Entry 235 — JoAnne Growney’s Selected
Beyond Reason Reasonable
I ended a previous review of JoAnne Growney’s poetry with the
observation that she “clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot
more.” I was referring to her fine “Can A Mathematician See
Red?” which is also in her latest collection, Red Has No Reason,
for it is a 79-page selected poems (available at Amazon), with most
of the best poems from previous collections (many of them
revised) as well as new ones. Red, and other colors, are important
for Growney again, as in her “April,” in which a “woodpecker
drums indigo into the poet’s blue days,” but she moves (with green
steps) through the colors, finally to “yield to the rainbow’s red
ending.”
Growney’s poems celebrate many such “red endings,” as when, in
“Exercise,” her persona jogs around a warm-up track for harness
racers, then into city streets where, oblivious of bystanders’ stares,
and cars honking at her, she loses herself in regions “where words
draft/ themselves into swinging, ringing bells.” Most important to
her, though, is not the beauty of colors, however important that
indeed is, but that they are beyond reason. Her forte, that is, may be
the unreasonablenesses truer than truth she surprises her readers
with–like the setting of her protagonist’s stroll in “Like a Cat,”
whose sky is “a creature as alive as rocks/ but not so warm.” Or
like the whole of “Stress Remedy”:
From the barn
bring the cow
to your living room rug.
Sleep
when the cow sleeps.
On your porch
watch the ant
do a task seven times.
Quit
before the ant quits.
Walk out
to the field
where wild mustard waves.
Spend
that gold right away.
Only when I read her “Running,” which she describes as a response
to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” ” did I realize that Roethke
is a key influence on her, albeit fully absorbed and re-created. A
villanelle, like Roethke’s poem, “Running,” builds its self-portrait
with “My sleep is brief. I rise to run again” and “I live by going
faster than I can,” Roethke’s builds its with “I wake to sleep, and
take my waking slow,” and “I learn by going where I have to go.”
Two beautifully executed formal poems, the later one with the
added richness of its connection to a portion of poetry’s best past.
Less direct but still potent is the connection of such poems of
Growney’s as “Stress Remedy” to the inspired babble of such
poems of Roethke’s as “Where Knock is Open Wide,” which
begins, “A kitten can/ Bite with his feet;/ Papa and Mama/ Have
more teeth.// Sit and play/ under the rocker/ Until the cows/ All
have puppies.”
I thought at times, too, of Emily Dickinson while reading this
collection: the wry sudden twists of thought or wording. As in the
strangely deep wisdom of:
14 Syllables
A hen lays eggs,
one by one;
the way you
count life
is life.
Growney has Dickinson’s interest in religion, too–but is much
more relaxed about it. Take, for instance:
I Don’t Know Much about Gods
but they don’t live in houses brightly painted
on narrow streets in small towns and don’t
celebrate the ordinary as I do and my friends.
I doubt Paradise. I see mostly what is small
and not too far away, dislike to start
new things, will build on old foundations.
No river runs in me, no sea surrounds.
My corner is a tidy garden plot.
I plant and nourish, pick the crop–
with care I cook, enjoy my fare, wash up,
and sleep to rise another day. Gods should
introduce themselves to girls like me.
What could be more Dickinsonian than the flat, “I doubt Paradise.”
I find Growney’s last sentence funnier than anything I remember of
Dickinson’s, though. Such a mordant “polite” turn on almost every
skeptic’s wonder about why God, if He exists, refuses to show
himself.
Canny observations are one of Growney’s strengths, and self-
revelation–concerning situations most of us find ourselves in, but
also in mathematical ones rare in poetry, and therefore especially
appreciated, too. This passage from her “A Taste of Mathematics”
particularly appeals to me: “Hot peppers/ are like mathematics–/
with strong flavor/ that takes over/ what they enter,.” A wonderful
simile out of ordinary sensual life to capture the hold mathematics
can have on those in love with it–as well the magically (beyond-
reason) number-infused Universe, itself.
I don’t feel I’ve come close to doing full justice to this collection. I
hope my comments have been at least preliminarily useful.