random

Hand at last to pluck

Me from the salty garden

Where I’ve grown old and sipped

A fraction of the vast

Surrounding sea.

                        So rapt

In sea dreams I’m possessed

By rhythms of waves and feel

In ebb and flow of blood

And air a tidal pull

Straining the old divide.

Entranced, I might have drowned,

And willingly, for shadow

Shimmering just beyond

The surface beckons, widens,

Promises. Instead

I wake to wariness

And take up what I’ve made

A substitute for loss.

Though I’m not done, it’s time

To leave these timeless pools

Where, bent and intent, I’ve roamed

Gathering onyx shells.

Regaining a land-bearing,

I make my way to shore

And like a laggard day-

Dreaming schoolboy, hearing

The bell and dimly aware,

Head home the longer way.