SOURCE: "The Oriental Connection: Zen and Representations of the Midwest in the Collected Poems of Lucien Stryk," in Midamerica XIII, edited by David D. Anderson, Midwestern Press, 1986, pp. 107-15.

[In the following essay, Guillory asserts that Stryk's poetry illustrates the "aesthetic and poetic possibilities inherent in the midwestern experience. "]

In 1967 Lucien Stryk edited Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, and in his Introduction to that anthology he underscores the aesthetic and poetic possibilities inherent in the Midwestern experience. Although many critics have denigrated the region for being flat and "colorless," Stryk insists that the Midwest can be "rich, complicated, thrilling" (Heartland xiv). In the poetry he chooses for that anthology and, more importantly, in his own work, Stryk dramatizes again and again that the Midwest is

made up of the stuff of poetry. And once those living in it begin to see its details—cornfields, skyscrapers, small-town streets, whatever—with the help of their poets, they will find it not only more possible to live with some measure of contentment among its particulars but even, miraculously, begin to love them and the poems they fill.

(Heartland xiv)

After this aesthetic manifesto, it is not surprising to discover that the opening poem in Stryk's Collected Poems, 1953-1983, is "Farmer," a powerful evocation of the agrarian life that typifies the region. Without rancor or sentimentality, the farmer beholds the landscape purely, observing a world "bound tight as wheat, packed / hard as dirt." His life and even his dwelling place are subsumed by the larger reality of the prairie:

While night-fields quicken,
shadows slanting right, then left
across the moonlit furrows,
he shelters in the farmhouse
merged with trees, a skin of wood,
as much the earth's as his.

In "Old Folks Home," a later and more meditative poem, Stryk imagines such a farmer at the end of his days, useless and unproductive but still tied to the fields by plangent memories and subtleties of perception. From his prison-like cell in the rest home, he follows the "empty path" to "fields pulsing / gold, green under / vapors, rain-fresh / furrows stretching / miles." (CP, 192). Then he is overcome by memories of his lost farm and long-dead wife:

he stands hours, keen
to the cool scent
of fullness—now
without purpose where
corn-tassels blow.
Returns to the bare
room, high above cedars
gathering gold and green.
(CP, 193)

The "corn-tassels" are just one of the constituent Midwestern "details" that Stryk invokes in his Introduction to Heartland; earlier, in Notes for a Guidebook (1965), he refers to the importance of "small particulars," (CP, 22) and in a recent interview with this author, Stryk insists on the primacy of the finely perceived detail. He explains that some years ago, after returning from one of his many trips to Japan, he determined "to make a minute inspection of my own world in DeKalb, Illinois…You see the smallest things become important as a source of revelation" (Guillory 6). This emphasis on the "small particulars" is a stylistic hallmark of Lucien Stryk's work. He rarely paints with a broad brush; his method is to focus on single objects, moments, and scenes. In his long poem, "A Sheaf for Chicago'" Stryk reduces Sandburgs comprehensive "city of the big shoulders" to particular scenes. Stryk's own childhood in Chicago is suggested by a catalogue of details, including discarded automobile parts and Christmas trees:

We gathered fenders, axles, blasted hoods
To build Cockaigne and Never-never Land,
Then beat for dragons in the oily weeds.
That cindered lot and twisted auto mound,
That realm to be defended with the blood,
Became, as New Year swung around,
A scene of holocaust, where pile on pile
Of Christmas trees would char the heavens
And robe us demon-wild and genie-tall
To swirl the hell of 63rd Place …
(CP, 23-24)

Another poem dealing with the theme of childhood is "Rites of Passage," a much later work in which Stryk, the former Chicago street urchin, has become a kind of Wordsworthian man, wandering through a rural corn field with his own son. The poet is even more aware of the importance of details and the intensity of childhood moments, here glimpsed through the eyes of his own son. The poem turns into a kind of incantation in which human language is replaced by the altogether more powerful language of nature itself:

In "Rites of Passage" the words become living entities, as if Stryk short-circuits the linguistic process and returns to an earlier time in pre-history when every word was the actual name of a living entity—a development described exhaustively by Ernst Cassirer in his classic work, Language and Myth (48-55).

Not all Midwestern moments, however, are the basis for transcendent experiences; many characteristic events inspire anxiety or outright terror. The region is visited by every meteorological curse imaginable, including freezing rain, dust storms, ice storms, hail, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes. These natural disasters occur as background or foreground in many of Lucien Stryk's poems, although he gives each terrifying event a peculiarly personal stamp. In "The Quake," for example, the poet and his wife are thrown out of bed by the mysterious rumbling underground. Their love-making is interrupted by a natural occurrence that shatters their tender interlude of shared intimacy. At first, they view the event as comic:

We laughed when the bed
Heaved twice then threw
Us to the floor. When all
Was calm again, you said
It took an earthquake
To untwine us. Then I
Stopped your shaking
With my mouth.

The "shaking" persists, however, as doubts and fears open in their psyches, fault-lines of a deeper and more sinister kind:

Then why should dream
Return us to that fragile
Shelf of land? And why,
Our bodies twined upon
This couch of stone,
Should we be listening,
Like dead sinners, for the quake?

The most terrifying of all the natural disasters is the tornado—deadly, unmerciful, and always unpredictable. In "Twister" the poet and his family wait out the storm in their basement after the tornado has already "touched down / a county north, leveled a swath / of homes, taking twenty lives." Like countless others, they study the "piled up junk" while wondering "what's ahead":

Like the earthquake in "Quake," the tornado in "Twister" breaks the numbing routine of ordinary existence and, hence, provides an opportunity for spiritual insight. By placing the poet (and his family) on the edge of death, such disasters force an instantaneous awareness of—and appreciation for—the mysterious and fragile life force. Paradoxically, the poet transforms such potential disasters into positive aesthetic triumphs. Speaking of all the possible setbacks to be encountered in writing poetry about the Midwest, Stryk remarks that "if the poet is worth his salt he is certain to get as much out of it as those who live elsewhere…" (Heartland xv).

Natural disasters are not the only kinds of setbacks that figure prominently in the poetry of Lucien Stryk; he gives a good deal of attention to the "Babbitry" (Heartland xix) that often typifies small-town life in the Midwest. Social disasters seem to occur just as often as natural ones. Every town has its share of malingers and ne'er-dowells, like the "toughs" and dropouts" described in "The Park":

All summer long rednecks,
high-school dropouts rev
motorbikes and souped-up
cars across the isle of
grass, jeer at cops cruising
as the horseshoes fly.
Strollers, joggers, children
traipsing to the city pool
flinch at hoots and whistles,
radio blasts recoiling from
the trees.
(CP, 190)

The sociology of prejudice and ostracism is the ugly core at the center of "The Cannery," another poem about malaise in the small midland town. Local residents re sent—and fear—the annual influx of migrant workers, especially poor Southern whites and illegal Mexicans who form a cheap labor pool for the local cannery.

In summer this town is full of rebels
Come up from Tennessee to shell the peas.
And wetbacks roam the supermarkets, making
A Tijuana of the drab main street.
The Swedes and Poles who work at Wurlitzer,
And can't stand music, are all dug in:
Doors are bolted, their pretty children warned,
Where they wait for the autumnal peace.
(CP, 74)

Some of the "disasters" may seem minor to someone who has never attempted the supremely difficult task of poetic composition, a process that requires intense powers of concentration. The poet's frustration in "Here and Now" is more than understandable: a poem has been scuttled by the importunate knocking of an Alcoa salesman. The poet's indignation turns on itself again and becomes the catalyst for a poem about not being able to write a poem in peace:

Hear a knocking
at the front. No muse,
a salesman
from the Alcoa
Aluminum Company
inspired by the siding
of our rented house.
(CP, 117)

The greatest disaster, perhaps, is to fall victim to the sameness and plainness that, at least on first sight, characterize the Midwestern scene. "And if the poets of the heartland," asks Stryk, "see their territory as often luminous and wild, are we to conclude that the weary passer-through who views it as a terrible sameness may, in fact, be seeing nothing other than himself (Heartland xix)? In point of fact, seeing things in a new way is one of the primary results of Zen training, and while it is true that good artists acquire this trait in many ways—not merely from Zen—it is also true that Lucien Stryk's work bears an especially strong affinity to Zen. For years he has translated Zen poetry and taught Asian literature; he has actually lived in Japan for a number of years. His most recent books are eloquent examples of his lifelong attention to this meditative and aesthetic discipline: On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho (Penguin, 1985) and Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi (University of Illinois Press, 1986). "I think my life has been profoundly affected by Zen and by meditation, reading, and translating," Stryk observes. "I think about Zen constantly; I believe I'm easier to live with, more able to handle life. And I take joy in reality of a kind that I could not have taken without such Zen training" (Guillory 13). The kind of joy Stryk means in this remark is well illustrated by the little poem "Constellation," a kind of poetic diary-entry in which the poet records the surprising discovery of beautiful sunflowers in a most unlikely setting:

Behind the super-
market where we
forage for our
lives, beyond the
parking lot, crammed
garbage bins—
thick heads of
bee-swarmed
seed-choked
sunflowers blaze
down on me through
fogged noon air.
(CP, 178)

Stryk is quite conscious of his unique way of looking at ordinary Midwestern artifacts: he describes himself as "someone whose experiences have all the limitations and, of course, all the possibilities of this particular corner of the universe" (Guillory 6).

Elm trees, to cite one example, represent one of the many "possibilities" for the poet. Once so numerous that their leafy branches were a trademark of every small town in the Midwest and now virtually extinct because of Dutch elm disease, the elm is a kind of totem for the region. In "Elm" the poet mourns the loss of his elm, a personal favorite destroyed by "beetles smaller than / rice grains." Then the season changed and frost "spiked"

the twigless air. Soon
snow filled emptiness
between the shrubs. I
fed my elm-logs to the
fire, sending ghost-
blossoms to the sky.
(CP, 156)

Those "ghost blossoms" are an unexpected and wholly Zen-inspired touch, as are the novel ways of seeing clothes hanging on a clothesline in "Words on a Windy Day":

Even more inventive is "Storm," a kind of extended metaphor:

The green horse of the tree
bucks in the wind
as lightning hits beyond.
We will ride it out together
Or together fall.
(CP, 114)

But the poem that best illustrates the Zen method is "Willows," the final selection in Collected Poems. Stryk describes the poem as a" embodiment of Zen learning," explaining that it is "based on an old Zen exercise known as 'mind pointing'." Mind pointing involves focusing

on some everyday scene or object, something you encounter but take for granted. It could be anything … there's a stand of willows near the lagoon on the campus of Northern Illinois University, and my self-imposed exercise was to go by the willows, seeing whether in fact I could really look at them without thinking of what happened yesterday, what will happen tomorrow, problems or whatever. And the finished poem is a detailing of that experience." (Guillory 10)

At one level, "Willows" is a kind of journal of a great experiment that fails, because Stryk never fully succeeds at ridding his mind of distractions. At another level, however, "Willows" is a magnificent accomplishment because it dramatizes the great Zen notion that the search and the thing sought are one and the same. Perhaps the poet does not fully apprehend all twenty-seven of the willows, but he does perceive them in a new way as they become "delicate / tents of greens and browns." Although he once makes it to the seventeenth tree, his trials are marked with various gestures of frustration, wrung hands and clenched teeth. But even his distractions are valuable. Shifting his focus from the nearest tree to the farthest one in the row, he beholds a shower" of leaves. In his passionate attention to the trees, the whole world becomes intense and vivid, and even the distractions are raised to the level of pure comprehension. The poet may not be granted perfect awareness of all twenty-seven trees, but he does receive unmediated impressions of reality as if the world around him were suddenly and magically translated into haiku-like imagery:

the flap of duck, goose, a limping
footstep on the path behind,
sun-flash on the pond.
(CP, 198)

"Willows" concludes with the poet still "practicing" on the trees "over, over again" because in each failure lies the magnificent gift of incidental poetry.

Like Japanese art, the poetry of Lucien Stryk is spare, compressed, and simple—minimalist art at its very best. But Stryk is no Japanese, and his representations of tornadoes, elm trees, willows, and farms revitalize these primary images of midland America. Without them there could be no Midwest; and Stryk deserves the gratitude of his readers for helping to rescue this precious world from oblivion. In "Awakening" Stryk reminds his readers that poetry is the greatest form of awareness; to be fully alive is to participate in the fundamental joy of seeing and, even, of not seeing, as in the final moments of every sunset on the prairie:

and what I love about
this hour is the way the trees
are taken, one by one,
into the great wash of darkness.
At this hour I am always happy,
ready to be taken myself
fully aware.
(CP, 108)

WORKS CITED

Cassirer, Ernst. Language and Myth. Trans. Susanne K. Langer. 1946. New York: Dover, 1953.
Guillory, Dan. "The Way the Eye Attacks: An Interview with Lucien Stryk." Indra's Net 10 (1986):6-13.
On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho. Trans. Lucien Stryk. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Stryk, Lucien. Collected Poems, 1953-1983. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1984.
Stryk, Lucien, ed. Heartland: Poets of the Midwest. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1967.
Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi. Trans. Lucien Stryk. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.