Facing High Water

by John Brandi

“These poems shine with a Taoist sensibility and the wisdom and simplicity of self. John Brandi, as a traveler throughout Asia and the Americas, gives us the artist’s heightened sensitivity and clarity of detail; and poems of rare precision, charm and truth.”—Joanne Kyger, author of About Now From the Himalayas, Angkor Wat, the barrios of Old Havana, the highlands of Chiapas, and the streets of New York, John Brandi’s poems lead us toward rapport with the natural world and our own inner landscapes. John Brandi is a poet, writer, and artist. He is the author of thirty-eight books of poetry and nonfiction.

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

John Brandi, poet, painter, essayist and haiku writer, has resided in New Mexico for 35 years. Over the decades his poems and essays have celebrated his rambles into the unexpected crannies of the high desert, as well as presenting his conversations with bizarre loners, spunky elders, and eccentric renegades.

As a poet, Brandi owes much to the Beat tradition, and to poets as diverse as Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Matsuo Basho. Brandi's writing and visual art is specifically informed by his world journeys. His dozens of publications include poetry, travel essays, limited-edition letterpress books, hand-colored broadsides, and modern American haiku. He has lectured at the Palace of the Governors Museum, Santa Fe, at Punjabi University, India, and has been a guide and lecturer for university students studying in Bali, Java, and Mexico. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry and four Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry teaching awards.

Reviews

[Ren · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Listen, there's a house
halfway up the mountain. Nobody lives there,
just the thunder."

As the name of the collection, 'Facing High Water' suggests, the poetry herein is tied together by a sort of push and pull between angst and heartfelt humanism when facing a future that feels, yeah, like the existential threat of slowly but steadily rising water.

War seems to be the threat he focuses on rather than climate change, but regardless of whether you fear the end in the form of nuclear annihilation or the slower destruction and death brought on by global warming that feeling is certainly just as relatable now (if not more so) than it was in 2008.

But that's where the collection's through-line stops. It's a bit difficult to understand the organization as we zip back and forth in time and place. Some poems are reflections on places he's travelled, others are portraits of people he's met, others meditations on emotions or religio-philosophy (he seems especially to be taken by eastern religious philosophy). It's kind of all over the place.

That also massively influenced my overall feeling about the collection as a whole. Those that I enjoyed the most tended to be the ones that were a bit more meditative, a bit more reflective. Those that captured a sort of je ne sais quoi that is recognizably 'the human experience' -- the good, the bad, the mundane. For instance, lines like
"Compost needs turning,
stomach's blocked. Bad cheese, political turmoil,
lottery tickets scratched the wrong way." (3 in the Afternoon)
encapsulate in a list only a poet could put together what angst feels like, what it's made of. It's wonderful.

Another stanza that struck me this way was in the poem 'Has the old Homeland Changed?' when he writes:
Down below, it's all on fire.
People grasp at inflated dreams, take refuge
in lies that catch like burrs on every promise."

Each word just feels so ripe for interpretation, for mulling over. Where is 'down below?' Down below from where? Who are the people there grasping at inflated dreams? Is the narrator looking down from Heaven and talking about earth and the people living on it? Or is 'down below' being described by a monarch looking down from their castle? Academics peeking at the world from the ivory tower? Is this about class? Is this someone from a 'free, first world' country commenting on the plight of people living under a fascist government?

It's so interesting and probably somewhat revealing to think about.

And there were many pieces like this in the collection that I really, really enjoyed.

However, and this is just a personal feeling, but I really, really don't like it when people from western countries do this thing where when they travel, especially to non-European countries, and especially when they travel to places in Asia and South-east Asia (though this isn't exclusive to those places), they write about the people and culture there in one of two ways:

1. like they're fountains of wisdom and knowledge and spiritual insight that are just there for white people to drink from and gain enlightenment, and not as though they're three-dimensional individuals with complex inner worlds and emotions.

2. like they're exotic sheep to be pointed at and exclaimed over and commented on while you're passing through. That type of otherizing and/or generalization is just, it's so dehumanizing.

I don't want to say these things plagued 'Facing High Water', but they were definitely there. For instance, in 'Teaching in the Rust Belt' he describes the names of the immigrants he teaches there as "hardly pronounceable" and the experience of entering the school as being "engulfed in waves of black, sienna, mahogany, a glistening undertow of beaded dreads."

He then goes on, now that we've completely dehumanized his students, to talk about how their insights into their own traumas help him develop a broader sense of empathy: As the days progress, my chest hammers with brown rivers and delirious jungles, desert wars and refugee camps."

All of it just smacks, to me, of the 'magical Negro' trope, albeit broadened out to 'the magical person of color' trope and it gives me the ick.

Something else that gave me the ick was the expression 'swollen triangle' to describe a vagina, but I fully accept that that might just be a personal thing.

Overall, though the 'white person interacts with people of color' lens was irritating and played out, I did really like everything else, and though he clearly still had/has a lot of growth to do in that area, John Brandi obviously has a fabulous poetic sensibility when it comes to broader human experiences and feelings.

Compliment sandwich-style, here's one more quote I really liked:

It's the hour without hands
where clocks become stars and truth books its desire." (A Dancehall in Baracoa)

Side Note: I found my (signed!) copy in a used bookshop in Chiang Mai, Thailand, while I was studying there at a Thai language school, which I think would make the author smile.