Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me: Essays from a Poet - Hardcover

Griffin, Shaun T.

9781948908122: Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me: Essays from a Poet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1948908123 ISBN 13: 9781948908122

Publisher: University of Nevada Press, 2019

“Think of a man walking in the desert,” writes Griffin, “looking for the path to its summit, looking for the observatory that may, at last, shed light on what’s below.”

In this luminous and moving book of essays, award-winning author Shaun Griffin weaves together a poetic meditation on living meaningfully in this world. Anchored in the American West but reaching well beyond, he recounts his discoveries as a poet and devoted reader of poetry, a teacher of the disadvantaged, a friend of poets and artists, and a responsible member of the human family.

Always grounded in place, be it Nevada, South Africa, North Dakota, Spain, Zimbabwe, or Mexico, Griffin confronts the world with an openness that allows him to learn and grow from the people he meets. This is a meditation on how all of us can confront our own influences to achieve wholeness in our lives. Along with Griffin, readers will reflect on how they might respond to a homeless man walking through central Nevada, viewing the open desert as Thoreau might have viewed Walden, seeing the US-Mexico border as a region of lost identity, reconciling how poets who live west of the Hudson River find anonymity to be their laurel, and experiencing how writing poetry in prison becomes lifesaving.

Whether poets or places in the West or beyond, experiences with other cultures, or an acute awareness that poetry is the refuge of redress—all have influenced Griffin’s writing and thinking as a poet and activist in the Great Basin. The mindfulness of Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me demonstrates that even though the light does not forgive, it still reveals.

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About the Author:

Shaun Griffin is poet, writer, teacher and activist. He is the co-founder of Community Chest, a non-profit agency which has served children and families in northwestern Nevada since 1991, and has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center for over two decades. Griffin has received numerous awards for his work, including the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1995, the Mike O’Callaghan Humanitarian Award in 2004, and the Rosemary McMillan Award for Lifetime Achievement in Art from Sierra Arts Foundation in 2006. In 2014, he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. He lives in Virginia City, Nevada.

Preface
Since moving to Mason Valley, about eighty miles southeast of Reno, in the late 1970s, I have learned to live with the constructs of place, weather, and aridity, these outward bonds of being in one locale for long periods. And I have learned to recall the names of trees and shrubs I did not know, the occasional flower on the bitterbrush. I have learned the language of clouds, the winter they speak in, the formidable union of wind and ice. I have burned wood in all weather, smelled smoke on my hands when there should have been love or some other reminder of touch. I have worn the blades of my chainsaw clean with dirt from the roots of sage and hung dry in the saddle of my bike on empty highways over mountains. These things taught me to live where I’m rooted, to reach beneath the flourish for what I know, and still they were not enough.

I have written poems and stories since I was a boy, have known the pleasure that it instills. You can never finish a poem, to paraphrase Archibald MacLeish, only stop when you can go no further. This is a kind of effort that mirrors living in the Great Basin, this vast openness for hundreds of miles where nothing tills the imagination and everything tills the imagination. When I closed this book, I returned to the shelves and opened Walden. Tucked in the middle of it was a note written in longhand from Gary Snyder. What a fitting end to this journey — the poet who has been most influential in the contemporary American West — was there, wedged in an old copy of the book. I had invited him to a reading from a book of bird poems. It took me seven years to write that book but it was Snyder, above all others in the Sierra Nevada, who would understand it, and now, twelve years later, I imagined his erstwhile presence in this collection. Early on in this gathering I wished for something like Walden Pond to reflect upon the nuance of the high desert. Having none and therefore having less in the popular imagination, the desert became its own reward and Snyder, a backbone from whom I drew upon to write it.

When I started on these essays their cohesive thread was the Great Basin. They would emanate out from this place, but my perspective was anchored here. It was what I took to my experience in North Dakota, Wyoming, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. All these separate twinings were shrouded by living, working, and watching what I loved in this landscape be savored and threatened. This is what Snyder knew; this is why I invited him to the reading and why he wrote the card: kinship. Poets who live in this place cannot live outside of its influence. I imagine the same is true for New York City poets and poets in Jerusalem: they infer the lessons that reckon with their existence in a specific location. That influence is also what forced me to look beyond these borders to discover what it was like outside of this locale.

The threads that run through these essays — the American West, poetry and poets, and the people about whom we read and with whom I work, are not apart from this discussion. I never wanted this book to be empty of feeling for what I do to ameliorate some of their suffering. This world has bivouacked on a precipice and as a poet I cannot look the other way. I cannot absolve myself of an obligation to reason beyond our current circumstances, to address some formidable way of living in spite of them. These people and places are extensions of what I hope for every day when I get out of bed: that somewhere, somehow this same person or place that has been denied can find their way forward.

Teaching poetry in the prison has given me an acute realization that very little is free or can be taken for granted. When the men want to learn about poetry they study it like it is food. That’s the kind of attention I tried to harness here: a resolute focus on what it was that brought these issues to the fore. Whether it was the magnanimous resolve of an Iraqi poet who escaped his homeland to keep writing or the equally strong resolve of Vassar Miller’s spiritual poetry, I wanted to share what they saw. I wanted to crawl inside the lens that opened to Ocean View, the township outside of Cape Town where a poet was forcibly relocated. I wanted to look inside the eyes of a friend who lost her house to flood, and then fought to save her spouse from a rare disease. I knew each of these people had stories that may not have been shared. Being a poet, I could only see them through that lens, the venerable passage to what dwells inside.

These essays evolved over time and at each juncture I believed in their efficacy, but of course, that was folly. Now, in the many revisions through that venerable passage I listen again to what these people taught me: trust their stories that I may arrive at a vision for what words can do. Without such effort their voices will not be recorded. Or worse, silenced. That is really the final argument: we writers push against silence. We leave the world and ruminate but upon return, we agitate, if only in the imagination where all great writing lives. I have been given the supreme choice: do something with your life, which I translated to mean — without these narratives, it would be diminished. I think of the man walking through the desert literally dying to meet Ray Carver. A man who recited William Shakespeare, a hitchhiker in my car, lost and confused. What could he possibly share? I listened and hurt at his every word. This is the silence we abrogate with our work. I am grateful for that work. The poet Hayden Carruth said work sustains us and this work — the narrowing of vision to capture someone outside our own comfortable way of life — is old work. It’s the work of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Muriel Rukeyser. We cannot choose to be outside the human family; it is ours, like it or not. In this simple equation comes the daunting question: what will we do about it?

My two adult boys and their spouses, my own dear, dear friend and spouse, have let me know that I have no choice but to be present, always, to live without chagrin so that my words reflect some habit of desire for fairness. The interior of these essays is equally old — there is willful unfairness on this globe — and each of us finds our way to that realization in time. That is why I believe in the examples of the people and perspectives in these pages. Even those that affront warrant my attention. In the end, if we are lucky, we listen for some fallow truth to set free and yet I cannot be sure that mine is any freer at this book’s conclusion. All I can do is describe the journey, the going down to plant. In this stubborn persistence, I am like my predecessors: I start again on the page that belongs to no one.

Virginia City, May 2018

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