Jack Remick reviews "Slow Now With Clear Skies" by Julene Tripp Weaver

Slow Now With Clear Skies

by Julene tripp weaver

reviewed by Jack Remick

There are moments in this volume, dominated by sickness of time and virus, when Weaver transcends the “easy way of death” to land in profound instants of insight. Those moments grace this collection, not with the expected lamentations of loss and death, but a greater depth—perhaps, even, grace beyond death.

Here the verse is clean, sharp and pure as the poet uses ordinary language to say extraordinary things. There is much Imagism in Weaver’s poetry—Imagism : “saying what you mean in the fewest and clearest words.”

While Weaver never fully abandons the purely experiential—and this volume is built on the personal—she leads us past the lyric of lamentations and into the epic of our own battles as humans to survive.

To me, as a novelist and poet, an important aspect of Weaver’s writing is her deep and personal knowledge of death, disease, the dead, and the dying, knowledge that she always encases in language that is deep and clear and pure.

Rusty Chain Heritage

I loved the quiet in this room, the history I
never understood. The organ no one played,
out of tune, a museum for far away relatives
in England or Holland, mother’s side

of the family, who tried to stay wealthy
but exposed to the elements, oxidized
in a slow decline, till it wore thin this familial
chain, clear to inevitable death.

Poets of the natural world, often revel in and sometimes canonize nature with its own cycles of death and resurrection. In Weaver’s writing, we see a shift to separation of the modern mind from nature and with that separation there comes a deep sadness. It is as if Weaver sees that by rejecting our place in the natural continuum, we create our own malaise. Implicit in these few lines from “Letting Go” is the sense that as we isolate ourselves from nature, we sacrifice the essence of being alive.

Letting Go

How unreal we are against natural forces: fire, rain—

stars explode—we don’t feel their sparks.

The homeless with their pungent bodies dig in the trash,

cars with shaded windows drive past.

The end is coming fast. No matter how young, now

is the time to sort out what is necessary.

To make decisions, the yes, the no, to clarify

the ache we feel for this or that possession.

Compare “Letting Go” to “Northwest Mineral Springs” to see the range of insight Weaver brings to the poetry of Nature:

Northwest Mineral Springs

Seeking renowned remote hot
springs, wild space to soak naked—
we found one near the Columbia
River—back woods, known to locals,
warned of the gnarly path, reminded
to pay the parking fee. Heated pools
of mineral water we sat with a traveler
who lived at The Farm in Tennessee.
A rare summer day of freedom—
glints of silver in the waterfalls
across from our sequestered rock hovel—
salmon jumping upstream—
interloper from the east coast, could I
believe my eyes? We moved closer to see
their silver shimmers. Oblivious to us
they swam instinctual and urgent
in cold icy water to spawn and die.
We dipped our toes into their running
river, satisfied, we returned to our soak—
a mere mile from Carson Hot Springs
where they piped this very water
into white porcelain tubs and charged
a fee for what we indulged for free.

In “The Moment of Diagnosis,” the poet sees herself as the sick-one—sick with the diseases of the modern world—yet she is also strong, lucky to be alive. Here, she opens the door on the universal I feel when reading her poems. The feeling is, in fact, an imperative: to survive we must be strong. A platitude? An easy way out? Try it. Be strong in the face of destruction (imagine being a child in Gaza).

The Moment of Diagnosis

The diagnosis hit like a tailgate strike, a scathing jolt,
a wake-up crash, whiplash, but there is a way
to forgive—to stand with trees—to grow a gradual
acceptance, a sliver matures in stillness, time passes
moves on to what transpires next, on a tree leaves come and go,
this process cycling to a calling that opened to a career
that came and went, I survive like the trees, in their daily standing.

It makes sense, this emotional stew that stormed my life—
a personal study—how to midwife the specter of death

Grateful to the trees that absorb pain, they would accept even
my blood if I had to bleed. I stand today one of the lucky ones.
Me and the trees, the trees and
I in the wind, in this courtyard.

In the twenty-first century, we have seen the Great Flu pandemic, we have witnessed the AIDS pandemic that ripped life from men and women alike, and we have experienced the Covid 19 pandemic that, like the Great Flu, killed millions of us without respect for status, wealth, nationality, or skin color. We stand, at a moment of time, close to the abyss. Weaver has captured that moment with an epic depth in “Pupal Soup,” a pun and a lament addressed to Theodore Roethke:

Pupal Soup

Oh Theodore, had you been here
with us these past years—
to question the good COVID has done
for earth—the many lives lost, this purge
nature’s retribution to equilibrium,
to regain a stake. We are light beings
who must recognize other ways.
We did our part—stopped
a molecular minute—our pace worn
into submission. Our clock reset.
There is a fine point of precision
to expect death—eyes opened to what is most
valuable—the heart knows—the gut-mind
knows, survival of the fittest not a game
but a life changer. We have buzzed
around like lost bees, tired, seeking
a new hive, and our Queen bee.

To see the depth of Weaver’s verse, we have to look beneath the experiential “I” where we find not the individual journey, but the epic collective journey as well.

There are many complex and deep poems about death from the medieval La Danse des Morts À Bâle, to William Cullen Bryant (“Thanatopsis”), to Emily Dickenson (“Because I could not Stop for Death”). From Dylan Thomas (“Do not go gentle into that good night”) to Conrad Aiken (“Tetelestai”). Where in this decade of the twenty-first century, do we find that depth of understanding of death and the chaos it brought to us? Perhaps, in this century, it is not death that beleaguers us, but a failure to understand that as small specks of flesh and blood in a cosmos that is indifferent to our existence, a cosmos that is indifferent to our suffering as a species, we must, for our survival, depend on one another. Rather than become a killing disease whose target is ourselves, we must cherish the cosmic chance of our existence and revel in the knowledge that, perhaps, earth is the only, the unique spot in the cosmos where love exists.

In “Social Distance,” Weaver personalizes her experience to give the reader a deep feeling for what love can mean in the face of adversity.

Social Distance

We need each other every single
day, month, year, generation.
Interdependent, we reach out,
barn raise with our neighbors.
Community, we lift each other up,
gather round a fire, a hearth, sing,
organize a union, speak unfettered
our worry and love.

We travel across boundaries, move ageless
like cowboy poets spreading news region-
to-region. The call for knowledge
lifted from truth and source, a wide web—
little insistence on independence—
we understand how frail each human. The idea
of a superhero manifests in good deeds,
Lassie barked, Help, he needs help,
and there was a rescue.

How can I learn to lean on others
when touch is extracted from my bones?
When I no longer care who sees me at my
worst. What deep seated fear rolls me
from a plethora of necessary help from another?
My partner rubs my back with healing herbs,
he, the only one I expect support from—the one
who is there, trusted. We have a couple bubble,
faith and love, but how many have even one

person in these hazardous times?
My friend with asthma, suffocated by smoke,
left, took a plane to Chicago, then a plane
to Portland, Maine, with no plan. With
little money, no credit card, no one to meet her
at either airport. She used the last of her cash
for this grand escape so she could breathe,
fires encroaching her home.

She asked for donations I wish I had to give.
This is a time of risk and daring for those
On the edge of survival. Our world on the slope
of decline, we roll into mire, claw through mud
to the top of a hill already crowded, those
who slip and die the earth accepts as filler.

“Food Chain” counterpoints the personal world of “Social Distance” with a, perhaps, unique view of the world that lives often beyond our provincial awareness of life on this planet. Several years ago, I came across an article that spoke of our “temporal provincialism.” Human beings tend to amplify our “egosphere” and to restrict our sense of time as we imagine that ours is the only important and unique time in history, To put our time in perspective, Weaver, at the end of “Food Chain,” gives us three especially captivating lines to close the poem:

We must fight back, preserve the wild,
allow insects to live their natural lives
harmonious nature to swallow us into her fold.

Food Chain

When it is time to die—
as if we can count the time to the inevitable
barred from the knowledge of the stars—
the moon and planets shift into alignment
with secret knowledge.

All life cracked in the cell waiting
for moisture to release what is stone hard.
We swallow pits—death grows its own path
of resilience—how much can we absorb
of immeasurable sustenance.

Circumstances of nations prevail—
the economics of soy or corn
overrides the necessity of potatoes.
Empty lots, the push of law
decides what seeds survive,

will be cloned or radiated, what nuclear
genocide we ingest day-in day-out.
We must fight back, preserve the wild,
allow insects to live their natural lives
harmonious nature to swallow us into her fold.

To see the depth of Weaver’s verse, we have to look beneath the experiential “I” where we find not the individual journey, but the epic collective journey as well. It is easy to see the “I” as representative of the individual, but in Weaver’s cosmos, the “I” always implies the collective—it is our journey, mirrored through her own that she tells us her disease is not a private one, but one that is linked to each and every one of us and the actual and world-wide death of millions.

I’ve Lived Through One War

I’ve had my share of the I’m dying lament
I’ll not go there with this new pandemic
I lived through one war, AIDS. Worked
and lived through death up-close—

people take risks—bug-chasers fucked
to get HIV—that old story. Citizens
throw Corona parties to get sick, build
immunity, they make decisions irrespective

of rules or science—meet with a friend,
walk in a park—conscientious I will
shelter in place within reason, unafraid.

Two Centuries, Three Pandemics, A World worn out, mined out, blasted out . . . perhaps even of its own future, and certainly our place in it, and one might think the poet’s skepticism would lead to despair. But Weaver doesn’t take us there. Instead, despite all the adversity (She and We) experience, she doesn’t dwell on the negative. No, we find that instead of pessimism she sees perhaps a place for hope and dreams as she discloses in “Learn to Love”:

Learn to Love

A new world is on its way,
it started at Woodstock, with Vietnam
protests, long hair rebels took off
into the blue sky on motorcycles,
forever nomads, now how many
live in RVs on the move
like Romani travelers, changed
by necessity. Far from the standard
American capitalist lifestyle,
way beyond the reach of the buzz.
We travel through life and time, make a path,
create our heart-home—we carry
each other, hold hands
learn to love.

Weaver’s experiential “I” becomes intense when she writes about the extreme personal, and little in this world is more personal than the death of the Mother. I wrote this about my Mother, in a “Quadrina in Memory of Verda Pauline Myers Remick”:

When a mother dies more than a body dies
more than a mind dies when a mother dies
a world ends but as the mother dies
the world does not end, nothing changes—

Time does not stop, the earth does not still
its spin, the sun does not stay its journey.
When a mother dies nothing changes,
the world ends, time stops, dead.

In “After Mother’s Death,” Weaver brings us closer to the universal that lives in each of us through the Mother:

After Mother’s Death

My mother never enters at the right
time, even in my dreams.
It’s been that way since I’ve known her.

She was asleep on my arrival
and had nothing to say for years
I had to love her—there are rules

that sit in the gut, how we love,
regurgitate, turn sour,
bile pushes against the flap

keeping it in place—
that love
a dandy mess of our insides—

we can’t escape even when we’ve
grown old, you see when she died
there was a long

complicated grief and panic rising,
there was no control in this body
that pushed hard against her a lifetime.

The lyre, that Sumerian invention, gives us the lyric poem. Poetry meant to be sung. Lyric poetry ranges from love ballads to sonnets to odes. The epic poem, long and complicated, in antiquity, was sometimes sung, often times chanted. So few of us today can neither sing nor chant the epic. It seems that the lyric has won the poetry sweepstakes, but it is curious that in the voice of this poet, Julene Tripp Weaver, the lyric fades, the epic survives. Earlier in this review I wrote that I see Weaver’s poetry recounting the battles she has fought—and won as a survivor of HIV—and in her recounting of those battles, I hear the echo of epic struggles of other times, of other wars of a different but nonetheless brutal and deadly kind now written in the contemporary mode. This epic is not sung, but it is chanted as the poet stands before us, the listeners, and gives us hope.

What Gives Hope

The miracle might be we emerge from this
a better world with a clearer vision, higher
priorities, a closer connection to each other;

that we might learn to live together in peace,
a new emphasis on healing the pain
our ancestors perpetuated with slavery.

We’ve been isolated in this pandemic, thrown
online to meet. Contact our most important
social soothing, cyber space not the body-

to-body we yearn, nuance obscured with distance.
Awash in protest against condoned police violence,
still, some are hopeful. It is clear now, essential

workers are not expendable. We return
our blood to the earth by rule of militaristic volition,
let us be drained like slaughtered deer. Or,

die in hospitals from COVID-19, intubated.
In the streets, we have always died. Our blood,
our breath, obstructed with no mercy, a clamp

on the poor with no clout—unlike those who
prosper from crisis. We, the little ones with jobs lost,
income gone, family dead from systemic violence,

these pressured times we’ve always lived through.
Yet some have hope and fire to burn, the young
who knew Obama their first eight years.

Following in his legacy, yet-to-lead on the front line
of change that is coming. And oh, to have
their fresh votes, their wisdom, their vision.

I recommend this volume for those who have survived the attacks and the battles to keep as proof that we, as humans, are greater than our fears.

Jack Remick has worked as a college instructor, a grammar school teacher, a social worker, a community activist, a tunnel stiff, and a bus driver. He writes novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and non-fiction. His novels include Man Alone—The Dark Book; Blood; Citadel; Gabriela and The Widow; No Century for Apologies; The California Quartet; Maxine, and Doubles in a Game of Chance. With Robert J. Ray, Remick co-authored The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery. Remick’s poetry includes Satori—Poems; Josie Delgado—A Poem of the Central Valley. Short fiction appears in two collections—Terminal Weird; Throwback and Other Stories. His essay collection is What Do I Know? Essays. Remick runs a zoom-web-based masterclass in Interactive Rewriting. Contact: http://jackremick.com

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