Charles Goodrich reviews Mike O'Connor's OLD GROWTH: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
OLD GROWTH: NEW & SELECTED POEMS
A review by CHARLES GOODRICH
In the photo on the cover of Old Growth: New and Selected Poems by Mike O’Connor, the poet stands beside the trunk of a massive Douglas fir tree in a Whitmanesque pose of ease and delight. Hiking boots, long pants and shirt, a wide-brim hat, a white-barked, hand-carved walking stick: he’s ready for a day in the woods. On his left wrist, a surprising combo: a woven Buddhist bracelet and a big wrist watch. And the man’s face: open, aglow, so plainly at home here. Is he smiling for the camera, or at the friend taking his photograph, or could that radiant delight be his default emotional state?
The testimony of the poems suggests that O’Connor lived a charmed life, an outdoor and outward-facing life. His poems are exoteric; plain-spoken illuminations of significant moments along his path.
According to the poem “Vocation,” [p. 130] O’Connor, in the tenth grade—so, age 15 or 16—told his mother he wanted to be a poet. He wrote, “I foresaw”:
world travel, going to sea,
wilderness adventures, romance,
a little bearable suffering,
art/poetry scenes, spiritual stuff,
a little bearable poverty,
books, girls, and, of course—
when I can fit them in—
the poems.
His poems are exoteric; plain-spoken illuminations of significant moments along his path.
Old Growth is a marvel-filled selection of the poems that O’Connor “fit in” to a life that included pretty much everything he imagined as a teenager.
Section I features poems from O’Connor’s first book, The Rainshadow. These are poems of tree-planters, hand-loggers, back-packers, and back-to-the-landers scrounging the woods for the minimum wages of their ‘bearable poverty,’ and reveling in the wild landscapes of his native Olympic Peninsula. What’s especially evident is the camaraderie of that time and place: most of these poems are either addressed to or dedicated to friends. O’Connor wasn’t writing for the magazines, not trying to get a toehold in the poetry establishment. He was “fitting in” poems of experience, romance, and adventure, though the adventures were mostly local and, often as not, set on a job.
The poem “The Breaks Along the Middle Graywolf” [p. 24] has it all, the specific outdoor location, the dedication to a friend, Finn Wilcox, and the question of vocation:
. . .
walking the Graywolf River trail,
thinking how the words of an elder
seem contrived, are too arid;
how words of young poets
sound inflated, too full
of the pressure to be visionary
. . .
. . . when suddenly:
/
. . .
a raven, with a loud raven call,
flies off the treetops
and shits in the sun.
The poet counsels himself to be wary of the poses that poets sometimes adopt, to remain instead open to the world as it arrives.
For a dozen years in the 1980s and 90s, O’Connor lived in Taiwan, supporting himself as an editor and writer for English-language newspapers. He became fluent in Chinese, and began translating classical Chinese poetry. (See especially his Selected Poetry of Chia Tao.) Old Growth includes an entertaining introductory piece by O’Connor’s close friend and fellow translator, Red Pine, recounting how they met in Taiwan and began collaborating on translations from the Chinese.
The poems in Section II, “The Basin, Life in a Chinese Province,” are mostly set in Taiwan. They continue the poems of friendship, some addressed to friends back in the States, others to new Chinese female acquaintances, sweet, often innocent love poems. In the poem “Walking Sunshine,” [p. 83] O’Connor and a woman friend are helping each other with their respective languages.
We’ve been this way before
hiking down from Bamboo Lake
hearts as light as butterflies
rising in pairs above the road.
The woman makes a grammatical mistake, saying, “I am walking sunshine,” omitting the preposition “in.” They both laugh; then the poet says:
But there is no English problem in it.
You are walking sunshine.
In Taiwan, O’Connor got deep into Buddhist practice, the “spiritual stuff” he so off-handedly mentions in “Vocation.” While the Taiwan poems include visits to temples and some allusions to Buddhist scripture and Chinese poems, his poetry is still rooted in the weather, the landscape, his encounters with vividly-sketched individuals. The poet is often riding his bicycle or taking a bus.
While the poems in Sections III and IV go back and forth between the Pacific Northwest and Taiwan, the final Section V returns us firmly to his home ground. In “Why I Work in These Mountains” [p. 133] the poet drives his pickup deep into the Olympics:
3,000 feet level off, ears pop clear
motor hums
wheels scrunch in the gravel.
Then the Graywolf Mountains
start coming into view:
. . .
/ / / / /
not the “home of the Goddess”
but the Goddess.
Since the translations of Arthur Waley, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and others, the influence of classical Chinese poetry on American poetry has been profound. In his introduction to The Clouds Should Know Me by Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China, co-edited by O’Connor and Red Pine, and including some of O’Connor’s translations of Chia Tao, Andrew Schelling describes the poetry included in that volume as “Poems of . . . travel . . . hard luck, good humor, close friends, a taste for simple things, tea, wine, moonlight.” An apt description of Mike O’Connor’s own poems. Was he a Chinese sage in a previous life? Or did the landscapes of the Olympic Peninsula infuse him with that sensibility?
Whatever the source, we can be grateful that O’Connor as a teenager foresaw his vocation, his life path as a poet. Old Growth is chock-full of the graceful and good-humored poems that he “fit in” to his eventful life.
Charles Goodrich writes and gardens at his home near the confluence of the Marys and Willamette Rivers in the traditional homeland of the Ampinefu Band of the Kalapuya in Corvallis, Oregon. He is the author of four collections of poetry, Watering the Rhubarb, A Scripture of Crows, Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, and Insects of South Corvallis, along with a collection of essays, The Practice of Home, and two co-edited anthologies, Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest and In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens. His first novel, Weave Me a Crooked Basket, will be published by University of Nevada Press in Fall 2023. FMI: charlesgoodrich.com
Old Growth
by Mike O’Connor
Edited by Jack Estes, Tim McNulty & Finn Wilcox
Foreword by Red Pine
ISBN 978-1-7370408-6-6
Empty Bowl Press, Chimacum, Washington
2023, paperback, 152 pages, $18.00