"Sentences of Light"

FEATURED AUTHOR—ROBERT MORGAN "Sentences of Light" Maggie Anderson IT'S BAD MANNERS, I KNOW, to introduce a poemwith an explanation of its origins. In this case, however, I'll risk a lack of tact in order to say a few things I want to say about the poet, Robert Morgan. When I heard about the special issue of Appalachian Heritage on Morgan's work, I told Patrick Bizzaro thatI would certainly like to contribute something. I had in mind an homage, a poem in which I would create the sense of admiration and gratitude I have for Robert Morgan's poems. I was eagerly rereading all the poems, dazzled again by Morgan's mix of dictions, his ability to slip gracefully from the homely to the cosmopolitan in the space of a few lines. In the poem "Appleglow," for example, he names both "(Aunt) Ida's dahlias" and the "avoirdupois of harvest," as well as "supernovas," "storm-epiphany," "Mt. Rushmore," and "Golden Delicious." Nearly every poem is a feast of vocabulary in different registers, interspersed with a savor of silence, a tenderness toward the unsaid. As Morgan himself writes in "Under Cover," the first poem in The Strange Attractor, his new and selected poems: . ..Something in the blood says don't violate the poise of wood and wild, don't insult with words this place where every bush may hide an ambush, and each syllable be heard by hidden, larger presence. I fell in love again with Morgan's catalogues of tools and machines, birds and plants, and with the edginess that comes of his plainspoken common sense laid alongside his considerable "book learning." My ownpoem wasn't coming alongverywell, but I was having a wonderful time rereading. I moved on to my favorite of Morgan's fiction, The Mountains Won't Remember Us; then I left for my vacation in Denmark. Sometimes, a loved poet comes clearer to us out of context, away from home. Part of my affection for Robert Morgan's poems comes from our mutual love for and understanding of the southern Appalachian Mountains and culture. When I read him, I feel 37 geographically, as well as poetically, at home. No landscape could be more different from the southern mountains than the low islands and coastlines that make up Denmark. Water is everywhere here, and bright yellow fields and astonishing cloud formations across the wide sky. On my second day here, some friends took me to a local museum in Kalundborg. Here, there was a good-sized exhibition of the implements of daily life through the ages. Immediately, I was takenback into Robert Morgan's wonderful lists from which he generates metaphorical and moral equivalents. I thought of poems such as "Toolshed," "Hog-Wire Fence," "Odometer," "Harvest Sink," or the tour deforce "Mockingbird." One of the surest ways we recollect the world is by naming it — seed by seed, blade by blade, "trunk and thicket." And one way of paying homage to a poet's work is by remembering it outside the expected occasions. Here, in a country where the highest mountain is only 35 feet high and is called, without irony, "Heaven Mountain," how unlikely to be hearing in my mind the poems of Robert Morgan. Out of that surprise of deep connection, I hurried back to the house to put down this epistolary poem, "Letter to Robert Morgan from Denmark." His poems are wholly present to me here, like "sentences of light." —Kalundborg, Denmark June 2004 Letter to Robert Morgan from Denmark You would have liked this local museum, twelve rooms of tools and bowls and weapons from the Stone Age to the present. In the beginning were only sharp edges, and round stones for grinding down and building up. Then the thin blades crooked into teeth for traps and hooks for fishlines. Everything was linked by size and the shape of a single hand to food or warmth. Later, shiny copper pots and ladles gave way to servants in the basements of big houses with pianos and paintings on the walls. The workers hung their wooden spoons on a nail in the rafters. Offices filled up with bureaucracy's paraphernalia: stamps, seals...