Return, Return O Shulamite

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A quarter-century ago, Terry Hauptman published two books of poetry, and now she has a new collection entitled On Hearing Thunder from North Star Press, P. O. Box 451, St. Cloud, MN 56302 (142 pp., $20). It has been a long interval, but well worth the wait. She is an example of a creative person skilled in various forms, including not only poetry but graphics and large mixed media installations-the latter presented in a DVD which accompanies the book.

Terry's range is extensive, and of that more in a moment, but when I was thinking of how to describe her approach not only to literature, but to the world, some sentences of Thoreau surfaced in my mind: "If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion and appearance . . . through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This Is, and no mistake."

So, yes, her range includes the terrain of New England, and the Midwest's Indian mounds, and Iceland and Europe, but it's where she starts from and is founded on that counts: in the bone, the flesh, and the fiery spirit of revolt against injustice.

Then I wondered, what kind of poet is Terry Hauptman? Lyric, surely, of a serious and exalted kind, then I realized that like her old friend and mentor Meridel LeSueur, she is a rhapsode. Wikipedia gives us a bit of guidance, defining a rhapsody as "an effusion, such as a speech, letter, or poem, that is composed impromptu under the excitement of the moment-or appears so-and has intuitively rather than logically connected thought, without a structured argument." The Rhapsode, we further learn from other sources, was "in ancient Greece, an epic singer," and also "a person who uses extravagantly enthusiastic or impassioned language."

Here is a short example from Terry's book:

THE EQUINOX STEADIES THE SENTRY'S CRY

The equinox steadies the sentry's cry
We palliate in wisps
The crows defiant observation.
Stark in restless swing
Yet static black
Against the empty sky.
The skald split a stone
With a kenning so elusive;
All is mind
Balanced in this changing time,
Wax drips the dusk still seeking
Depths of black.
Into the prolonged dream
We turn obsidian.

I'm not going to attempt a real explication of this poem, but will merely note the starkness of its setting, the archaic language (skald, kenning), and the shamanistic atmosphere of dream and transformation. The root of rhapsode goes back to the Greek for "a weaver of songs," and thence to rhaptein, "to string or stitch together." This the terrain of the Norns, and of the weird sisters of Macbeth.

Another shadow haunting this poetry is the Shulamite, a woman evoked in the Song of Solomon, 6:13: "Return, return O Shulamite; return, return that we may look upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies." That's the King James Version, but the last phrase about the armies is incomprehensible. The Revised Standard Version renders it thus: "as upon a dance before two armies," and the exegesis of my grandfather's sturdy old Interpreter's Bible conjectures "it was some special dance, apparently performed in the nude, as the following verses suggest, reminding one of the naked goddess of the fertility cult." This same exegesis further proposes "the word is best interpreted as the feminine of Solomon."

The whole context of Jewish tradition, including these ancient Hebrews and the more recent Yiddish subculture, is fundamental to this collection. One striking poem is entitled "Shekhinah" and Terry helpfully supplies a definition: "Shekhinah from Sh'khinah, 'presence' or 'indwelling' which over the course of Jewish history has been used to name the divine. The shekhinah was explicitly portrayed as a female figure." But this is not parochial poetry: "Wait for me Shekhinah/From my secular tent/I see the Intifada/Put my finger into the wound."

Terry's graphic and tapestry work is full of ghosts entangled, drifting, swept along by what?-their passion, their fear, their love, and time itself. Among the ghosts cited in the poems are Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Meridel LeSueur, Nelly Sachs, Sylvia Plath-ghosts whom the poet has known and lived with for a long time. Most though not all are women; among the men, Lorca and Eduardo Galeano. They come to the poet in dreams, in the imagery, and in person, actually, alive, and dead. There are dances of celebration, of redemptive memory, and pain: "We know this sliver of moon will/Slice our hearts out."

The Holocaust, other genocides, massacres and mass murders are a kind of terrifying symphonic chorus, groaning and weeping, sometimes a shout, sometimes a low murmur, sometimes the farewell of a benediction, or the prophecy of Revolt: "Come see our dear heart of the divided spirit,/Our wolf heart of the divided spirit,/In the heat of memory/We come with kindling twigs/Ablaze and striding."

None of this is easy reading, nor should it be. This is poetry to dwell with, to treasure as Milton said, like the precious lifeblood of a master spirit. The language and imagery is often recondite, dense and difficult, but as with all scriptural writing, it will reward study and love.