The Plum-Stone Game

Kathleen Jesme

An author’s statement

 

Reflecting on the early life of Helen Keller and her relationship with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, I began this book as an exploration of what we can know of the world and ourselves when hampered by sensory absence. How are we connected when the usual means of communication have been taken away? What does it take to bring an encapsulated self out of isolation? How does love call forth a more complete being? These were some of the originating questions I was curious about. Many of my reflections on these ideas are contained in The Plum-Stone Game, especially in the second poem sequence, “The Little Hour.”

A friend once said to me, “Poetry is a metaphor for psychic work.” I am confident that whatever I am working on at any given time is part of a whole, most of which I can’t see with my limited vision. In most cases, for me it is a slow and painstaking excavation, one spoonful of dirt at a time. What is revealed is usually small and seemingly insignificant. I try to hold on to the possibility that it may lead to something with greater completeness. Sometimes it does. The first sequence in the book, “Lives of the Saints,” was meant for a different manuscript. Somehow, it insinuated itself into this one, only then to make it plain to me that this is where it belonged. The poems are the invented stories of childhoods of imaginary saints, told in what might be their voices. But we all had the childhood of a saint, so it wasn’t that hard to hear.

I love repetition in poetry. Perhaps a legacy of nursery rhymes. Or simply of childhood itself. One of the first poetic dicta I remember hearing was, “Don’t repeat a word in a poem.” But I think words are big enough, like bells, to carry all sorts of overtones, and can be struck any number of times in order to hear the complete range of what is pealing in them.

Recently, a poet colleague told me I use words like banana peels: You can be walking along and suddenly you’re going in a completely different direction. I like that. The element of unpredictability so superbly inherent in the English language, with its glorious ambiguity and capacity for sudden turns. Reader, I don’t mean to make you fall, but I’d like you to end up arriving somewhere unexpected.