Jan Zwicky
Jan Zwicky
Biography
Jan Zwicky is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Forge, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, and Wisdom & Metaphor. Zwicky obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto and subsequently taught at a number of North American universities. As both poet and philosopher, she frequently focuses on music, the natural world, and questions of ecology.
Zwicky’s poetry has been published in translation in a number of European languages, and she lectures widely in North America and Europe. A native of Alberta, she now lives on Quadra Island, unceded territory with a complex history including Coast Salish and Kwakwalan influences.
Sample of Poet's Work
Courage
And now you know that it won’t turn out as it should,
that what you did was not enough,
that ignorance, old evil, is enforced
and willed, and loved, that it
is used to manufacture madness, that it is the aphrodisiac
of power and the crutch of lassitude, you,
an ordinary heart, just functional, who knows
that no one’s chosen by the gods, the aspens
and the blue-eyed grass have voices of their own,
what will you do,
now that you sense the path unraveling
beneath you?
Sky unraveling, unraveling
the sea, the sea that still sees everywhere
and looks at every thing —
not long. What will you do,
you, heart, who know the gods don’t flee,
that they can only be denied.
Who guess their vengeance.
It has been a long hill, heart.
But now the view is good.
Or don’t you still believe
the one sin is refusal, and refusal to keep seeking
when refused?
Come, step close to the edge, then.
You must look, heart. You must look.
String Practice
The fingers of the left hand
are the chambers of the heart.
The thumb is character.
The heart alone
is voiceless. By itself, it knows
but cannot think, and so
it cannot close the door to fear.
Thought is the right arm
and it moves like breath.
The fingers of the right hand
are thought’s tendons, which,
with practice, will take root along
the bone of breath. Breathe
from the shoulder. It is thought
that pulls the bright gut of the heart
to speech.
Breathe also
from the knees, which tune
the ear to earth, its turning,
and the double-handed movement
of the day and night.
If the knees are locked
the mind is deaf:
it fills the house with clamour, then,
but never music.
The collarbone
is the lintel of the voice,
and the breastbone
bears its weight.
In their house, the heart lives
and the breath that is not bone
until thought touches it.
These are the elements,
which is to say,
the difficulty.
When we lack experience,
it is the motions of the heart
that most perplex us.
But of all these things
thought is the hardest,
though its beauty is a distant river
in its plain of light.
The Geology of Norway
But when his last night in Norway came, on 10 December, he greeted it
with some relief, writing that it was perfectly possible that he would
never return.
–Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein
I have wanted there to be
no story. I have wanted
only facts. At any given point in time
there cannot be a story: time,
except as now, does not exist.
A given point in space
is the compression of desire. The difference
between this point and some place else
is a matter of degree.
This is what compression is: a geologic epoch
rendered to a slice of rock you hold between
your finger and your thumb.
That is a fact.
Stories are merely theories. Theories
are dreams.
A dream
is a carving knife
and the scar it opens in the world
is history.
The process of compression gives off thought.
I have wanted
the geology of light.
They tell me despair is a sin.
I believe them.
The hand moving is the hand thinking,
and despair says the body does not exist.
Something to do with bellies and fingers
pressing gut to ebony,
thumbs on keys. Even the hand
writing is the hand thinking. I wanted
speech like diamond because I knew
that music meant too much.
And the fact is, the earth is not a perfect sphere.
And the fact is, it is half-liquid.
And the fact is there are gravitational anomalies. The continents
congeal, and crack, and float like scum on cooling custard.
And the fact is,
the fact is,
and you might think the fact is
we will never get to the bottom of it,
but you would be wrong.
There is a solid inner core.
Fifteen hundred miles across, iron alloy,
the pressure on each square inch of its heart
is nearly thirty thousand tons.
That’s what I wanted:
words made of that: language
that could bent light.
Evil is not darkness,
it is noise. It crowds out possibility,
which is to say
it crowds out silence.
History is full of it, it says
that no one listens.
The sound of wind in leaves,
that was what puzzled me, it took me years
to understand that it was music.
Into silence, a gesture.
A sentence: that it speaks.
This is the mystery: meaning.
Not that these folds of rock exist
but that their beauty, here,
now, nails us to the sky.
The afternoon blue light in the fjord.
Did I tell you
I can understand the villagers?
Being, I have come to think,
is music; or perhaps
it’s silence. I cannot say.
Love, I’m pretty sure,
is light.
You know, it isn’t
what I came for, this bewilderment
by beauty. I came
to find a word, the perfect
syllable, to make it reach up,
grab meaning by the throat
and squeeze it till it spoke to me.
I wanted language
to hold me still, to be a rock,
I wanted to become a rock myself. I thought
if I could find, and say,
the perfect word, I’d nail
mind to the world, and find
release.
The hand moving is the hand thinking:
what I didn’t know: even the continents
have no place but earth.
These mountains: once higher
than the Himalayas. Formed in the pucker
of a supercontinental kiss, when Europe
floated south of the equator
and you could hike from Norway
down through Greenland to the peaks
of Appalachia. Before Iceland existed.
Before the Mediterranean
evaporated. Before it filled again.
Before the Rockies were dreamt of.
And before these mountains,
the rock raised in them
chewed by ice that snowed from water
in which no fish had swum. And before that ice,
the almost speechless stretch of the Precambrian:
two billion years, the planet
swathed in air that had no oxygen, the Baltic Shield
older, they think, than life.
So I was wrong.
This doesn’t mean
that meaning is a bluff.
History, that’s what
confuses us. Time
is not linear, but it’s real.
The rock beneath us drifts,
and will, until the slow cacophony of magma
cools and locks the continents in place.
Then weather, light,
and gravity
will be the only things that move.
And will they understand?
Will they have a name for us? – Those
perfect changeless plains,
those deserts,
the beach that was this mountain,
and the tide that rolls for miles across
its vacant slope.