it is something
in the returning
these strangers
in my night dreams
keep saying
and their offer
of a handful of yellow earth
for my soul
seems so strange
till I wake
with the taste of dust on my lips
This is how Neil Aitken opens one of his earlier chapbooks, titled "Yellow Eath Songs" -- haunted by the reoccurring visits of strangers who offer handfuls of yellow earth. Later in this first poem, from which the title of the chapbook is derived, "Yellow Earth," he reveals the yellow earth is the dust of his heritage, from his mother's side. It is inviting his return home from whatever exiled land he lives.
This past week, I was fingering through the books on one of the lower shelves of my bookcase and came across Neil's chapbook, which was published by Willow Tree Press in Provo, UT, 1997. I have this image in my head of meeting him at a reading, purchasing this copy, but so much has come and gone since then that I do not know whether that image is accurate.
I was so intrigued by the opening of Earth Songs that I googled his name to see if he was still writing. The answer, dear reader, is Yes.
One of the first poems I encountered was a thoughtful work published at Prairie Poetry, titled "Adrift". Seven years since Yellow Earth, he's older and his poetics are more mature. He's still alive with explanations of evocative visions and dreams:
All night, locusts fly from my dreams,
the sky peels back from sky, twin heavens
reeling in a dark net of stars.
And still alive with the taste of the experience of life, the dust of it:
Each gravel road turns a vein, a slow pulse of dust
rising in waves like semaphore or sign against the clouds,
the thunder, the coming rain.
All night, I drive this empty ship into a storm,
the long-shadowed world below, the moon buttoned fast to the sky,
and the desert asking if the land would make a better sea.
Aitken's thoughtful regard of the landscape, his awareness of it, makes for highly surprising, catch-your-breath like phrases and images, like the last line "the desert asking if the land would make a better sea."
I emailed Neil to tell him that I had re-discovered "Yellow Earth Songs," that I had read some of his current (and wonderful) poetry, and that I had found his insights on writing (on his blog) astute and personally meaningful. IN fact, I wrote down one of his thoughts: "Writing is an invitation to the world of ghosts and memories to step into a moment."
His reply to my email was likewise meaningful, amazing, leaving me with this nugget of wisdom from the essayist, Andre Achimen:
...in his collection of essays titled "Letters of Transit," [Achimen] notes that every exile suffers from a form of double-vision where it is impossible to view one city without seeing the city one came from as well. I feel much the same way -- each place I end up is haunted by the ghosts of the places I've been.
In many regards, it seems that the writer, the poet, makes himself/herself an exile so that he/she can have that unique perspective of the exile. Writing is a lonely art. Writers are always in search of "home."
*****
Neil Aitken maintains the Eurasian American Literature Resource website and serves as co-editor-in-chief of CRATE, the new literary arts journal of UC Riverside. He is presently working on a MFA Creative Writing at UC Riverside. Aitken has just finished his first full-length poetry manuscript "The Lost Country of Sight."
To read Adrift, click here.
To read his exemplary and thought-provoking insights on writing aesthetically, click here, here, and here.
And for an additional treat, please read "Counting Winters in Los Angeles," which opens with the magnificent line: "I no longer mark what falls in passing..."
Neil has told me that CRATE is currently taking submissions for poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, critical essay, and plays for the upcoming issue.
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