(This article originally appeared in Helicon Nine, The Journal of Women's Arts and Letters. Number 10, Spring/Summer 1984, pp. 60-69.)
The Poetry Worm: A Portrait of Colette Inez
by Dennis Bernstein
"I sometimes think about the great vanity we put toward out poems and the sun is just out there, big, bulbous, shining, making our breathing and our life possible."
Colette Inez is a poet and she is a composer, a soundsmith with a passionate love of life and perfect pitch. Listen:
Sidelights, angels, fifes and harps
Aha, aha
it's no ordinary morning
Brother Love has gone for logs...
"Gospels in the Drifts"
Harps and fifes, logs crackle in the ear. And hear once again the musician at work:
Best to forego pain, the surgical brain
doesn't love nouns.
Croaker, monger, medic, quack,
sawbones, prober, jawsmith, vet
I am well, sound, hale, cross references with fit,
snuffling the morning air, alive and taking names.
"Alive and Taking Names"
"I sometimes think of poems as chamber music: maybe a solo, then maybe two instruments playing off one another, an intimate chamber music. Sometimes I even hear a poem before I get the words."
Does music make meaning? "I love the sound of things so much that there are times when meaning doesn't matter to me. There are times when the sheer seduction, the sheer food of the words in my mouth is enough."
A partial menu of Colette's homecooked titles for your tongue's perusal: "Love in a Silo of Dreams"; "The Sky is an English Priest Undoing His Coat"; "Father Went Out Like a Faulty Fuse"; "The Bonewalkers, Post World War Three Underground Dream"; "Balloon Sleeves and Velvet, The Country Turned"; "Startalk in the Greek Luncheonette"; "Triptych"; "Skokie River Cadenzas." Add these to the titles of Colette's three collections of poetry, The Woman Who Loved Worms, Alive and Taking Names, and her most recent work Eight Minutes From the Sun, and the reader begins to have a clue as to the depth and breadth of this lively poet's curiosity. There is a much to be found in the investigation of a single wormcell as there is in the exploration of the angles of stars and the genius of sunlight.
The Woman Who Loved Worms
(From a Japanese legend)
Disdaining butterflies
as frivolous,
she puttered with caterpillars,
and wore a coarse kimono,
crinkled and loose at the neck.
Refused to tweeze her brows
to crescents,
and scowled beneath dark bands
of caterpillar fur.
Even the stationery
on which she scrawled
unkempt calligraphy,
startled the jade-inlaid
indolent ladies,
whom she despised
like the butterflies
wafting kimono sleeves
through senseless poems
about moonsets and peonies;
popular rot of the times.
No she loved worms,
blackening the moon of their nails
with mud and slugs,
root gnawing grubs,
and the wing case of beetles.
And crouched in the garden,
tugging at her unpinned hair,
weevils queuing across her bare
and unbound feet.
Swift as wasps, the years.
Midge, tick and maggot words
crowded her haikus
and lines on her skin turned her old,
thin as a spinster cricket.
Noon in the snow pavilion,
gulping heated saki
she recalled Lord Unamuro,
preposterous toad
squatting by the teatray,
proposing with conditions,
a suitable marriage.
Ha! She stoned imaginary butterflies,
and pinching dirt,
crawled to death's cocoon
dragging a moth to inspect
in the long afternoon.
Who is this woman who loved worms? "I see her in some way, as the older woman I would like to become. I have part of her in me, the imprint, but there's something about that wonderful sense of self that she has. Also, she's cultivating things, she's inspecting the worms. She's the scientist as well, and the lover of precision, but she is very much her own person, however preposterous or larger than life she might sometimes seem."
Is she alive and taking names? "Yes, and giving names, as what we as poets do. I find it gives me great joy to give words to what was a cloud of what was once a blur. So, yes, she is out there giving the worms names and cutting them open."
Sunsong
Sun,
the moth's eye
is in your rise.
It's a flustered summer.
Webworms and slugs
don't imagine
hydrogen,
the improbable bird
of your plainspoken
light.
Helium, helium.
Beetles gleam.
In the field
lobelia cardinalis
doesn't mimic anything
not even your glare,
the brainless fury
of a moderate star,
no more rare
than the common worm
eating the moths
of our summer.
"I seem to have this need for the banquet table, the variety, sort of a smorgasbord. I can't stay with the very definite, identifiable voice. Some people say they can recognize my poetry, but I don't think so. I think that variety fives me a sense of richness in my life and I need that. I believe it's still an outcry and a reaction toward the narrowness of forms in my childhood, where I led the life of medieval austerity, and I've been fighting that with the color of words."
And where did the life of the poet and of the poem begin? Perhaps in another language, before speech. "I began life as love child of medievalist and a Catholic priest. I spent my childhood years in the corridors of a Catholic orphanage on the outskirts of Belgium, under the thumb of the very stern Sisters of Charity. So my sisters were my mother, my father was my brother, and my mothers was no mother."
Crucial Stew
Crucial, that's me mother's word:
this is a crucial election."
Christ's been banged
on the crucial with niles,
it were a bloody saight.
"Giscard d'Estaing respresents
our highest aspiration,"
me mothers writes,
she what
dumped me in an orphanage
in Beljum
is very neat about er person
and as been coresspondin
with an English nicetype
for 23 years;
they ain't ever met.
Crucial, Comrade Crucial.
Communist atheist and Kulak killer
she's ave said of im.
We're two tough ducks, me and me mum,
she what dumped me with the Catolick Sisters.
Still, crucial, the word, seems a bit
thick and damn the bloody Pope
if I care what wins.
I lost me mother from the start
when they ad me stabbing mutton fat
in that groveling pit
of highest aspirations.
Not an eyeheist in saight
but plenty of crucials with niles.
We was very neat about our persons.
"And I'm still haunted by this, still working it out, trying to find a way of giving it continuity, trying to come to terms with it, and I have. but as a source of poetry, it's still a rich field; and poetry gives me a narration for my life. I can invent closenesses and even invent people that I hardly knew: my parents to begin with, who were the ultimate strangers in my life."
Thinking of My Father,
Priest, Nightflight to Home
I'm stuffed inside the blandest bird, tuned
to trombones, red clarinets. Who just struck
that plumsweet note? The fruit's thin skin
singing anything but hymnals.
Cities drift, a snaredrum's blur, windy intakes,
the purple horn's recessional under the stare
of those incurable insomniacs, God and the moon.
I've agreed to perform for the Pope
in an aerial Vatican act. Nonsensical Nuncios.
I'm the dunce hungry to love a priest
on an ethereal trapeze, Daddy's stunning acrobat.
But Papa's in an opera box
sweating out the tunes; Gloria Patria,
the scuttling chords of October leaves,
his cassock's sign in the sacristy.
So many locked away keys, how I fell
from his highwire act into the net of these words,
clues to his ways when he twirled off his collar
and I was conceived, frilled stars, Paris,
Neon struts, le hot jazz blowing its stunts
in the fretworks of loss
where my father made the sign.
The passion transformed, the poems breathe new light into the spaces around them.
Nicolette
Nicolette, my little carrot,
I pull you out of the dark ground
of Pennsylvania
where they blasted my thighs
and scarped your seed away.
You are twelve, my counterpart child
breathlessly running into rooms with acorns and leaves
you want to arrange
for the most senseless beauty.
I have married your father.
We are reconciled to minus signs.
The moist kiss you give me
comes from the forest
of a dark time;
anthracite in the earth,
old signals from the stars
when I walked away from the fill
blood on my legs, a phrase to caulk
the falling walls in a universe
moving light years away
from our promises.
Nicolette, we will meet
in my poem and when the light
calls your name
you will rise like a fern
to live all summer long,
a green integer
in a pure equation of song.
"This is a very special poem to me and one that almost wrote itself. the poem had been waiting, waiting in the winds, waiting inside of me. It had been organized as poem and needed some kind of key, some sort of permission to appear."
"It came. I was in Central Park on a beautiful autumn day. A little girl about twelve flashed by; she had a leaf in her hand. It was so fast, but I felt this pang when I saw her--that this could have been my daughter--and with that I no longer belonged to myself, I belonged to that poem and I had to go home and write it. I began with the image of Nicolette my little carrot and it pored out of me with just a little bit of shaping. Very few arrive like that, the ones that I call the "Athena from the brow of Zeus" poems. But it is an important poem and one in which I also ask forgiveness. And that child is alos me as well as my daughter--we are joined even in name. Colette is a diminutive of Nicolas, which has the feminine Nicol, Nicolette. Colette is really a diminutive of a diminutive. So not only the words but the physical act of joining the names is a comfort."
Along the Garonne
There has always been a road
for wandering daughters, past signs
in another tongue, unfamiliar doors,
vestibules and halls.
In my mother's room ghosts sighed:
"Who are you to make claims?"
"Lovechild," I answer in a rivertown
of cypress and palm,
floodmarks on the house
from an old spring torrent.
My mother and father. Once they walked
through a stream of fragrances, nodded
and stopped, watched hummingbirds shift from bloom
to bloom. Here where I've come to wrangle
with wills and lump sums, he read a passage
from Linnaeus' Species Plantarum,
she fiddled with her gloves.
Beyond bequest and deed, they seem
players in a dream fixed fast to the stage,
and held by light like carvings
on my mothers' comb which arranged
her rippling hair when she was girl
and the clouds above the river climbed
one over the others as they do before rain.
In a rain that leaves a road to children
off to schoool, birds find shelter
where they will. I wait for their song,
and along the Garonne put down these words to say
birds sang when I was born, and will fly known paths
above the cloud of my mother's hair,
my father's books, fading and closed
west of the river's meandering streams.
On the meaning of dreaming: "I have a dream book, and I try and get the edges of dreams. I think dreams also speak of our other life, this other fanciful life that goes on inour unconscious. I try to keep track of my dreams and occasionally they insinuate themselves into poems. So I feel, as artists, keeping in touch with our dreams is another medium, another form of our own life, our own unique set of symbols."
Some advice for beginning writers: "The idea of not giving up, of loving words, loving language, keeping a journal, keeping some track of the spirit life we all have. And to remember that the relationship you have with the poem and with the language is the most important thing, more important than publishers and agents and any of those other things: it is you and the process of writing that is the most meaningful and beautiful part."
Probings Under Vega
When we lug the telescope up to the roof,
stars trapped in our lens, rightside left,
seem less real than their photographs
yet give joy like rare warblers
sighted through binoculars.
Stars, birds, and their followers fly off
at different speeds. We will climb down
a flight of stairs, one foot at a time,
heavy with gear.
Scroll or herald of fire, the sky
transformed to metaphor makes us ask
what is real? Not the sense of our lives
deepened by shadows
and given in an album of shots.
Not the album lying shut on its side
like a dreamer of bodies grouped here
and there at the beach, in a field
flooded with light form our middle-sized star.
Less vivid than our photographs, we stand
in the dark and are gazed upon and fastened
to the shell of a far off, blinding source.
God as an infinite machine
seems possible as we look straight up
at blue-white Vega, one-fourth the age
of the sun, twenty-six light years away,
brightest summer star.
Poems reprinted in this essay originally appeared in the flowing collections by Colette Inez:
The Woman Who Loved Worms, 1972, Doubleday and Company, Inc., New York, New York: "The Woman Who Loved Worms."
Alive and Taking Names, 1978, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio: "Crucial Stew," "Thinking of my Father, Priest, Nightflight to Home," "Nicolette."
Eight Minutes from the Sun, 1983, Saturday Press, Upper Montclair, New Jersey: "Along the Garonne," "Sunsong."
Article reprinted from Helicon Nine, The Journal of Women's Arts and Letters. Number 10, Spring/Summer 1984, pp. 60-69.
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