“Afterword” by Wendy Winn, in “Such Sweet Sorrow: Poems at 90” by Lawrence Hussman.
Wendy Winn’s Afterword for “Such Sweet Sorrow: Poems at 90” by Lawrence Hussman. “Such Sweet Sorrow” is now available for purchase.
If you don’t read a lot of poetry, you might have thought that opening a collection like this was going to be a relaxing treat, best done with a cup of Earl Grey or a glass of single malt at hand, and a cat on your lap.
Even if you do read a lot of poetry, you might have been attracted to this collection’s title, Such Sweet Sorrow, looking forward to embarking on a nostalgic guided journey to the past, where you hoped to glimpse your younger, more innocent self, fall in love again, and rediscover your first adventures far from home in Paris or at least across the state line.
Well, if you aren’t skipping ahead to this afterword without having walked through the poems, you know. It wasn’t that kind of experience.
You got to go camping. Alone. Near craggy coasts. In the middle of dark forests, teeming with elk and bears and wolves.
When you go again—and you will want to—you’ll be better prepared. You’ll bring a blanket, extra batteries. Pull on your hiking boots. And pack a thermos of black coffee or a hot toddy, maybe one of each.
This collection invites you to look at nature and at the nature of things and relationships through the eyes of an unsentimental realist with the soul of a poet, an atheist who aches for spiritual redemption and meaning, a loner who longs for companionship. Guided by the poet, you look, unflinchingly, at accidents, at death, and you get up close and personal with a squirrel and a salmon.
And although you may find some breathtaking places to stop and delight in some chance encounters, you’re not going to find the ideal place to pitch your tent and rest for very long. You’ll want to keep moving, keep making your way through these pages. Even the poet gives us fair warning.
From “The Inland Gull”:
Ever the search, the hunt, the pursuit,
then the winning or the losing,
but always another gnawing need.
And from “Mandala”:
We all need things that lure to live,
but what we wish for, once secured,
almost always stirs dregs of letdown,
and gnawing need for more or other.
The speaker in these poems—and I dare say that the speaker’s voice and Hussman’s are one and the same—does not shy away from asking the big questions, the ones that are responsible for literature and insomnia. Why are we here? What’s the sense of it all? Hussman looks for the answer in all directions—well, at least out in the woods, down on the beach, on the lonesome highway and quite literally east and west.
His poem “Look Further East” is a comparative religion course in six lines. Hussman argues here that the Hindu belief that we sprang from desire makes the most sense as an origins story. “A soul will wither without longing,” he says, somewhat giving himself away in attributing to us a soul capable of withering. In “Westward Whoa!” he imagines walking so far west he’ll arrive in the land of pink cherry blooms and Shinto shrines. He knows that plan will be thwarted, but vows to “dream walk till the tide turns / and sends me, world weary, back to / firmer ground.” None of this sounds like the sentiments of a matter-of-fact realist to me. But it does sound very much like a professor of mine who wrote a critically acclaimed book on desire in American Literature, and who is one of the world’s leading authorities on Theodore Dreiser.
Nor do the many poems about birds and animals in this collection sound like they were written by the sort of realist who could watch gazelles get devoured by lions on the Nature Channel, shrug and say, “that’s life.” The realist tries to stand at an emotional distance, to observe animals through binoculars and take notes about their markings, their behavior. But the poet wants to save them from harm, divine what they are thinking, look into their eyes and have a moment of communion. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted, at least momentarily, to take them all home and give them treats and shelter, even though the poems reveal a profound respect for the wildness of the wild and for the autonomy of animals, whom he credits with inner lives. And he wonders about those inner lives.
Whenever this poet suggests or says outright, “what you see is what you get,” there is a hint, almost always, of a longing for something more, or a deep sense of regret that there isn’t one, or that he is incapable of believing that there is. This inability to believe in that something more vexes and frustrates and saddens Hussman to such an extent that he is driven to do something desperate—write poetry. This volume is living proof of Eastern philosophy’s truth—desire is the spark.
But this unfillable void, this longing, isn’t the poet’s only prompt. The title of this collection promises us, after all, some sweetness. Yes, life is short, and can be cruel, and the poems tell us it likely has no purpose, but “between / crib and crypt” the poet finds plenty in the present moment to delight in—the elk, the fish, the woman, the friend. All of which are pretty much on equal footing, although the really great catch that got away seems to sting him more when it’s a woman.
You shared in these delights on this camping trip, and next time, you might pack enough trail mix and beef jerky to extend your stay in the woods. You’ll want to head back to the forest and to the shore, especially after the reminder that the beauty you’ll find there is not permanent and neither, my friend, are you. It isn’t always an easy journey, but it wouldn’t be hard to accept life’s inescapable brevity if life weren’t so exquisitely beautiful.
The solo walk on the beach, the chance encounter. The love of a dog, the lust for a woman, the beauty of a fox. All of these experiences make life, even if we can’t guess the length of it and don’t understand the point of it, worthwhile.
From “The Heaven Held Out”:
Better to tread this stunning earth,
relish the feel of mortal flesh,
exit paid in full.
That was written by the man who introduced me to Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” back in the late 1980s with such passion for the poem that I can still see that woman dressed in her peignoir rather than in her Sunday church clothes, and smell the coffee she’s brewing.
Hussman’s poems, too, are packed with sensory experiences that celebrate life and put forth the idea that swimming elk and car-swerving foxes, like Stevens’ “late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,” have their own kind of holiness. The poems of Such Sweet Sorrow are like 4D landscape paintings that become animated and exceed their frames, misting your face with ocean spray and winding vines around your legs.
That’s why I told you to consider packing a hunting knife.
I’ve made much of content, but a poem without a form is just an idea. It’s magenta and forest green and cobalt blue, but not a 4D landscape painting or any other kind. Hussman pays careful attention to the sound and sense of words, and he doesn’t lay them all down for us like stepping stones in an English garden. He arranges them in ways that make you slow down and pick your way across them carefully, so as not to slip or step on a rattler. Think about getting those hiking boots I mentioned.
Making your way across some of the poems won’t get you winded—they’re pared down and whittled to their bare essentials—but others have been built up as carefully as a campfire, with lots of expertly gathered twigs and kindling and heavy dry logs. Those poems will keep burning in you for many days to come.
Most of the poems are in free verse, which to me seems the perfect choice for a poet who challenges, rants against, laments and accepts a world without Divine order. If nature is wild and unpredictable, if life just happens, then you can’t really force it into fourteen lines of iambic pentameter.
And yet, Hussman does occasionally find reason, and even rhyme, in this untamable, incomprehensible life, at least in a couple of poems. This is where you can spread out that blanket, stretch out your legs and enjoy the view. A solid rhyme, or even a half rhyme, can make you feel like you’re on solid footing, and you’ll come across some here. He occasionally concludes a free verse poem with a rhyming couplet. I’ve heard it argued that this breaks a poet’s contract with the reader, that a poet who promises an elegy ought to deliver it and not throw a limerick at readers and should refrain from hitting them with a rhyme at the end of a poem that hitherto had none—but I like it and I do it myself. A concluding rhyming couplet—especially when you don’t see it sneaking up on you—is like someone giving you a hand to help you down a steep last step, or patting your back as you hug goodbye. It’s something solid, reassuring.
There is also a natural musicality to the poems, and as Hussman’s former student, I am not the least bit surprised. Hussman once asked his students to defend their favorite art form in an essay. I chose the novel, as any self-respecting English major might have done, but I swear I wasn’t going for brownie points. Yet Hussman, the Head of our illustrious English department, ranked Mahler’s First Symphony as the epitome of creative endeavor. And he wanted to convert us. He dared us to go home, lie on the floor or the sofa or bed, and listen to it. With earphones if possible.
His enthusiasm for music and for literature was infectious – that’s what good teachers are meant to do, infect us with a love of learning that exceeds its frame and grabs us with vines that never let go. He accomplished that with his vast knowledge and his gift for sharing it. This he did with a dry sense of humor and a sharp wit, which are evident in his poems.
You have more than likely read many of the poems before reaching this Afterword. Maybe all of them. Like life itself, when you do reach the end, you’ll want more. We can’t say with any degree of certainty what happens after we draw our last breath, but before then, we can revisit these poems time and time again, and draw new life out of them at every reading.
This afterword sketches out the outer contours of Hussman’s poetic world. The long Introduction provided by Carmine Di Biase dives deep into Hussman’s background, context, inspiration and personal character. The collection itself is also part introduction, spurring its readers on to greater reflection and appreciation of life itself, and part afterword, the poet’s reflections on nine decades of learning, loving, longing and living.
Di Biase, too, studied under Hussman at Wright State University, where I earned my BA in English and worked as a graduate assistant while completing my master’s. Di Biase followed Hussman’s career path, becoming a professor himself, while I veered off by happenstance and pursued journalism and painting and continued writing poetry abroad. Both of us, and many of Hussman’s other students, went on to publish, and we have never fallen out of love with literature. That’s one kind of love, even Hussman would agree, that more than endures—it grows.
One more word of advice before I leave you to further explorations here. Pace yourself. These poems are arranged in groups that could constitute a long hike each. I’d take it slow and enjoy just a few poems at a time. Sit down on a log or the grass, get out your sketchpad or your notebook, let the words and emotions wash over you and savor the experience. This too, is one of life’s beautiful encounters. Be present. Life’s not lived in introductions or afterwords—it’s lived in the now.