When the Mountains Open

V i ? mim Gs^Q^5) V When the Mountains Open by Marion Hodge A couple of months ago I received notice from Jay Robert Reese that the members ofthe Appalachian Writers Association were to meet and that I was invited, as were the other members, to read a poem. I had something I wanted to say to the poets of Appalachia, so I wrote a poem that said it. I had been working on the poem for several weeks, but I was not spurred to complete it until I read two things in the Appalachian Journal. The first thing I read was a statement by Jim Wayne Miller: A weakness ofsome contemporary poetry is a tendency to turn the world into a metaphorfor the poet's mental or emotional state, or into a symbol of the collective unconscious, which has become the god ofsome contemporarypoets....The recognizable world is broken into bits; it floats about in the phlogiston-like ambience of the poems—disembodied hands, arms, bones, stones. Such poetry is weak because it lacks a real connection with the external world. ...It's solipsistic, self-centered, blind, finally trivial. It doesn't sufficiently engage the world around us; it withdraws into an interior world, dragging afew holy objects with it.1 What bothered me about this statement was what seemed to me to be Miller's utter denunciation ofthe symbolic, expressive way of writing and what seemed to me to be his utter support for the modern mimetic way, the modern list of drab and sentimental images.2 What bothered me was Miller's support for "a real connection with the external world" solely. What we need, in fact, is more, not less, of the expressive, the mythic, the symbolic, the prophetic. It seems to me that the very poems that Miller likes are the ones in which the "recognizable everyday world is broken into bits."The poet fastens onto a little piece ofthe world like a leech because it is the only world he knows, not having been given a faith and lacking the power to achieve one. The interior world that Miller condemns is, in fact, the only world there is. The deeper we go into the external world the more we realize that where we are there is where we are here, and the medium of that journey is the imagination, the interior world itself. Should we 46 choose to go into any physical object, the snout of a black bear, say, or a stone embedded in the blood-red bank ofa mountain stream, we find that eventually we wind up in outer space; when we go into an object, between its molecules and, deeper, between its very atoms, we find outselves in an empty universe where the molecules and atoms are as far apart as the planets and stars. We have made the great circle back to our present situation and our present identity. This kind of wondrous voyage and marvelous arrival at truth cannot be achieved by looking merely at the surface of things. The voyage and arrival results in a glorious, totally satisfying sense of unity, a knowledge that all things are one, that each individual object is a part of the whole. There is no death, Einstein taught us long ago (and poets taught us even longer ago), there is only metamorphosis. Certainly, the image by itself can help us see clearer, but the image itself should not be the be-all of poetry, for the image itself lures us into stasis, the stasis of imagination, and that stasis is slavery. The image by itself halts us at the supreme moment of the beginning. The image by itself binds us at the very point we should leap forth to begin the voyage to the exquisitely peaceful destination. We need poets who, like the Ancient Mariner, have gone out and have returned to tell us what it is like out there. We need poets who, like Sir Gawain, have gone out and have returned to tell us of the faith and peace they have found. The other thing 1 read was a poem by Bob Snyder called "A Prophet's Honor." It...