Robyn Rowland launch speech for Harvesting Darkness

26 Oct

Launch of Harvesting Darkness. New Poems 2019-2023. Robin Morgan, Spinifex Press, September 19th 2023 by Robyn Rowland

Once again we have a launch of a truly wonderful book of poetry from Robin Morgan, a book with vitality, with poetic skill at its finest. And what can I say, but that you chose your publisher wisely, Robin. Spinifex, an excellent feminist press of 32 years under the committed hands of Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein, both well-known authors in their own right. Good mutual choice of course!

It’s a terrifying honour to be asked to launch this book. We met decades ago, and I am proud that we were each asked for a poem to begin and end a fine book called Radically Speaking. Feminism Reclaimed out of Spinifex in 1996.

And the truth is… I don’t really want to launch this book. I really want just to read it to you …. but, then, I guess that is not my job! I really want to read it out loud, and keep reading and keep unveiling and delving in. Because the movement within is far from linear, the movement is helix (symbol of resilience), nautilus, convex, concave, whirling between space and the interior of the body, back and forth between hope and achievement, with yet a fear of failure to change the world as much as we wanted to, as much as is necessary.

See how I say, ‘we’. Because this book and its companion, Dark Matter published with Spinifex in 2018, drew me into a convergence with Robin the activist, the poet and the older woman; because sisterhood IS global’, is our fall-net, our buoyancy, our connection.

When Robin writes in the first poem, ‘ These hands’:

An old woman’s hands,
strong still but with loosening grip;
bones delicate, gloved in blue embroidery’s
prominent veins, skin spotted brown
as a hen’s egg

… they are my hands also. Because so much in these poems, as great poems do, recalls me back to myself.

When she writes to her son in ‘The Will’, of poems ‘as my real divestiture’ and of him in ‘This Dark Hour’ ‘when blood of my blood /bone of my bone, child grown to manhood now – stranger, intimate, not too distant but apart – lies safe’ – I too breathe that love toward my own sons.

In your TED reading Robin, in 2015, you said you fell in love with poetry at 3 years of age; with poetry’s rhythms, music, metaphors, imagery, ‘poetry being the essence of communication’ ‘the discipline, the distillation’. And this last word you emphasised. All this is achieved in your own work. And so we get ‘time intimate as an embalmer’ (2018, p69) and ‘the garnet taste of plum’. (2018, p40).

But I cheat here. That poem is from Robin’s earlier book with Spinifex in 2018, Dark Matter. But how can I launch the one without the other companion striding beside. These books are woven into each other. Similarities in politics are striking as Robin reaches into horror and gives us in Kiglai, 1994 (p10) the murders of 750 patients in a mental facility in Rwanda by Hutu militiamen; and in 2023, the massacre of an indigenous tribe along the Amazon. So much cruelty still alive in our world.

From these earthen terrors to the wonders of science and of the body; the entering in both books into the visceral, so that the brain, and its ‘dark matter’ are investigated deeply, the metaphor flinging out towards space. And we look at the names of these books and their sections: In Dark Matter, Doing the Blood Work, The New Old Woman, Grey Matter and finally Dark Matter. In Harvesting Darkness: Reaping, Threshing, Winnowing. Tough active words, fearless words, signifying strength, valour.

Science tells us: ‘Dark matter's exact identity remains a mystery in space’ and that ‘The dark energy of the brain is a concept that's recently been making its way into the scientific field between the dark energy of the universe and the way in which brain processes occur.’

And the poet uses these images to enter her own Parkinson’s, investigating it poetically. Darkness, dark matter: death, space, the brain. How well she has chosen this continuing movement.

My grandmother had Parkinson’s and I helped to care for her with my mother until she was 68, but minimally, in the ways of a 16 year old. Her path was nothing like this. I never would have comprehended that this ailment could inform a poetry so powerfully, so alive, so observant and penetrating. Nor that the poems on it in Dark Matter could contain lines of humour: ‘who needs to walk in a straight line anyway’, and ‘balance has never been my strong point’!

But the poignancy of increasing loss is strong:

when you grieve for yourself –
not pity, you understand, but mourning –
it’s not for old times or missed boats.
There’s one reason only: you find you’ve lost stillness (Dark Matter p.52)

And yet in the garden before dawn in ‘this dark hour’ ‘there is the small, still hour’ of ‘immeasurable lightness’. And the breeze of gratitude. And so through the poems, a balancing; a weighing of light and dark.

Here is an old woman, but what is that!? At 82, with Parkinson’s, a woman whose mind is still sharp, whose eyes see metaphor, who engages, who feels and explores, adventures into the difficult, her own degeneration slowly forthcoming – very slowly I might add. And old, how to face death? She does that in 'The Old Woman is Talking with Death’ a conversation that unfolds a character ‘Death’ who created god in itself to quell the fears of children, but ended up giving the impression through that god, that we can live forever! Finally the poet, the old human woman, realises in the sweet smile of death that sometimes it is welcomed but that it too is an old woman:

It must be hard on you, Death. To always feel unwelcome everywhere

Not hard at all. You’d be surprised. The old, the ill, those in unrelenting pain, or in despair. And of course, the poets, the mad, the newborn ….

They see you as you really are?

Oh, child. They see me as a thousand faces, call me by a thousand names, from Thanatos to Entropy. But some do see me as the old woman you are.

The old woman I am… but then if you are … if I…then there is nothing to fear, is there?

I’ve never been able to find it, if it exists.

And Death smiles and the smile is ‘beautiful’. (2023, p48)

Her repertoire of movement jangled, her increasing tremble, unstill, Robin’s ‘curiosity’ about what she will make of Parkinson’s rather than what it will make of her leads to poems I think unique in their delving. She says she will, and she does, use words unneeded by her before: e.g. lurch, stumble, weave, stagger, fumble, stoop. (p40)

And so in Harvesting Darkness, this exploration of the new old woman leads to this magnificent poem: ‘The Ringmaster’s Desertion’

I must lie down where all the ladders start
in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart

—‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, William Butler Yeats

My body gnarls around me now
as I excrete myself
calcifying to an exoskeleton,
a womb, home, shell, trap, carapace,
sanctuary, chrysalis, coffin. Why
the drive, then, to send these messages?
Does the snail long to be seen for itself?
Does the crustacean rattle
I am alive inside here? A rag
is ripped from some larger cloth. A bone
is a fragment of scaffold. A heart is just a muscle.
But my muscles have minds of their own:
I must hunch to gain perspective.
Only then, stooping high, dare I recognize
a creature arrayed in rag and bone who scuttles
across this intersection as the light
turns red, weaving, while laughing at the pain,
through the gridlocked traffic in my brain.

How do feminist activism and poetry come together? Through knowing the world’s cruelty, through acting against it, through writing it into you and out of you, so that there is no doubt that both love and hopelessness ride together. as in ‘This Worthless Act’. Always, we are wary that all our efforts, all our shouting, all our careful argument is lost: ‘failed as a saviour, misnamed as a poet’. (p32)

Like other poets, I share with Robin the deep ambiguity of witness in poetry, versus action in reality. And always we fear failure in both.

But I think Carolyn Forché in her anthology Against Forgetting would say bearing witness through poetry is resistance. And through bearing witness, whether it be personal or political – and we know they are the one – change does come. It happens and continues to happen. As Robin said in an interview in 2000:

‘Even 15 years ago, phrases like family violence and sexual harassment didn't exist. There was no name for date rape … The triumphs seem ephemeral because they get absorbed into the fabric so fast. One of the most important things is to stop and claim the good things. History needs it, kids need it, we need it.’

At times there is a harshness here: as in ‘Taxidermist’, ‘Regret’, ‘The Fish’, where failure lurks as if we still haven’t learned the lesson of the value of that flaw in the rug; the nature of being human and not super women who get every little thing right. Go easy dear sister.

What has the poet learned which she shares in these books:

- old loves never lose their impact

- youth was truly vital, with its hectic busyness; old age truly wise

- poetry solves nothing, but salves all

- the world continues both hideous and loving

- death and slowly growing into physical loss can awaken us to a precision of honesty, a truly beautiful gift of insight.

As well as our agenda for political change, justice and equality, Feminism is important to us because of its deep connectivity, its humanity, its ‘moral intelligence’ as opposed to prescriptive moralism, as Andrea Dworkin put it. Poetry is the way into our deeper selves, its power resides in its ability to connect, to make us think, feel, change and experience at some levels, a sense of awe. It can make us tremble, it can make us brave.

And these are poems of valour. These are books of a unique kind. Certain Evenings, n powerful poetry, the poet’s humanity is naked. Her woundings have brought to us these pearls, as the oyster creates its own, in the poem ‘Pearls’, from winding itself around its gritty wound on towards ‘satin iridescent art’:

She slept naked sometimes, wearing only pearls,
stared in the mirror at her weathered face and smiled,
brushed silver hair grown back post-chemo as white curls—
but noticed something in the eyes: obsessive, wild
with pain as an oyster frantic to wrap the wound
gouged raw by sand grains pour its tender flesh,
internal bandage self on self, winding round
to layer smooth agony’s sharp edge
toward satin iridescent art. …

Finally, I want to close by reading the deeply moving and apt, ‘Certain Evenings’ (p50) in its entirety. I’d like to suggest you keep this poem close as years slip by us:

We sat in the darkening garden lit
by candle flame and fireflies. The round wood
table drew us in. We weren’t wealthy, but we were
content. We ate seafood, roast vegetables, salad
crisp with herbs from the garden—mint, basil, sorrel.
We drank, we laughed; we talked of poetry, films,
music, politics. The birds chanted vespers. We
were three people alive in a time of planetary grief,
three artists trying to live clearly and die well.
You really can’t ask more than that. Or less.
If someday in a future unimagined
you sit in such a garden at such an hour
perhaps you might remember us, who went
before, who found some way some time
somehow not to despair, some means
to make things beautiful
and to make beautiful things.
We passed this way.