Arts & Crafts

Craftsmen in the moonlight? - Chagall

A few discussions on “craft” lately. Somehow they keep me in tune with the Amish, the way they build things. Any discussion on craft must be a reductio ad absurdum, of poetical sorts. Obviously, you cannot write poetry without a minimum indicia of craft. Words in arrow are a good start. But then again writing poetry according to strict craft may result in poems solid as Quaker chairs. They are solid, unmoving. Though something may be said about the right way to hold nails in your mouth before the last plank goes on to the frame of that house, beware of all houses looking exactly that practical same. Thus “craft” in that sense turns poetry into suburban neighborhoods seen from the sky. I don’t know. How to describe the craft of Lorca? O’Hara? Wordsworth? Shall we call the carpenters’ guild?

It all explains, perhaps, why Donald Hall was once great at scything.

My grandfather taught me scythe mowing, which is a rhythmic motion like dancing or lovemaking. It is a studios sweeping crescent in which the trick is to keep the heel (where blade joins snath) close to the ground, an angle that tilts the scythe point-up, preventing it from catching in the ground. I no longer mow with a scythe …Finding a meter, one abandons oneself to the swing of it; one surrenders oneself to the guidance of object and task, where worker and work are one: There is something ecstatic about mowing with a scythe.”[Donald Hall, Life’s Work, at p. 86.]

There. Don’t you ever forget it. There is nothing ecstatic about mowing with a scythe. Nothing ecstatic about worker and work as one. Ask any worker. Anybody know how to build a hut in the forest? Oh never mind, Mr. Thoreau, I’ll stick to trinkets.