Sherwin Bitsui experimental and daring poem “At Deer Springs” is a fascinating work of lyrical and poetic innovation and dreamlike wordplay:
“Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.Snake dreams uncoil,
burrow into the spine of books.Night spills from cracked eggs.Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.”
The topic with which I choose to examine this poem is the conflict between nature and technology. I understand this topic to include issues as vast as the modern human experience in a globalized world, anxiety at the death of the kind of holistic, natural lifestyle that the Native Americans hold very dear to them, and more. In reading I looked for passages where the idiosyncracies and arrhythmic patterns of Bitsui’s poetry would evoke both images of the natural and of the modern and technological. Viewing “At Deer Springs” through sensory, typographical, rhythmic and other perspectives, Bitsui’s poem will be analyzed and explicated to further understand the majesty of this short, but extremely unique, work of postmodern literature.
The sensory response to this poem is immediate and evocative from the first line, each line evoking a specific type of imagery, from visual (“turn signals blink”), auditory (“cracked eggs”), kinesthetic (“ice in the skin”) and more. Most of the imagery itself is visual, from the blinking of turn signals to the cracking of eggs and the spilling of night, but it all somehow also feels so tactile and kinesthetic. Even while describing “thin hands” veining “oars in a canyon bed,” there is a feeling of sensing the touch of those hands on the oars. Even the phrase at the end of the poem, “the insertion of her tongue,” evokes a certain kind of almost sensual pleasure and kinesthetic response, though it does not coincide with the definitions of auditory, olfactory or gustatory imagery. Even so, Bitsui manages to convey the smell, taste and touch of these attributes to the reader through simple phrases and uses of figurative language and vocabulary.
Through this sensory, tactile approach, Bitsui helps to illustrate the differences in the essential nature between the colder nature of technology and the wetter, more organic aspects of nature. The first line juxtaposes the mechanical turn signal with the ice through which it is blinking, the light from a machine figuratively cutting through this natural phenomenon. In lines 2 and 3, “snake dreams” combines two very organic, holistic things (snakes and dreams) and has them slip away from a person and into “the spine of books” – an inorganic creation of man that nonetheless carries with it the products of their imagination. Cracked eggs evoke breakfast and civilization, while “night spills” from them to show yet more draining of the natural into the mundane. The “canyon bed” in line 5 is disrupted by the oars being gripped by “thin hands,” yet another violation of nature by technology and civilization. Finally, the tracking of deer – a very intimately spiritual act for Native Americans – is perverted in a strange way with the sensuall image of a woman inserting “her tongue.”
On a typographical level, Bitsui’s poem offers small but significant alterations to the normal line spacing and placement of poetry to create substantial effects. The poem is only six lines line, the first and final lines being the longest (first line at nine syllables, the last at fourteen). The four lines in the middle are somewhat shorter, at four, eight, five and nine syllables, respectively; however, the third line (“burrow into the spine of books”) is indented to the center of the page. This is significant, as it is the only line to continue from a previous line and require context from another – the previous line is the only one to end with a comma, indicating that line 3 continues what it is saying. The words “uncoil” in line 2 and “burrow” in line 3 are equated as the only words that overlap in the typography of these two lines, verbs which illustrate the transition between the more natural “snake dreams” and their eventual destination in “the spine of books.” By forcing the eye to follow this unconventional line placement, the reader goes through a transformation themselves, not unlike the uncoiling and burrowing of the “snake dreams” in question. This places the reader in a more immediate relationship with the text, and engages through surprise at the unexpected.
When investigating the rhythms and language of “At Deer Springs,” Bitsui’s poetic style is relatively unmoored from standard linguistic conventions. Rather than following traditional senses of meter and rhythm, each line is incredibly idiosyncratic and all its own, with no specific rhythm continuing from one line to the next. In many ways, it is almost fractal in the radical sequencing of the words and phrases, moving from one shape to another in a very surreal sense. Each detail is incredibly lucid, each image locally described and precisely identified to create a sense of perception that is clear and immediate. The result is an extremely dreamlike sense of tracking verse, making it difficult to decode. When the poet describes a turn signal, we are not given context as to which way the signal is indicating, for instance. The end of the poem describes “the insertion of her tongue,” but without context to who she is, where the tongue is going, or the circumstances behind the unknown “we” tracking deer to it.
These mysterious elements create a dreamlike structure and attitude to the poem that evokes feeling without going into specifics, particularly as to the fascinating anxiety that the Native American poet likely has about the loss of more natural and spiritual connections with nature to the more modest goals of civilization. In a more nature-centric Native American culture, Batsui argues, the “snake dreams” would remain uncontained within books, the “canyon bed” and the concept of night itself would be unmolested, the tradition of deer tracking would not be distracted by carnal pursuits. The chaotic, fractal rhythms of Batsui allow these images to sit in the reader’s mind without demanding description,
Despite this lack of context, the internal rhythm of the poem remains interesting, as lies are tied together through phonics – phrases like “turn signals blink” and “in the skin” place emphasis on tongued nasals like n, which then make way for i and u vowels that create a compelling mysteriousness of echoed tone and language. Batsui provides small rhymes through reversed vowels, such as in “deer tracks back,” and the phrase “insertion of her tongue” invites the usage of the throat in its use. To that end, Batsui’s true poetry and rhythms do not lie in the structure and tenor of the words themselves, but in the actual sounds the words produce. In this way, Batsui works to allow the lyrical and phonetic nature of the syllables to tell a story of how the greater rhythms and sounds of nature are often perverted through the alluring instincts of civilization – abandoning the harsher k sounds of deer tracking to the longer, more sensual discussion of tongues. These elements reveal substantial understanding of the allure of modern society by Batsui, which he clandestinely reveals in the poem.
Through this explication, Sherwin Batsui’s “At Deer Springs” provides ample sensory, typographical and rhythmic/phonetic evidence to support the assertion that Batsui is uniquely concerned with the threat of modernity, sensuality and technology disrupting the neutral, spiritual bliss of nature. Nature and modernity are intertwined in an organic, fractal way through the sounds, spacing and senses demonstrated in the poem, Batsui stressing through five simple lines that the majesty and wholesomeness of Native American life has been inexorably complicated with the nuances of the modern experience.
References
Bitsui, Sherwin. “At Deer Springs.”
