Jinglin Ponies by John Harris

Sid Marty’s best poems tell stories about his job as a ranger in Yoho, Banff and Jasper National Parks (1966 – 1978). His job was in a captivating (beautiful and dangerous) place, and he had to do rare, exciting and / or interesting things like dangling from helicopters, repelling down cliffs, tracking rogue grizzlies who’d acquired a taste for dumpsters or granola bars, putting out forest fires, and (one of my favorites) “jinglin’ ponies:”

Get up in faint, cold light

take some oats in a feed bag

coffee will be ready when I return

mist rising on the Maligne River

Half mile walk to toy horses

motionless in wet buck brush

A light frost that was dew

feet get wet

to where they stand

White mare, the bell mare

Shakes her head rings her bell

That Mac found twelve years ago

In distant mountains

In cold light and blue shadow

valley and mountain

Their white blazes shine

While gentle mare takes the bit

untie the hobbles on one side

horses crowding round the feed bag

their warm breath on my neck

ride back to camp, geldings following

their mare, ride bareback in the cold air

The mare’s warm body

Between my wet, chilled knees.

Nothing is unclear in the poem except maybe the title, “Dawn: Jinglin’ Ponies,” and there’s a footnote defining “jinglin” as “Alberta / BC slang. To wrangle (gather up) horses left to graze overnight in the mountains.” The story is told telegraphically: “get up,” “take some oats,” “untie the hobbles”, “ride back to camp,” and it has that essential beginning-middle-and-end “narrative arc.”

Marty, the narrator, is an attractive character, and this poem brings the reader right inside him.  The poem’s a series of his sensations (visual, auditory, tactile), and thoughts, easily identified with, that are strung along the plot. Most of Marty’s sensations are stated directly. Adjectives “cold” and “wet” are repeated three times each, “warm” two times. Some visual sensations are presented by means of metaphors. The horses are “toys” — seen, at the time Marty sets out, in the distance. The patches of snow in the valley and on the mountains (it’s spring) are “blazes” — slashes on trees to mark trails or cut-lines. The first metaphor would be clear to all readers, the second somewhat less so, but easy to access in a dictionary (Webster’s, fourth meaning for the noun).

Marty’s thoughts are scattered and don’t include any messages. He thinks about coffee, he remembers that the bell on the mare was found by someone named “Mac” long ago on some far away mountain, and he thinks that the mare is “gentle.” The latter thought is an opinion, but on what might be called a non-controversial matter. Marty likes the mare, and the mare likes him.

In a “statement” printed after a collection of his poems in Storm Warning (1971), Marty said, “Linear speech has trapped us, forced the poet’s ideas to mount each other, couple indecently, cramped in sharp corners.” The personification of thoughts as erotic lovers indicates comic detachment — a thoughtful objectivity — about what he does as a poet. Speech is linear. Thoughts are linear. Visual and tactile sensations are not, so poetry tries to find linear (coherent) ways not to be linear.

The style of the poem is “free verse,” eschewing rhyme and meter to focus on other pleasures, like drama, figure and denotative accuracy. The poem is telegraphic, but still grammatical, sentences mostly with subjects and predicates but lacking most punctuation, including upper-case letters indicating the beginnings of sentences. The choice of what punctuation to include, and what not, seems random, but that randomness isn’t noted because a lot of the lines are, in themselves, grammatical units: sentences, clauses, phrases. The pauses usually indicated by commas and periods happen when the eye moves from line-end to line-beginning. Also, the stanzas are paragraphs: the three steps of the plot each get a stanza — getting to the horses, feeding the horses, riding back with the horses.

Not all the warden poems are as immediately impactful as “Dawn: Jinglin’ Ponies.” Marty’s sentimentality and tendency to caricature (cowboys good and wise, urbanites bad and stupid, old things good, new things bad, workers good, career administrators bad) can intrude. The second poem in the series of warden poems, “A La Claire Fontaine,” is a good example of this. It’s a psychological study — the study of a wood carver, “a worshipper of form.” It’s a powerful (tragic) poem, blurred only momentarily when Marty plants his own thoughts and feelings into the carver’s head, where they don’t take.

The carver is a warden-predecessor of Marty’s in the cabin (wardens were pulled out of the back-country cabins in 1972, maybe for reasons implicit in this poem), who carves faces and, “when he was lonelier than usual,” the bodies of women on trees and roots. Marty’s unsure about calling him a “sculptor,” but applies the word anyway, suggesting that he may actually have that status. This idea is further suggested by the facts that Marty tries to preserve the carvings (but the Park Service won’t issue paint), and that hikers have stolen some of the carvings so that “they’re in cities, now.” This guy could be, and could ultimately become recognized as, a mountain Bernini.

Marty’s especially taken by the head of an Indian chief carved out of a “spruce butt” at the spring where he gets his water. The head’s a Kaw-Liga figure, corny (“this cigar-store nobility”) in some other place, but here, weathered, useful in a way, it seems inspired. The poem’s title, also the title of an ancient French love ballad, seems like a sarcastic comment on the situation described, but applies to Marty’s appreciation of the spring — a sort of romantic appreciation. The spring has been directed through the head’s mouth, as “from the mask of some prolific god:”

I think that way about it,

stooping to drink each morning,

meeting a mouth issuing

between worlds, kissed

by cold wooden lips

where sweet crystals flood the tongue

A thought again, presented in simile. A sensation, in metaphor, of kissing and of water as “sweet crystals.” The two worlds mentioned are the one Marty’s in, and the underground one, which Marty describes later in the poem as “quiet,” “benevolent.” He sees the statue as “smiling” at him, though he smiles at himself for having this “notion.” Marty’s always wary of sentimentality, of anthropomorphizing things, even (maybe especially) art.

The story of the sculptor has a sad ending. One day he “saddled up,” as was his wont when he needed human company, and headed to Banff. There, he started drinking” to forget himself.” Here, I think, Marty’s image of him gets confused. In the bar, drinking, among “the young of the great / middle class,” who are all dressed “in the ripped off image / of the working cowboy they despised,” he’d start babbling, as was his wont, and get thrown out. He’d stagger up the street, “where the thousand-thighed summer / swivelled disdainfully past:”

The sculptor would be aware of the disdain that would be directed at a raving drunk by women, but not aware of the disdain for working cowboys (which wardens could be easily taken for) on the part of “the young / of the great middle class.” It’s unlikely the young actually despise working cowboys and, anyway, this sort of class consciousness seems beyond (or maybe beneath) a man so focussed on expressing his physical and sexual sense of desire and alienation:

A worshipper of form

Whose sharp irony was

In the presence of desire

To be mute

To only drool at beauty . . .

Stranded, speechless

In the Age of B.S.

The “Age of B.S.” is also too political (and every age is the age of BS). Anyway, the sculptor ends up in some circumstance (unspecified) where he bites a woman on the butt, and is transferred north, to,

those vast

and uncarved forests

where every tree concealed

some knotheaded girlfriend

just waiting to be revealed

Instead of accepting this transfer and facing this fate, the sculptor quits:

He framed

His most articulate speech

Just four little words,

Two pronouns, two verbs.

He threw his badge on the desk

Said goodbye to his horses

And hit the trail.

The four words were, likely, “Fuck you. I quit.” Something like what Marty might have said himself when he quit the Park Service.

There could be a good 100 poems, in Oldman’s River, about Marty’s job as a warden — most of these poems from Headwaters (1973) and Nobody Danced with Miss Rodeo (1981). The section of poems from Nobody Danced with Miss Rodeo (1981) entitled “The Spur” (10 poems) provides the narrative arc of the sequence, starting with “When I Joined the Outfit” and ending with “When I Left.” The best among the warden poems, along with the ten mentioned above, are “Siwashing,” “Each Mountain,” “Burnt by the Tree” (last line could be cut), “Two Years Cub,” “Throwing the Diamond” (a poem featuring “Mac,” the guy who found the bell), “The Cut,” “Inside the Map,” “Maligne Lake Poem,” and the series of 3 poems set at Takakkaw Falls in Yoho.

I say “could be” above because the warden poems mix easily with poems about Marty’s “civilian” life, much of it lived on an acreage near Pincer Creek. This life also involves epiphanic (uplifting and comic) encounters with wild animals (moose, deer, bears), domestic animals (horses), and people like firefighters and cowboys (who do a lot of things that wardens do). All Marty’s poems express the faith of his great predecessor in “nature,” Wordsworth, that “in . . . rustic life . . . the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.” The poems make heroes of wardens, cowboys and farmers, seeing in them a sort of wisdom and honesty that Marty doesn’t find in urbanites, generally portrayed as idiots. The cowboys and farmers all use language in the way Marty’s father (a homesteader) did — “an idiom that rose from experience in a harsh land, a colourful way of being, and of speaking, often pithy and to the point, both teasing and self-deprecating.”

Marty’s belief in the merits of rustic life and language is never elaborated upon, philosophically and politically, in the actual poetry, to the extent that it is in Wordsworth. Wordsworth portrayed himself, increasingly, as a sort of guru. “Self-depreciating” is the operative word in describing Marty’s style. He plays the role of the “kid” learning the ropes, not of the guru. He understands too that his philosophy and his language makes him inaccessible to the very people he celebrates: “The sad and simple truth [is] that, although we may pay homage to working people, farmers and ranchers . . . very few of them actually read poetry or at least poetry of transcendent or lasting literary value.” Wordsworth never grasped, or at least never admitted this; his friend Coleridge had to tell him that his language was nowhere near that spoken by common folk, and would in fact be inaccessible to them.

Also, Marty’s “rustics” would regard the idea of epiphanic moments in nature as ludicrous and, even though it’s clear they would experience them, they’d regard it as pretentious that such experience had any sort of formative effect on their personalities. As for the urbanites who make up the bulk of Marty’s audience, he understands that, if he overplays his hand by pushing his philosophy and overusing rustic language, he can seem like a colorful caricature or a grumpy throwback.

For those who want to romp through what I regard as the hits of Oldman’s River, here, as additions to what I’ve identified as the best of the warden poems, is my list: “Your Face Was a Single Flame in the Sea,” “Deer Lodge, off Season,” “An Apprenticeship,” “Old Man, Old Horses,” “A Graph of the Wind,” “Candy,” “Chinooked,” “Aspens,” “There Was a Man,” “On the 27^th of June,” “Someone,” “Sentenced,” “The Nonfiction Writer (a non-fiction poem),” and “Poem for Mary.”

I’ve provided this list because I’m more interested in praising Marty’s poetry than the platform in which it presently appears. Oldman’s River is not for the ordinary reader of poetry, if such a person exists. It announces itself on the cover as a “collected poems,” meaning that all of Marty’s published poems to date are in it, along with some new, unpublished ones. Even if all the poems are good, only the best are worth reading — by that ordinary reader. Robert Graves once advised poets to honour readers by keeping their output down to a manageable size, but it doesn’t work that way now that poetry lives mainly in English departments. Oldman’s River is for the teachers, professors, and students of English and creative writing departments. Their job is to practice / teach composition using literary works as samples and subject matter, and (the professors mostly) to provide teaching materials in the form of biographies, bibliographies, thematic studies, literary histories and, yes, well-edited (“definitive”) collected works.

I specify thematic studies because composition or rhetoric handbooks start with theme, the identification of a topic, or the establishment of a clear statement of purpose, as the first step in building an essay or report. Oldman’s River features an introduction, acknowledgments, a preface, a biographical summary, a thematic analysis, an interview, and a bibliography. It’s missing an index of titles and first lines (for easy reference), but other than that is a gold mine for scholars and students looking for themes.

The biographical material is there because English teachers foster the illusion that great poets, because their work deals with important themes, must be wise people. The interview is there because teachers foster the illusion that poets know what they’re doing when they write great poems. The great tradition of poetry is a sort of secular bible, the poets speaking in the voice of God, the department a sort of church, and the teacher a sort of priest, uttering interpretations of the Word to the congregation (readers).

Accordingly, in their Introduction, professors Owen Percy and Kit Dobson build on Marty’s Preface, which contains his own statement of purpose as a poet. Marty quotes Herman Hesse, saying that “Man . . . is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between . . . nature and spirit”, and goes on to say, “I have been trying to forge that bridge between humanity and nature for most of my creative life.” This is monumentally abstract and idealistic, to the point of pretension, but exactly the sort of thing teachers find useful.

Marty, though, immediately brings his statement down to earth: “I am, and always will be, motivated to be a voice for the inchoate in nature, but I signed up, albeit warily, to the environmental movement in a bruising apprenticeship as a national park warden in the Rockies, where what worked well in practice seldom worked in environmental theory.” In signing up, he “abandoned a career path in English literature,” which, he implies, was fortunate. It kept him away from thematic writing, which is too easy: “Nowadays, the tendency is to write books of poems that are thematically united, but life is not lived according to a thematic blueprint . . .”

So. Marty’s, not exactly a reluctant prophet, but he is a thoughtful one. He has a theme, but warns against having a theme. Percy and Dobson pick up on this theme and on Marty’s warning about themes, saying, “there is no single, easy way to pin down his particularly fiery brand of commitments.” But they do try to pin these commitments down anyway, providing a good list of them, most of them taken from Marty’s prose, most of them connected to environmental politics. In the list, Marty warns about “the logic of private property,” “the allure and the shiny lights of commerce,” the tendency of retired or wealthy urbanites to buy up rural property, the determination of “the developers and their political accomplices to keep young minds buttoned to the stunner [television],” the cutting of “local history, local culture, local ecosystems from the school curriculum,” the evils of building roads into the mountains, and much, much more.

The professors also specify thematic categories: Marty’s a work poet, a cowboy poet, a prairie poet, a western poet, etc.  Finally, they spin off into canonizing Marty: “Marty’s mission — be it through direct argument and description through his non-fiction [prose] or through the beauty and splendor of his verse — is to make the case for halting human hubris that would lead to evermore environmental plight.” Their hopes for Oldman’s River are that the book will be accepted as a sort of sacred text: “If this book can make the case (which needs to be made on an ongoing basis), in favour of a politically nuanced, thoughtful, and deeply poetic practice of environmental and social stewardship — then it will have matched the hopes of the authors of this introduction.”

Fortunately, the editors provide an interview, by yet another professor, allowing Marty to secularize their Introduction. The questions are thoughtful, and the answers even more so — the interview was conducted “in writing.” Mostly, Marty deals with influences, on both his poetry and his song-writing — a list of fellow saints. But he also (by invitation) elaborates on his Preface. He says he was lucky to go from the English department into the warden service: “I abandoned a career path in English literature to pursue parks work full time, because I could not live in a city, nor could I endure the stultifying institutional politics of academe.” “I would not survive in the neurotic hothouse of a creative writing program.” So much for Marty’s opinion of what professors do.

He also rejects, or backs gently and politely away from, the categories the professors apply to him: “As an environmentalist of an earlier wave, I don’t find much new in the work of today’s eco-poets.” “I guess I would say (and Tom [Wayman] might not agree with me on this), that he and I share a certain naivete about blue-collar folk when it comes to poetry.” “I am not a cowboy poet, and so I would not call myself a cowboy poet . . . Wearing a Stetson was a natural fit for me, and I don’t see why only cowboys get to wear the cool hats.” “I’m pleased to be identified as [a prairie poet], but I’m really a poet of the west.” “’Western poet’ is about as close as I would want to get to a category these days; but I’m not a fan of any hyphenated label.”

In his interview, Marty makes it clear what poetry really does. It is to express the beauty in the moment. It applies emotional intensity to experiences. It is the voice of intimacy: “There are many readers of my non-fiction books who think they know me. However, those who have not read my poems don’t know the first thing about me.”

So, if you can afford this book ($44.95), can make space for it on your shelves (just over 400 pages), and are not likely to be put off by the sermonizing of professors, Oldman’s River is presently the best way to get intimate with Marty. In my experience, to read him is to love him.