Ponds
by J. C. Scharl
(Poiema Poetry Series, 2024, 86 pp., $26)
I remember the first time I noticed an adult truly listening to the words of a little child. The child—three or four years old, at most—was telling the woman about a dream she had had. The woman listened with an attentiveness that was entirely genuine. She expressed interest. She asked questions.
This experience reminds me of J. C. Scharl’s poetry. Sometimes she is the child, unselfconsciously narrating her dream. Sometimes she is the adult, listening reverently to something or someone small and seemingly frail. It is this latter voice, this listening voice that left the greatest impression on me, because all poems speak, but few poems listen. In either case, each poem in Scharl’s collection, Ponds, is an exercise in conversation between seemingly dissimilar things.
In “Marco Polo,” a neighborhood swimming pool game takes place on “white silky roads / through the water that piles up continually / like little Himalayas.” Scharl’s subtle shifts—from Silk Road to “silky roads,” and from the Himalayas to “little Himalayas,” for instance—illuminate the cosmic grandeur wrapped up inside the daily, and we believe and are carried along. In “In the Sandbox,” children become not merchant-explorers, but gods, who “…scoop, and dump…and raise towers, not quite / to heaven, but to its toes./ [Their] task is great, // and the small shovel quakes.” Again, the tiny and simple meets the grand and unfathomable: the quaking of the shovel brings to mind a much larger earth-shaking, and heaven itself has toes (one of my favorite images)! These poems do not merely make the little look grand: they show that the little is indeed a part of the grand. When children create worlds in a sandbox or discover worlds in a swimming pool, they are fulfilling their telos as images of God.
“Act of Poetry” explores what can be heard in the sounds of words:
It goes like this: a pond is like nothing
more than it is like that brimming O
between consonantal banks
a little muddied with spring rains,
and then a stone sits heavy on the tongue
in just the way it snugs in the hand,
and when the two meet,
there is nothing more like itself
than the hollow that opens briefly
in the water when the stone falls through,
the clearing left by the smack
of being against being, and into
that space where stone and pond
were both and are no longer
there rushes for a moment the void
whose edges hum with energy
but whose core is a limitless lack
of energy… then the act ends,
and the waters close again over the gap,
about which now it can be said
only that it may have indeed have been nothing
or it may have been a stab
into everything.
Never before have I read a poem that inspires me to slow down this much and appreciate every individual, visceral sound within one-syllable words. Each sound evokes the shape and act of its object, and thus the world makes a little more sense. This built-in order feels right, like a stone in the palm of a hand. At the same time, it is mysterious: what is this act of poetry, and what is it for? The speaker in the poems flirts with this question at the end. Owen Barfield may have argued that it was a “stab into everything.” Indeed, “Act of Poetry” evokes his claim in Poetic Diction:
Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects, and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to reveal. These relations exist independently, not indeed of Thought, but of any individual thinker…it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception.
The pond, the stone, and the void—the sound of each word echoes what each thing is, and each thing is connected to each other thing, a “smack / of being against being.” Gerard Manley Hopkins might say that the pond, the stone, and the void each “goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”[1]
In that sense, the pond, the stone, and the void also function much like characters. This is apt, considering that Scharl is also a playwright. As Scharl herself will tell you in her recent workshop with Let Go the Goat, drama has its roots in poetry: from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Eliot, many of the greatest plays are in verse. Verse infuses drama with rhythm and order; variation of formal verse can also be used to highlight differences between characters. The poems in Ponds, while not strictly narrative, treat people, places, and things as characters worth listening to. Penelope speaks to us about her experience as Odysseus’ wife; Theoderic the Ostrogoth speaks to his magister; a mother speaks to us about the confused grief of her little son as his father leaves for work in the morning. Each of these mini-dramas is infused with beautiful character development, dramatic tension, and attentive love.
And all the while, this attentive love is directed not only at characters, but at language as a thing itself. Scharl splashes in words without being silly, and she plumbs their depths without being stodgy. And always she listens hard. Ponds is a poetry book worth noticing: pick it up and start a conversation. It will change you.
Footnote