Harryette Mullen's "Tanka Diary"

Thoughts on noticing as a radical act.

Tanka Diary [Don’t need picket fences, brick wall]

Don't need picket fences, brick wall,
or razor wire. Our home's protected by
prickly pear cactus and thorny bougainvillea.

*

Native or not, you're welcome in our gardens.
Lavender's dress is not so vibrant as your
green trousers and purple velour sleeves.


from Urban Tumbleweed (Graywolf, 2013)

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When I was seventeen, I had the option at my high school to enroll in an independent study class. We had to pitch our own idea, find a teacher willing to take us on, and cross our fingers. And so I did these three things, pitching the idea to take a class on formal poetry. I don’t know why that idea excited me. But it did. And I was lucky enough to have a teacher willing enough to sit with me while I wrote little poems about big and little things.

The first book that teacher gave me was Lewis Turco’s The New Book of Forms, which outlined a bunch of different variations of Japanese formal poetry. I spent months writing haikus and tankas, these short-lined poems. I wish I could find them now. They were probably filled with leaves and fires and feelings.

For Mullen, whose book, Urban Tumbleweed, is filled with tankas, the form is a way to practice a daily kind of noticing. In an essay about the book, she writes:

I began the diary despite being able to recognize only the most common creatures, and feeling that I lack a proper lexicon to write about the natural world, when what we call natural or native is more than ever open to question. I did not turn into an amateur naturalist or avid birdwatcher, but I became a bit more aware of my environs. The 366 tanka verses collected here represent a year and a day of walking and writing.

And though a tanka is traditionally defined as a five line poem that adds up to 31 syllables and follows a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic pattern, Harryette Mullen takes some liberty in her various tankas:

While embracing the notational spirit of this tradition, I depart from established convention in both languages, choosing instead a flexible three-line form with a variable number of syllables per line. I try to adhere to the thirty-one-syllable limit, although I am aware that the number of syllables in a given word can vary, depending on the speaker and the circumstances. “California,” for example, sometimes has four syllables, at other times, five.

I love all of this. I love Mullen’s humility, the way she admits what she does not know. It reminds me of something Ross Gay said in an interview, an interview that a student, Adam, in my most recent poetry class, shared with me. In that interview, when asked if he had any advice, Gay said:

Also, writing stuff I notice helps me I think. It's a version of pointing, writing is. Pointing and thinking, to be more precise. Preciser still: wondering!

And so, I feel in Mullen’s diary a kind of “pointing and thinking,” which is a kind of pointing and thinking that I feel all the more grateful for because of her admitted “lack” of a “proper lexicon.” It’s here — in this lack — that I feel a space of wondering and mystery and attention that is all the more transformative because it is aware of all it doesn’t know.

It’s in that space that we are offered such moments of surprise as this:

Though they can’t help flaunting their
vulnerability, I imagine that creeping snails
are trusting me to spare their fragile shells.

Or this:

Dried-out snake on the road
I brought as a curiosity to the child—
who insisted we give it a proper funeral.

Or, finally, this:

Even in my dreams I’m hiking
these mountain trails expecting to find a rock
that nature has shaped to remind me of a heart.

These are moments of noticing — humble, ordinary — that then expand into moments of wonder that include meditations on vulnerability, or fragility, or grief, or recognition, or love. They are moments that remind me that one of the most important things we can do as people, I think, is to admit how little we know. When we do this, and when we enter each day primed to notice whatever it is we notice despite the fact that we know so little, and when we are unafraid and courageous enough to be aware despite of the bigness of all we are not aware of, then we have the utmost privilege of experiencing the fact that what we encounter runs tangential to what we do know, which is important stuff. It’s the stuff of love and life and loss. And this moment of encounter heightens the sense of being alive, because we feel, in our knowledge of love and loss and life, little threads sewing the line between such things and others. We begin to see the world in constant, sparking connection, rather than lonely isolation.

Today’s poem feels transformative in a similar way, as it juxtaposes the classically American “picket fences” and “brick wall(s)” and “razor wire(s)” with what is natural: “prickly pear cactus and thorny bougainvillea.” In doing so, it calls into question what we perceive as natural — the fences and walls and wires, or the plants that bloom out of the surface of the earth. This is the kind of calling-into-question that is worth doing. It’s the questioning that is borne out of a practice of noticing, the questioning that wonders why is this the case or shouldn’t it be this way or make this make sense. It’s the questioning that says maybe the way we’ve made it is what’s wrong, as it is so far from the way it is, which is also the way it could be.

In my experience, the power of such questioning is diminished the older we get, and the more we get dulled and destroyed by the trappings of life. I see it now, as our political system is being ripped apart by a ruthless, cruel, and powerful contingent of people who are experiencing not consistent defiance by those who are powerful enough to at least try to stand up to them, but rather a sense of consistent passivity. There are exceptions, yes, but it is painful to witness how the collective rage of so many people is funneled into a collective rolling-over by those who represent them.

It is hard, in this moment, not to think of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and how she writes:

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

When I read Mullen’s work, and when I consider the premise of it — a practice of noticing that then becomes manifest through poetry — I see a desire to think. To think despite not knowing. To think because of not knowing. To think, to point, to wonder. When that happens, you read a line like Native or not, you're welcome in our gardens, and you wonder why this can’t always be the case. And why can’t it? Why shouldn’t it?

I’m thinking of all of this because of the recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist, graduate student, soon-to-be-father, and permanent resident of this country, who was taken from his home by ICE agents as a result of his engagement in his civil right to protest. It’s an arrest that is heartbreaking and terrifying on its own, and it is all the more terrifying as a result of the context that surrounds it, how the federal government revoked nearly half a billion dollars of funding for Columbia University, and how the university seems to be, as a result, failing to protect its students. Indeed, here’s a sad, horrifying excerpt from an Al Jazeera article, featuring Jelani Cobb, the head of the Columbia School of Journalism:

“If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” the journalism school’s dean, Jelani Cobb told students. “Nobody can protect you … these are dangerous times,” he added.

And here’s an excerpt from a piece in Hellgate that describes how the ICE raids didn’t stop, even after Khalil was detained:

On Thursday night, ICE agents were back on campus executing search warrants in student residences. Columbia's interim president Katrina Armstrong acknowledged the searches in an email to the Columbia community, describing herself as "heartbroken," but observing that the university was "obligated to comply."

When, I wonder, do our institutions that serve as beacons of independence, creativity, freedom, and acceptance have an obligation not to comply, but to protect? The work of so many in power feels like the opposite of this single line from Mullen’s poem:

Native or not, you're welcome in our gardens.

There’s a moment in a Ross Gay interview about gardening where he says:

One of the lovely things about gardening to me also is that…you’re never done learning, and you’re always sort of in need.

Later, he defines and clarifies this need:

I feel like one of the gifts—and it’s a lesson and it’s a gift that the garden gives us, if we allow it—is that we get to submit. We get to submit to the garden, we get to ask questions, we get to wonder about it and with the garden. And we also get to be in profound need, just like sort of bottomless, unfathomable need actually. And that feels like a really important state of being, to understand that we do not exist without, say the sun.

And so, I imagine that Mullen’s garden is also a garden of need. It’s a garden of collective care. It’s a garden where people acknowledge their dependence rather than fighting for an impossible independence, some world where we don’t have to care about the needs of others. By the way, these noticings — of both Mullen and Gay — are noticings that come from a profound place of humility, of not-knowing. They are noticings that acknowledge that place of dependency and see in such a place the possibility for a better, more just world.

They remind me of children, such moments. They point. They notice. They wonder. I think we’d do well — all of us — to channel such imaginative energy, especially in a moment — painful, awful, terrifying — that seeks to diminish it.

I think it’s more than useful to point and notice and wonder now. To say what is that. To say I see that. To say what you wish you saw and to wonder why something is not the case. As Matthew Desmond writes in Poverty, by America, sometimes a retreat into complexity is a refuge for the privileged:

Hungry people want bread. The rich convene a panel of experts. Complexity is the refuge of the powerful.

Poetry has taught me the power and purpose of complexity, of nuance. But it has also — as today’s poem teaches me — taught me the power and purpose of concision, of simple noticing. You are welcome here is a much simpler phrase than you are welcome here if. It is also a more generous phrase. It is also a more just phrase. Poetry has taught me those things, too — generosity and justice. This is why language is being attacked by the current administration; they know that language is a tool for building a more radically imaginative and inclusive world. And so they will try to dismantle it. This, too, is not complex. It is simple. And it is wrong. Poetry taught me to discern such things, yes, but people taught me them, too. And people live with the consequences of our discernment, our courage, our vulnerability, and more. We should protect one another, even and especially if those with power fail to protect us, which means that they have chosen not to.

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Some notes:

1. I appreciated NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s courage and conviction in standing up to ICE’s “border czar” Tom Homan after Khalil’s arrest. You can find video of the encounter circulating online, and you can find more info about Mamdani’s campaign here.

2. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

3. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

4. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

5. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.