Ode to a Nightingale
1
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minutes past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness--
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
2
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
3
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies,
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
4
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays,
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
5
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
6
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
To thy high requiem become a sod.
7
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
8
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?
John Keats 1819
I read this poem for the first time on the same day I went to Mozart's Requiem, and the similarities are striking. Though not a requiem, Keats wrote this poem knowing that he was going to die, just as Mozart wrote his Requiem knowing death was near. I think you have to read this poem with death in the back of your mind. It is so easy to ache with it and bypass Keats' heartbreak.
My professor told our class of one of his colleagues from graduate school who found she was terminally ill. She was a Keats scholar, had only seven months to live, and found much solace in his art as she moved closer to death. She asked to have this poem read at her funeral. I almost cried in class when I heard that... it's that she loved this poem so much, and that she wanted to share its beauty as her goodbye. The poem is about love, it is about poetry, art, depression, imagination, death, eternity, infinity, beauty, heartbreak, hope, but most of all grief.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
Poem of the Week 4/24/2006: Poem Ended by a Death
Poem Ended by a Death
They will wash all my kisses and fingerprints off you
and my tearstains--I was more inclined to weep
in those wild-garlicky days--and our happier stains,
thin scales of papery silk. . . Fuck that for a cheap
opener; and false, too--any such traces
you pumiced away yourself, those years ago
when you sent my letters back, in the week I married
that anecdotal ape. So start again. So:
They will remove the tubes and drips and dressings
which I censor from my dreams. They will, it is true,
wash you; and they will put you into a box.
After which whatever they do
won't matter. This is my laconic* style.
You praised it, as I praised your intricate pearled
embroideries; these links laced us together,
plain and purl** across the ribs of the world . . .
* terse
** Stitch in knitting with needle moved in opposite to normal (plain) direction
Fleur Adcock 1979
For a poem that seems to be about a body, there is a lot of heart to "Poem Ended by Death." Of course, it is about a relationship, though the narrator seems to emphasize the physical connection between she and her ex-lover. The first three lines shows the connection between the two physically with kisses, fingerprints, tearstains (we wonder whether the power of their physical intimacy could have made her weep then, or whether it is just a testament to their intense connection), and "thin scales of papery silk," another nod to their erotic adventures.
But the narrator checks herself, saying that the physically saturated opener is "cheap," and misleading as well. Those stains were there, but he effectively effaced them. Here it becomes absolutely evident that there is more to their relationship than simple physical interaction, for the body then serves as a metaphor for deeper things. It is still the dominant metaphor, showing that it was probably a dominant element in their relationship.
We get the details of this relationship in a few short lines. He erased her from his life, sending her letters back, when she married someone else. The tone is matter-of-fact, almost grinning at itself. The narrator swears casually and calls her (ex?) husband "that anecdotal ape." This is funny. I know that pointing out funny things is a pretty good way to make them un-funny, but I appreciate it when literature doesn't take itself so seriously. This poem is fantastic in that it manages to be funny and sexual and sad and complex while retaining a strong voice.
Part of this ability to mix humor and seriousness comes from the poem's honesty. The narrator, whether she wanted to begin so idealistically or not, acknowledges that she did, that it was dishonest, and that the right thing is to candidly tell what happened. "So start again.," she says, and launches into the truth of the matter. There is almost an in-breath at the colon. She lays out the facts: "They will remove the tubes and drips and dressings / which I censor from my dreams. They will, it is true, / wash you, and they will put you into a box. / After which whatever else they may do / won't matter." We learn that she was concerned for him, that his death was probably drawn-out, and that things are now over. Once he is in the box, nothing matters any more.
This comment seems to emphasize the body again, for once it falls from sight, somehow their relations are officially over. I think, though, that she is just willing to end things. Not coldly cut them off, but breathe in, grit your teeth, and nod, yes, we loved, yes, it's over. So when she talks of her "laconic style," perhaps she's not merely referring to the tone. It seems that she lives her life laconically, not drawing things out unnecessarily.
Which is what made her lover's "intricate pearled / embroideries" all the better. Unlike the speaker, he seems to have found connections everywhere. But both are necessary. The entire poem, in fact, is a balancing of different ideas. The first part is a fantast, how she would like to remember the relationship, while the second is a candid look at his death. The rhyme scheme also shows the interlacing of two different styles - it is abcb defe ghih jklk - rhymed pairs laced with unrhymed. This seems to parallel the embroidered, connected man with the terse, jerkier woman. Along with the rhyme, the mixture of "plain and purl" shows their balance of laconic and intuitive. Both are necessary, knit together "across the ribs of the world." This final line recalls the emphasis on the body, but it reminds us that beneath the ribs lies the heart.
Before I end this, a couple of the thoughts I remembered after writing the bulk of this: the emphasis on the body comes through in the repetition of the “oooo” and “oh” sounds in “So,” “so,” “ago” and “true,” “you,” “into,” and “do.” These are sexual sounds, and ramp up the energy of this poem. Then, too, the title of the poem calls into question the relations between art and life. Adcock’s poem begins with a death, but ends with an affirmation of their connection. The poem the title refers to may be, instead, their relationship, or perhaps the man’s life. In either case, the title asks what about our own lives and relationships is poetic. Our connections? Our loves? Our honesty? Our personal style, be it terse or embellished, logical or intuitive? I like the idea of life as poetry. I think of most things in terms of poetry, I suppose. Prayer, relationships, conversations…
They will wash all my kisses and fingerprints off you
and my tearstains--I was more inclined to weep
in those wild-garlicky days--and our happier stains,
thin scales of papery silk. . . Fuck that for a cheap
opener; and false, too--any such traces
you pumiced away yourself, those years ago
when you sent my letters back, in the week I married
that anecdotal ape. So start again. So:
They will remove the tubes and drips and dressings
which I censor from my dreams. They will, it is true,
wash you; and they will put you into a box.
After which whatever they do
won't matter. This is my laconic* style.
You praised it, as I praised your intricate pearled
embroideries; these links laced us together,
plain and purl** across the ribs of the world . . .
* terse
** Stitch in knitting with needle moved in opposite to normal (plain) direction
Fleur Adcock 1979
For a poem that seems to be about a body, there is a lot of heart to "Poem Ended by Death." Of course, it is about a relationship, though the narrator seems to emphasize the physical connection between she and her ex-lover. The first three lines shows the connection between the two physically with kisses, fingerprints, tearstains (we wonder whether the power of their physical intimacy could have made her weep then, or whether it is just a testament to their intense connection), and "thin scales of papery silk," another nod to their erotic adventures.
But the narrator checks herself, saying that the physically saturated opener is "cheap," and misleading as well. Those stains were there, but he effectively effaced them. Here it becomes absolutely evident that there is more to their relationship than simple physical interaction, for the body then serves as a metaphor for deeper things. It is still the dominant metaphor, showing that it was probably a dominant element in their relationship.
We get the details of this relationship in a few short lines. He erased her from his life, sending her letters back, when she married someone else. The tone is matter-of-fact, almost grinning at itself. The narrator swears casually and calls her (ex?) husband "that anecdotal ape." This is funny. I know that pointing out funny things is a pretty good way to make them un-funny, but I appreciate it when literature doesn't take itself so seriously. This poem is fantastic in that it manages to be funny and sexual and sad and complex while retaining a strong voice.
Part of this ability to mix humor and seriousness comes from the poem's honesty. The narrator, whether she wanted to begin so idealistically or not, acknowledges that she did, that it was dishonest, and that the right thing is to candidly tell what happened. "So start again.," she says, and launches into the truth of the matter. There is almost an in-breath at the colon. She lays out the facts: "They will remove the tubes and drips and dressings / which I censor from my dreams. They will, it is true, / wash you, and they will put you into a box. / After which whatever else they may do / won't matter." We learn that she was concerned for him, that his death was probably drawn-out, and that things are now over. Once he is in the box, nothing matters any more.
This comment seems to emphasize the body again, for once it falls from sight, somehow their relations are officially over. I think, though, that she is just willing to end things. Not coldly cut them off, but breathe in, grit your teeth, and nod, yes, we loved, yes, it's over. So when she talks of her "laconic style," perhaps she's not merely referring to the tone. It seems that she lives her life laconically, not drawing things out unnecessarily.
Which is what made her lover's "intricate pearled / embroideries" all the better. Unlike the speaker, he seems to have found connections everywhere. But both are necessary. The entire poem, in fact, is a balancing of different ideas. The first part is a fantast, how she would like to remember the relationship, while the second is a candid look at his death. The rhyme scheme also shows the interlacing of two different styles - it is abcb defe ghih jklk - rhymed pairs laced with unrhymed. This seems to parallel the embroidered, connected man with the terse, jerkier woman. Along with the rhyme, the mixture of "plain and purl" shows their balance of laconic and intuitive. Both are necessary, knit together "across the ribs of the world." This final line recalls the emphasis on the body, but it reminds us that beneath the ribs lies the heart.
Before I end this, a couple of the thoughts I remembered after writing the bulk of this: the emphasis on the body comes through in the repetition of the “oooo” and “oh” sounds in “So,” “so,” “ago” and “true,” “you,” “into,” and “do.” These are sexual sounds, and ramp up the energy of this poem. Then, too, the title of the poem calls into question the relations between art and life. Adcock’s poem begins with a death, but ends with an affirmation of their connection. The poem the title refers to may be, instead, their relationship, or perhaps the man’s life. In either case, the title asks what about our own lives and relationships is poetic. Our connections? Our loves? Our honesty? Our personal style, be it terse or embellished, logical or intuitive? I like the idea of life as poetry. I think of most things in terms of poetry, I suppose. Prayer, relationships, conversations…
Monday, April 17, 2006
Poem of the Week 4/17/2006: The Simple Truth
The Simple Truth
I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat," she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter, and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
Philip Levine 1994
Is this poem about innocence? Love? Simplicity? Modesty? Levine doesn't give us any single, concrete "truth," though that is the poem's title. That's the lovely thing about this poem, though; it is simple, clear, and straightforward, but it doesn't provide an easy explanation or answer. Rather, "the simple truth" is a feeling, an experience, something tangible and sensual and fresh. It is buttery potatoes, the affection of a stranger, the light wandering on a furrow. The poem invites us to experience the feeling with its narrator. Just share, and enjoy.
He starts with his own story, told without pretension. The diction, like the elements of the poem, are straightforward and clear. The price - a dollar and a half, written in longhand - establishes the modesty of the meal, while the "small red potatoes" are evenly and lovingly described. They are comfortable, wrapped in their "jackets." The meal is unassuming and simple, for the potatoes are garnished with nothing more than "a little butter and salt." The addition of the details "small," "jackets," and "little" make this otherwise unremarkable sentence strikingly beautiful. There is just enough attention to detail to really make us notice this dinner.
There is a kind of rich delicacy to the narrator's stroll, as well. The "dried fields" kindle a crackling freshness, while their position "on the edge of town" sets them at a finely balanced point. The narrator takes care to notice the light's persistence in the furrows, the strings of birds moving overhead. The words "squawking," "gathering," and "darting" are logopoeic: words that both mean and are.* As Pope wrote, "the sound [seems] an echo of the sense." "Squawking" scraps on the ears like the calls of jays, "gathering" rustles like feathers, and "darting" mimics the quick energy of finches flying in the night. Levine's language draws the walk, its phrases simple and rich as pencil-lines.
You can see the affection with which the narrator views the Polish woman as well; we, too, know this woman. The one whose bad taste (pink-spangled sweater!) and affection mix in some completely loveable way. She is our mother, our aunt, our grandmother, our third grade teacher. Someone whose cajoling makes us blush from embarrassment and self-esteem. The narrator lovingly re-creates the rise of her voice with the phrases "praising the perfection" and "all the way / she swore, from New Jersey." And we can almost her her Polish accent leaking out from her command, "eat, eat."
The energy and humor of the first stanza make the introspective revelation, "Some things / you know all your life" more striking. The narrator quits his half-grin towards the vegetable-seller, adopting a voice of almost urgent passion and love. He turns towards the reader with the "you," looking us in the eye and explaining what he means. There are no words for these simple truths, though, only experiences that must be seen and tasted and touched. By bringing in his friend Henri, the narrator ups the intensity of his story. Henri's appearance perhaps expresses the narrator's regret for not living in the present when he had the chance, not loving the world through clear and meticulous observation.
This is why he turns to us so urgently, asking, "Can you taste / what I'm saying?" But again, he cannot articulate his thought. It is stuck in the back of his throat: a kind of loving intensity, a clench of affection and a desire to appreciate the world for what it is. We live on these simple truths: the yearning tenderness for the world, the raw, deep, uncomplicated realm of sense and experience. The line "that dirt we call earth, that metal we call salt," too, expresses the sometime-arbitrariness of labels. We can't label and constrain them any more than we can label and constrain experience (whether we try to or think that we can is a different question). Perhaps Levine is hinting that labels are useless, and take us out of the realm of the present. Our truest experiences are those without names, descriptions, or analyses. They are necessarily personal and individual, experienced and interpreted by all.
So when I ask again what this poem is about, the best answer is, I believe, simple, true things. Potatoes, trees, moss, paper, a good pencil, cool water, walking in the sun, toast in the morning, meadowlarks in Colorado, forsythia bushes out of the window, cats purring, bread baking, for me. Levine invites us to think about the simple truths for ourselves, notice and appreciate the wealth of modest, true things surrounding us. So go ahead! List your own and think about yours. There is something to be said for the infinite unspeakable-ness of simplicity.
*Logopoeia: Ezra Pound discusses language as a means of communication and finds three ways in which language can be charged with meaning: (a) by throwing the object, be it fixed or moving, on to the visual imagination; this is phanopoeia; (b) by inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of speech; this is melopoeia; (c) by inducing both of these effects, thus stimulating the intellectual or emotional associations which have remained in the reciever's consciousness in relation to the actual words or groups of words employed; this is logopoeia. (from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory)
I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat," she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter, and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
Philip Levine 1994
Is this poem about innocence? Love? Simplicity? Modesty? Levine doesn't give us any single, concrete "truth," though that is the poem's title. That's the lovely thing about this poem, though; it is simple, clear, and straightforward, but it doesn't provide an easy explanation or answer. Rather, "the simple truth" is a feeling, an experience, something tangible and sensual and fresh. It is buttery potatoes, the affection of a stranger, the light wandering on a furrow. The poem invites us to experience the feeling with its narrator. Just share, and enjoy.
He starts with his own story, told without pretension. The diction, like the elements of the poem, are straightforward and clear. The price - a dollar and a half, written in longhand - establishes the modesty of the meal, while the "small red potatoes" are evenly and lovingly described. They are comfortable, wrapped in their "jackets." The meal is unassuming and simple, for the potatoes are garnished with nothing more than "a little butter and salt." The addition of the details "small," "jackets," and "little" make this otherwise unremarkable sentence strikingly beautiful. There is just enough attention to detail to really make us notice this dinner.
There is a kind of rich delicacy to the narrator's stroll, as well. The "dried fields" kindle a crackling freshness, while their position "on the edge of town" sets them at a finely balanced point. The narrator takes care to notice the light's persistence in the furrows, the strings of birds moving overhead. The words "squawking," "gathering," and "darting" are logopoeic: words that both mean and are.* As Pope wrote, "the sound [seems] an echo of the sense." "Squawking" scraps on the ears like the calls of jays, "gathering" rustles like feathers, and "darting" mimics the quick energy of finches flying in the night. Levine's language draws the walk, its phrases simple and rich as pencil-lines.
You can see the affection with which the narrator views the Polish woman as well; we, too, know this woman. The one whose bad taste (pink-spangled sweater!) and affection mix in some completely loveable way. She is our mother, our aunt, our grandmother, our third grade teacher. Someone whose cajoling makes us blush from embarrassment and self-esteem. The narrator lovingly re-creates the rise of her voice with the phrases "praising the perfection" and "all the way / she swore, from New Jersey." And we can almost her her Polish accent leaking out from her command, "eat, eat."
The energy and humor of the first stanza make the introspective revelation, "Some things / you know all your life" more striking. The narrator quits his half-grin towards the vegetable-seller, adopting a voice of almost urgent passion and love. He turns towards the reader with the "you," looking us in the eye and explaining what he means. There are no words for these simple truths, though, only experiences that must be seen and tasted and touched. By bringing in his friend Henri, the narrator ups the intensity of his story. Henri's appearance perhaps expresses the narrator's regret for not living in the present when he had the chance, not loving the world through clear and meticulous observation.
This is why he turns to us so urgently, asking, "Can you taste / what I'm saying?" But again, he cannot articulate his thought. It is stuck in the back of his throat: a kind of loving intensity, a clench of affection and a desire to appreciate the world for what it is. We live on these simple truths: the yearning tenderness for the world, the raw, deep, uncomplicated realm of sense and experience. The line "that dirt we call earth, that metal we call salt," too, expresses the sometime-arbitrariness of labels. We can't label and constrain them any more than we can label and constrain experience (whether we try to or think that we can is a different question). Perhaps Levine is hinting that labels are useless, and take us out of the realm of the present. Our truest experiences are those without names, descriptions, or analyses. They are necessarily personal and individual, experienced and interpreted by all.
So when I ask again what this poem is about, the best answer is, I believe, simple, true things. Potatoes, trees, moss, paper, a good pencil, cool water, walking in the sun, toast in the morning, meadowlarks in Colorado, forsythia bushes out of the window, cats purring, bread baking, for me. Levine invites us to think about the simple truths for ourselves, notice and appreciate the wealth of modest, true things surrounding us. So go ahead! List your own and think about yours. There is something to be said for the infinite unspeakable-ness of simplicity.
*Logopoeia: Ezra Pound discusses language as a means of communication and finds three ways in which language can be charged with meaning: (a) by throwing the object, be it fixed or moving, on to the visual imagination; this is phanopoeia; (b) by inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of speech; this is melopoeia; (c) by inducing both of these effects, thus stimulating the intellectual or emotional associations which have remained in the reciever's consciousness in relation to the actual words or groups of words employed; this is logopoeia. (from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory)
Monday, April 10, 2006
Poem of the Week 4/10/2006: Four Poems for Robin
Four Poems for Robin
Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest*
I slept under rhododendrom
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pacl
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen.
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.
A spring night in Shokoku-ji**
Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.
An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji
Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.***
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.
December at Yase *
You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."
After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.
Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were--
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.
I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.
Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.
We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.
I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.
*West of Eugene, Oregon. Siwashing: camping with light equipment, roughing it.
**Fourteenth-century Zen monestary in Kyoto.
Yuago: a woman from The Tale of Gengi who, after a brief amorous encounter with Gengi, dies suddenly and mysteriously. After happening on a dress of hers, he writes a poem
***Snyder both names the planets and alludes to the Roman gods. Venus, goddes of love and beauty; Jupiter, ruler of all the gods.
* Near northeast Kyoto
Gary Snyder 1968
Gary Snyder, I just learned, is part of the Beat Generation, a group of poets I have dismissed wholeheartedly in the past. I still believe that much of their work is overrated, but it is never advisable to automatically reject anything. Besides, this poem is so quiet and lovely; it deserves a second look. I didn't actually want to include the entire thing, because the final section interests me most. I felt that I couldn't do "December at Yase" justice unless you all had read the first three. In three separate scenes, they establish the eastern influences, the narrator's memories of Robin, and his long-steeped loneliness. They give us a sense of the meditative, nostalgic, sad approach he expands upon in the final stanza. They also show how the final section is a departure; while the first three poems are episodic memories, the fourth is a memory layered with reflection and questions. It is by far the most interactive part, which is, I suppose, what interests me.
I want to look at the eastern influence and the introspection in this poem, two elements that work together. The eastern philosophy informs the narrator's thoughts, while the landscape mirrors his close, tight attention to the world around him. The diction in the first stanza is sparse and exact, the lack of punctuation almost methodical. The lines "You said, in October, / In the tall dry grass by the orchard / When you chose to be free," establish who, what, where, and when in less than 25 words. This economy of language makes the memory seem rehearsed, as if the narrator has found the best possible way to say it because he has done so so often. "The tall dry grass," parallels the state of their relationship. What was once organic and alive is now barren, thinned, listless. The grass, like their relationship, is now bleak.
Even Robin's break-up has been reduced to its essential terms; "Again someday, maybe ten years" is an end in that it implies "not now." Then, too, that the narrator chooses to quote this statement reveals what was important to *him* about her speech. The door is open in his mind, even if he's only seen her once since college. This interaction, too, boils down to its core. The interaction was awkward; their paths led in different directions. This terseness questions what is essential in our everyday lives. We get so concerned telling each other every detail, analyzing this searching look or that slight lean of the neck, but what happens when only the facts remain? Is it advisable to strip experiences to the bone? This poem perhaps hints that it is inevitable, or perhaps that heaping piles of words on experiences devalues them. I don't necessarily agree with this (it doesn't make for good conversation, for one, and it enables a disconnection with things, for another), but I see that this may also concentrate an experience's impact. By leaving some things unspoken, we perhaps respect the power that is there, not attempting to force them into sentences and conversations. One phrase suffices.
This space (for there is space in this kind of simplicity; the absence of detail allows the reader time for reflection of her own and lets her imagine the specifics) increases as the next stanza wears on. One gets the sense that the narrator nearly trails off, lost in thought. "I didn't" is the shortest line in the entire poem, but its implications are far-reaching. Why didn't he go back, we wonder. Is the reason too complex to even begin to explain? Or would he simply prefer not to let us in? One of my best friends from long ago told me about how her Chinese mother dealt with things. Everything was internal, private. Struggles are best kept to the self in Chinese culture. This is the brave way, the strong way, the right way. In the West, we are encouraged to be open, direct, confrontational with our emotions. Perhaps that is where some of the mystery in this poem comes from - the interaction of two cultures. I am, after all, sitting here trying to explain why the narrator is not using more words to describe his heartbreak, while it might be as simple as he is from the Eastern tradition. That doesn't make my questions about it any less valid, though. Indeed, the interaction between my ranging Western mode of communication and this tight, Eastern one illuminates characteristics of both. I would simply accept wordiness as the natural way of things were it not for experiences like this. This conjunction reminds me of a book another friend lent me, "Elsewhere Communities" by Hugh Kenner. He talks of forging bonds with Others so that we may grow. Or know ourselves. This is one thing literature does for us, I think. It forces us to listen, to pay attention, to experience things otherwise outside our normal realms.
That was a little tangent. It was just so interesting to notice my own perspectives in the face of this poem. It just affirms who I am, in a way, and it is strange and public to have that happen writing about a poem on a blog. But this is why poetry amazes me. I love the trance-like nature of writing - writing is discovery, the saying goes. That said, I really ought to be writing for an art history paper, but I got too caught up in this poem of the week. I will have to finish my reflections on the narrator's reflections later. Goodnight!
Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest*
I slept under rhododendrom
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pacl
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen.
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.
A spring night in Shokoku-ji**
Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.
An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji
Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.***
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.
December at Yase *
You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."
After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.
Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were--
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.
I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.
Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.
We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.
I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.
*West of Eugene, Oregon. Siwashing: camping with light equipment, roughing it.
**Fourteenth-century Zen monestary in Kyoto.
Yuago: a woman from The Tale of Gengi who, after a brief amorous encounter with Gengi, dies suddenly and mysteriously. After happening on a dress of hers, he writes a poem
***Snyder both names the planets and alludes to the Roman gods. Venus, goddes of love and beauty; Jupiter, ruler of all the gods.
* Near northeast Kyoto
Gary Snyder 1968
Gary Snyder, I just learned, is part of the Beat Generation, a group of poets I have dismissed wholeheartedly in the past. I still believe that much of their work is overrated, but it is never advisable to automatically reject anything. Besides, this poem is so quiet and lovely; it deserves a second look. I didn't actually want to include the entire thing, because the final section interests me most. I felt that I couldn't do "December at Yase" justice unless you all had read the first three. In three separate scenes, they establish the eastern influences, the narrator's memories of Robin, and his long-steeped loneliness. They give us a sense of the meditative, nostalgic, sad approach he expands upon in the final stanza. They also show how the final section is a departure; while the first three poems are episodic memories, the fourth is a memory layered with reflection and questions. It is by far the most interactive part, which is, I suppose, what interests me.
I want to look at the eastern influence and the introspection in this poem, two elements that work together. The eastern philosophy informs the narrator's thoughts, while the landscape mirrors his close, tight attention to the world around him. The diction in the first stanza is sparse and exact, the lack of punctuation almost methodical. The lines "You said, in October, / In the tall dry grass by the orchard / When you chose to be free," establish who, what, where, and when in less than 25 words. This economy of language makes the memory seem rehearsed, as if the narrator has found the best possible way to say it because he has done so so often. "The tall dry grass," parallels the state of their relationship. What was once organic and alive is now barren, thinned, listless. The grass, like their relationship, is now bleak.
Even Robin's break-up has been reduced to its essential terms; "Again someday, maybe ten years" is an end in that it implies "not now." Then, too, that the narrator chooses to quote this statement reveals what was important to *him* about her speech. The door is open in his mind, even if he's only seen her once since college. This interaction, too, boils down to its core. The interaction was awkward; their paths led in different directions. This terseness questions what is essential in our everyday lives. We get so concerned telling each other every detail, analyzing this searching look or that slight lean of the neck, but what happens when only the facts remain? Is it advisable to strip experiences to the bone? This poem perhaps hints that it is inevitable, or perhaps that heaping piles of words on experiences devalues them. I don't necessarily agree with this (it doesn't make for good conversation, for one, and it enables a disconnection with things, for another), but I see that this may also concentrate an experience's impact. By leaving some things unspoken, we perhaps respect the power that is there, not attempting to force them into sentences and conversations. One phrase suffices.
This space (for there is space in this kind of simplicity; the absence of detail allows the reader time for reflection of her own and lets her imagine the specifics) increases as the next stanza wears on. One gets the sense that the narrator nearly trails off, lost in thought. "I didn't" is the shortest line in the entire poem, but its implications are far-reaching. Why didn't he go back, we wonder. Is the reason too complex to even begin to explain? Or would he simply prefer not to let us in? One of my best friends from long ago told me about how her Chinese mother dealt with things. Everything was internal, private. Struggles are best kept to the self in Chinese culture. This is the brave way, the strong way, the right way. In the West, we are encouraged to be open, direct, confrontational with our emotions. Perhaps that is where some of the mystery in this poem comes from - the interaction of two cultures. I am, after all, sitting here trying to explain why the narrator is not using more words to describe his heartbreak, while it might be as simple as he is from the Eastern tradition. That doesn't make my questions about it any less valid, though. Indeed, the interaction between my ranging Western mode of communication and this tight, Eastern one illuminates characteristics of both. I would simply accept wordiness as the natural way of things were it not for experiences like this. This conjunction reminds me of a book another friend lent me, "Elsewhere Communities" by Hugh Kenner. He talks of forging bonds with Others so that we may grow. Or know ourselves. This is one thing literature does for us, I think. It forces us to listen, to pay attention, to experience things otherwise outside our normal realms.
That was a little tangent. It was just so interesting to notice my own perspectives in the face of this poem. It just affirms who I am, in a way, and it is strange and public to have that happen writing about a poem on a blog. But this is why poetry amazes me. I love the trance-like nature of writing - writing is discovery, the saying goes. That said, I really ought to be writing for an art history paper, but I got too caught up in this poem of the week. I will have to finish my reflections on the narrator's reflections later. Goodnight!
Monday, April 03, 2006
Poem of the Week 4/3/2006: The City Limits
The City Limits
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
A.R. Ammons 1971
This poem almost literally leaves me breathless. On one level, the phrases' sheer length is exhausting, even when read silently, while on another, its heady positivity... okay. I have to describe how it feels: that click of breath when you jump into the Puget Sound. The lungs beat like a heart, just for a second, and the breath pauses outside your mouth, waiting for your body to adjust to the water. A wondrous hiccup of breath, if you will.
The form is as overflowing as the content in this poem; the one reinforces the other. Ammons does not wax positive about everything, though. He includes a strong dose of realism that validates his point. The poem attains an aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific balance. Alright, let's start at the beginning before I ramble myself (and you all) to sleep.
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider
that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the
leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.
A.R. Ammons 1971
This poem almost literally leaves me breathless. On one level, the phrases' sheer length is exhausting, even when read silently, while on another, its heady positivity... okay. I have to describe how it feels: that click of breath when you jump into the Puget Sound. The lungs beat like a heart, just for a second, and the breath pauses outside your mouth, waiting for your body to adjust to the water. A wondrous hiccup of breath, if you will.
The form is as overflowing as the content in this poem; the one reinforces the other. Ammons does not wax positive about everything, though. He includes a strong dose of realism that validates his point. The poem attains an aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific balance. Alright, let's start at the beginning before I ramble myself (and you all) to sleep.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Poem of the Week 3/27/2006: from Mont Blanc
from Mont Blanc
Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni*
1.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters,--with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
*Through the Chamouni valley flows the river Arve, which originates in a glacier on the mountain and empties into Lake Geneva, from which flows the Rhone, which reaches the Mediterranean.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1816
This poem was shown to me about six months ago, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing ever, period. Please, I entreat you, read it out loud. Shelley is a master of language; the words will come out shaped like rivers. It is enough to merely read this stanza, for the words are beautiful without the meaning. On top of that, though, sits Shelley's theory of mind. He engages epistemological (the philosophy of how we know what we know) theory in his treatment of the river, using it as a symbol for the human mind.
The words reflect the natural phenomena they describe. The first line is expansive, but Shelley channels it "through the mind" in the next stanza by organizing "the everlasting universe of things" in a stream of thought. This river is vibrant and energetic, reflected in the repetition of the "r" sound, the round word "roll," and the iambic rhythm of "and rolls its rapid waves." Shelley then slows us down with three even dashes. In the third line, one senses a river's repeated leaps. The structure, like that of a river, is constant; there is a set of four "nows" and four stops, of which the first three are dashes and the last a comma. But just as a river's water is constantly replaced, so the description of the flow of thought changes. Dark and magical diction reveals that "the everlasting universe of things" is rich and varied, per a Romantic sense of mysticism. "Dark," "glittering," "gloom," and "splendor" emphasize a mysterious, glorious train of things through the mind.
The winding rhyme scheme also recalls the twisting of a river; "waves" and "raves" almost encircle the stanza, while "things," "springs" and "brings" bubble up within five lines. Shelley plays with rhythm in much the same way, darting between iambic (unstressed, stressed), trochaic (stressed, unstressed), and even spondaic (unstressed, unstressed) tropes.
The next three lines or so are syntactically twisted, as if caught in an eddy. Shelley creates a circle of language with the early prepositional phrase "from secret springs." He gives us an origin of water before even mentions water, tying the end of the phrase to the beginning. We thus have to untangle "Where from secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute brings / of waters." It becomes, "where it brings its tribute of water (gotten from the source of secret things) to the mind."
So here we are at the mind. This dynamic river is actually the mind, the flow of thought. Shelley is adopting, perhaps, Kant's epistemological stance: that there are indeed outside objects our senses percieve, but the mind sorts and organizes them into ideas of color, shape, texture etc. The first lines may be summarized more philosophically as "random and chaotic things in the universe enter our mind through the senses, which channels and sorts their infinite variety."
If the river is a representation of the mind, then the first half of the poem establishes the mind's power. It picks its way through an infinite sea of data, essentially constructing the world. This would seem to be an almost arrogant claim, in fact, were it not for the later half of the poem. Close up, it sorts infinity, but zoomed out this great faculty is merely "a feeble brook" among other natural elements. Notice how the earlier description "The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves." sits in comparison to "with a sound but half its own, / Such as a feeble brook will oft assume." The later description diminishes the river by dropping action and active diction. Shelley peoples the second phrase with small words like "but," "such as," and "oft," while the original look at the river incorporates eternity and infinity.
Our river is suddenly dwarfed by the chaotic energy of the surrounding mountains and waterfalls. It is a small flash among powerful forces. In the world outside the mind loom "mountains lone," towering over our little rill. Its dark eddies seem peaceful compared to the battle between expansive woods and gusting winds, and it appears a trickle when set against "waterfalls around it [leaping] for ever" or the vast river that "ceaselessly bursts and raves."
Of course, Shelley rhetorically packs the other elements of nature with energy as well. He repeats the "w" sound to create a whistling gale through the final five lines, again playing with rythmn to provide a chaotic drumbeat of nature. Then, too, verbs like "leap," "burst," and "rave" strain off the page, their aural impact leaping, bursting, and raving out of the poem. I repeat them because there is no better way to describe it - they are the best possible words, the ripest, the most energetic.
It's important to note that Shelley does not deny the mind its power, merely to put it in perspective. The elemental forces in the second half of the poem do not diminish the beauty of the first. In the poem as in life, mountains and tempests remind us that we are small, take us outside ourselves long enough to remember that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreampt of in the philosophy of men.
Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni*
1.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendor, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters,--with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
*Through the Chamouni valley flows the river Arve, which originates in a glacier on the mountain and empties into Lake Geneva, from which flows the Rhone, which reaches the Mediterranean.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1816
This poem was shown to me about six months ago, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing ever, period. Please, I entreat you, read it out loud. Shelley is a master of language; the words will come out shaped like rivers. It is enough to merely read this stanza, for the words are beautiful without the meaning. On top of that, though, sits Shelley's theory of mind. He engages epistemological (the philosophy of how we know what we know) theory in his treatment of the river, using it as a symbol for the human mind.
The words reflect the natural phenomena they describe. The first line is expansive, but Shelley channels it "through the mind" in the next stanza by organizing "the everlasting universe of things" in a stream of thought. This river is vibrant and energetic, reflected in the repetition of the "r" sound, the round word "roll," and the iambic rhythm of "and rolls its rapid waves." Shelley then slows us down with three even dashes. In the third line, one senses a river's repeated leaps. The structure, like that of a river, is constant; there is a set of four "nows" and four stops, of which the first three are dashes and the last a comma. But just as a river's water is constantly replaced, so the description of the flow of thought changes. Dark and magical diction reveals that "the everlasting universe of things" is rich and varied, per a Romantic sense of mysticism. "Dark," "glittering," "gloom," and "splendor" emphasize a mysterious, glorious train of things through the mind.
The winding rhyme scheme also recalls the twisting of a river; "waves" and "raves" almost encircle the stanza, while "things," "springs" and "brings" bubble up within five lines. Shelley plays with rhythm in much the same way, darting between iambic (unstressed, stressed), trochaic (stressed, unstressed), and even spondaic (unstressed, unstressed) tropes.
The next three lines or so are syntactically twisted, as if caught in an eddy. Shelley creates a circle of language with the early prepositional phrase "from secret springs." He gives us an origin of water before even mentions water, tying the end of the phrase to the beginning. We thus have to untangle "Where from secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute brings / of waters." It becomes, "where it brings its tribute of water (gotten from the source of secret things) to the mind."
So here we are at the mind. This dynamic river is actually the mind, the flow of thought. Shelley is adopting, perhaps, Kant's epistemological stance: that there are indeed outside objects our senses percieve, but the mind sorts and organizes them into ideas of color, shape, texture etc. The first lines may be summarized more philosophically as "random and chaotic things in the universe enter our mind through the senses, which channels and sorts their infinite variety."
If the river is a representation of the mind, then the first half of the poem establishes the mind's power. It picks its way through an infinite sea of data, essentially constructing the world. This would seem to be an almost arrogant claim, in fact, were it not for the later half of the poem. Close up, it sorts infinity, but zoomed out this great faculty is merely "a feeble brook" among other natural elements. Notice how the earlier description "The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves." sits in comparison to "with a sound but half its own, / Such as a feeble brook will oft assume." The later description diminishes the river by dropping action and active diction. Shelley peoples the second phrase with small words like "but," "such as," and "oft," while the original look at the river incorporates eternity and infinity.
Our river is suddenly dwarfed by the chaotic energy of the surrounding mountains and waterfalls. It is a small flash among powerful forces. In the world outside the mind loom "mountains lone," towering over our little rill. Its dark eddies seem peaceful compared to the battle between expansive woods and gusting winds, and it appears a trickle when set against "waterfalls around it [leaping] for ever" or the vast river that "ceaselessly bursts and raves."
Of course, Shelley rhetorically packs the other elements of nature with energy as well. He repeats the "w" sound to create a whistling gale through the final five lines, again playing with rythmn to provide a chaotic drumbeat of nature. Then, too, verbs like "leap," "burst," and "rave" strain off the page, their aural impact leaping, bursting, and raving out of the poem. I repeat them because there is no better way to describe it - they are the best possible words, the ripest, the most energetic.
It's important to note that Shelley does not deny the mind its power, merely to put it in perspective. The elemental forces in the second half of the poem do not diminish the beauty of the first. In the poem as in life, mountains and tempests remind us that we are small, take us outside ourselves long enough to remember that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreampt of in the philosophy of men.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Poem of the Week 3/20/2006: Ancestor
Ancestor
I was going to say something,
and stopped. Her profile against the curtains
was old, and dark like a hunting bird's.
It was the way she perched on the high stool,
staring into herself, with one fist
gripping the side of the barrier around her desk
--or her head held by something, from inside.
And not caring for anything around her
or anyone there by the shelves.
I caught a faint smell, musky and queer.
I may have made some sound--she stopped rocking
and pressed her fist in her lap; then she stood up
and shut down the lid of the desk, and turned the key.
She shoved a small bottle under her aprons
and came toward me, darkening the passageway.
Ancestor. . . among sweet- and fruit-boxes.
Her black heart . . .
Was that a sigh?
--brushing by me in the shadows,
with her heaped aprons, through the red hangings
to the scullery, and down to the back room.
Thomas Kinsella 1973
Two things strike me about this poem; the first is the portrait of the ancestor, and the second is the more universal feeling of grief, mystery, and respect for one's family history. Or perhaps family secrets. I guess that I'm interested in narrative focus right now; how does a poet balance a subject and speaker? "Ancestor" straddles narrator and speaker. Though we get a sense of the woman, we percieve the narrator just as acutely. Then, too, the poem deals with the past. What can we really know about those who came before us? The narrator carefully observes this woman, but says little about her. There are immense gaps in her person; we never learn where she was going or what she was thinking in this scene. With the present narrator's collection of observations and facts about his ancestor, Kinsella explores how humans sort and engage the past.
Kinsella starts this poem with a question for the reader, writing,"I was going to say something / and stopped." Why does the narrator stop, we ask? For me, this halt springs from the uncomfortable conundrum of wanting to know someone's secrets and simultaneously respect her privacy. I think that this is very human - do you know the feeling of intruding on someone's personal moment yet being unable to back out of the room for your fascination, fear that they'll notice you, or curiousity?
For the ancestor is certainly looking inward. She is "staring into herself," "her head held by something, from inside. / And not caring for anything around her / or anyone there by the shelves." The diction here already begins to hint at the ancestor's current state: unbalanced and sad. "Perched" here seems to connote a precarious position, which the anxious image of "one fist / gripping" underlines. She is lost, unkempt, as evidenced by the faint, musky smell coming from her.
This smell also underlines the mystery attached to this ancestor. All the narrator gives us (and perhaps all he sees) are small facts and actions, scattered evidence of her interior monolouge's existence. He, out of respect or ignorance, leaves it untouched, unvoiced. I could list the facts (she carries a bottle, she is a maid, she holds her hand in a fist, she shuts something in a desk), and we could infer that this woman is alcoholic, poor, determined, and secretive. Every little detail has to serve as an window into her being, for we have neither word nor thought from her.
The ellipses in the fourth stanza encapsulate the fine line between respect and ignorance. On one hand, the narrator could be leaving a moment of silence within the poem; the ellipses perhaps provide a pause of respect for the ancestor. However, they also suggest that something is missing, that something is cut or unknown. What are these things? Who is this woman? There is no way to know for sure, though we could make up some story about her illict affair or her dark plot to kill her mistress.
At heart, this is a poem of questions, facts, and how to deal with the past. The narrator looks for any sign about her situation, asking "was that a sigh?" but we never hear the answer. Which brings us to the larger question: how can we ever know the past? Because the narrator's ancestor is so vague, we can never really know what happened, and this seems to be indicative of humans everywhere. Like the ancestor in this poem, perhaps all we have of others are actions and facts. We have to piece people together from the scraps that filter down to us, or the moments frozen in a snapshot, a memory, a dream.
I was going to say something,
and stopped. Her profile against the curtains
was old, and dark like a hunting bird's.
It was the way she perched on the high stool,
staring into herself, with one fist
gripping the side of the barrier around her desk
--or her head held by something, from inside.
And not caring for anything around her
or anyone there by the shelves.
I caught a faint smell, musky and queer.
I may have made some sound--she stopped rocking
and pressed her fist in her lap; then she stood up
and shut down the lid of the desk, and turned the key.
She shoved a small bottle under her aprons
and came toward me, darkening the passageway.
Ancestor. . . among sweet- and fruit-boxes.
Her black heart . . .
Was that a sigh?
--brushing by me in the shadows,
with her heaped aprons, through the red hangings
to the scullery, and down to the back room.
Thomas Kinsella 1973
Two things strike me about this poem; the first is the portrait of the ancestor, and the second is the more universal feeling of grief, mystery, and respect for one's family history. Or perhaps family secrets. I guess that I'm interested in narrative focus right now; how does a poet balance a subject and speaker? "Ancestor" straddles narrator and speaker. Though we get a sense of the woman, we percieve the narrator just as acutely. Then, too, the poem deals with the past. What can we really know about those who came before us? The narrator carefully observes this woman, but says little about her. There are immense gaps in her person; we never learn where she was going or what she was thinking in this scene. With the present narrator's collection of observations and facts about his ancestor, Kinsella explores how humans sort and engage the past.
Kinsella starts this poem with a question for the reader, writing,"I was going to say something / and stopped." Why does the narrator stop, we ask? For me, this halt springs from the uncomfortable conundrum of wanting to know someone's secrets and simultaneously respect her privacy. I think that this is very human - do you know the feeling of intruding on someone's personal moment yet being unable to back out of the room for your fascination, fear that they'll notice you, or curiousity?
For the ancestor is certainly looking inward. She is "staring into herself," "her head held by something, from inside. / And not caring for anything around her / or anyone there by the shelves." The diction here already begins to hint at the ancestor's current state: unbalanced and sad. "Perched" here seems to connote a precarious position, which the anxious image of "one fist / gripping" underlines. She is lost, unkempt, as evidenced by the faint, musky smell coming from her.
This smell also underlines the mystery attached to this ancestor. All the narrator gives us (and perhaps all he sees) are small facts and actions, scattered evidence of her interior monolouge's existence. He, out of respect or ignorance, leaves it untouched, unvoiced. I could list the facts (she carries a bottle, she is a maid, she holds her hand in a fist, she shuts something in a desk), and we could infer that this woman is alcoholic, poor, determined, and secretive. Every little detail has to serve as an window into her being, for we have neither word nor thought from her.
The ellipses in the fourth stanza encapsulate the fine line between respect and ignorance. On one hand, the narrator could be leaving a moment of silence within the poem; the ellipses perhaps provide a pause of respect for the ancestor. However, they also suggest that something is missing, that something is cut or unknown. What are these things? Who is this woman? There is no way to know for sure, though we could make up some story about her illict affair or her dark plot to kill her mistress.
At heart, this is a poem of questions, facts, and how to deal with the past. The narrator looks for any sign about her situation, asking "was that a sigh?" but we never hear the answer. Which brings us to the larger question: how can we ever know the past? Because the narrator's ancestor is so vague, we can never really know what happened, and this seems to be indicative of humans everywhere. Like the ancestor in this poem, perhaps all we have of others are actions and facts. We have to piece people together from the scraps that filter down to us, or the moments frozen in a snapshot, a memory, a dream.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Poem of the Week 3/13/2006: [And, the Last Day Being Come, Man Stood Alone]
[And, the Last Day Being Come, Man Stood Alone]
And, the last day being come, Man stood alone
Ere sunrise on the world's dismantled verge,
Awaiting how from everywhere should urge
The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none
Did come, -- but indistinct from every realm
Of earth and air and water, growing more
And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar
Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm
His ears; and as he looked affrighted round
Every manner of beast innumerable
All thro' the shadows crying grew, until
The wailing was like grass upon the ground.
Asudden then within his human side
Their anguish, since the goad* he wielded first,
And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst,
Darted compressed and vital. -- As he died,
Low in the East now lighting gorgeously
He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed**
Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed
To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.
Trumbull Stickney 1905
* A pointed stick for driving cattle and other animals
** In rainbow-colored armor
I think my time with William Blake is attuning me to apocalyptic poetry - poems that reach farther than a certain moment. Take this poem, for example. It is essentially Stickney's vision of the Judgment Day; one wonders what kind of vision he had that prompted him to write it this way. Though there are, I suppose, no real warm visions of the apocalypse, this is a particularly cold and lonely one. There is no visitation by a god, merely the wails of animals and a giant sea-serpent. Stickney also folds in imagery from Genesis, inverting it for the End of Days. We have all of the elements of a "typical" apocalypse - judgment, chaos, Biblical diction, but Stickney builds on it in his own way.
The first stanza, though, assembles traditional elements; it begins with "And," indicating that this is a continuation of some previously established story. The diction here is distinctly Biblical. "Ere," "the Coming of the Lord," and "behold" draw upon Biblical conventions. Furthermore, the syntax of "being come" is recognizably Old Testament, as well. This first stanza recalls earlier episodes in the Bible - we have a Man standing alone on the edge of the world, which conjures up the image of Adam cast out of Eden, or perhaps Satan standing on the brink of Hell in Paradise Lost. But this is neither Adam nor Satan; the Man waiting here is man with a capital M, the final representative of humanity, a figure vague enough to be any one of us.
The second stanza, then, begins to re-write the Apocalypse, for no Lord comes to judge, merely an "indistinct" wailing from all around. By withholding the source, Stickney puts the reader in the same, confused space as Man. All we know is that there is a roar coming "from every realm / Of earth and air and water." The internal rhyme between "come" and "dun," "water" and "louder," the mixed use of polysyndeton and asyndeton (excessive use of conjunctions, no conjunctions), and the structural rhyme in the stanza (a-b-b-a) build the roar's energy. Stickney rhetorically turns up the volume again with the diction - this noise is high and low; the use of "heavier" lends it an almost tangible quality.
It is no surprise, then, that the Man is terrified in the third stanza. He looks "affrighted round," and suddenly is surrounded by the noisemakers: "every manner of beast." Their wail is so constant that it becomes part of the scenery, blanketing everything like grass. We can't restrict the line "the wailing was like grass upon the ground" to that, however; like the word "heavier" the second stanza, this similie gives the cacophony a physical presence. If we could see it, it would ripple like grass, comprised of as many individual strands. Also, "grass" is usually a more peaceful image, conjuring fields and gardens. As such, it adds a note of hope to this din; this is perhaps the saddest part, I think, for it makes us remember what is lost forever. The Apocalypse is emphatically an end, which grass' peaceful connotations reminds us of.
Though we don't know if the animals are the only things producing this noise, we know that they contribute to it in force. Their presence contorts Biblical convention, twisting the naming of the animals in Genesis. This reference heightens the poem's terror, for it contrasts these tortured cries with Eden's scene of fecund delight. They have fallen far, indeed.
Then, too, the animals are the arbiters of judgment in Stickney's apocalypse. Because the syntax is so knotted in the fourth stanza (mirroring Biblical diction and the tortured scene at hand), it is hard to see the chain of causality. We may rearrange the lines to read "Since man weilded a cattle prod, and since he did not give the animals enough to drink when they were thirsty, the animal's anguish suddenly darts 'compressed and vital' into his side." Man is judged because he was controlling and cruel. Stickney draws upon Matthew 25: 30-46. (Matthew or Jesus or somebody - anybody know who?) says that the righteous will be saved, "(35) For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, (36) naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me." Those who treat Jesus' lesser creatures with respect will be saved, but those who trod upon those beneath them will be cast into hell. Stickney adapts this by eliminating God in the process; the animals are enough to judge Matthew.
As he dies, pierced by their anguish, he sees the final destruction of the world. Another animal - a sea serpent in iris armor - stabs the sun, bringing about the end of time. With the image of the sea-monster in rainbow armor, Stickney again inverts Biblical convention. In Isaiah and Job, the sea monsters Leviathan and Rahab exist as conquered beings. They represent God's power in His ability to destroy them. Since Stickney has, so far, effaced God from this Apocalypse, it follows that the final agent of destruction be something that could only exist if God didn't. Stickney again works against a concept of a loving, benevolent, God with the rainbow armor. The rainbow was supposed to be God’s covenant to protect man and beast. It signaled, even when a storm came, God would keep us safe. To put God’s symbol of protection on the monster destroying the earth openly mocks Gods’ promises and powers.
More than the religious elements, the most striking element of the poem's end is the breathtaking, apocalyptic diction. If this is the end of things, what a way to go. The final dawn is "lighting gorgeously" the East as the sea serpent strikes the sun, plucking it from its resting place. There is something etherial about the word "transfixed," and "gorgeous," and "pluck," out loud, are nearly corporeal. Their robust, sensibile aspect heighten the power of this last moment, especially in contrast with the flatness of "the dead sea." But that, too, is a flat explanation. I think that I can't explain why the last stanza is so moving. We talk in my aesthetics class about how. in all discussion of art, we hit this wall where words fail. The only way I can even begin do it justice, I think, is to say that it carries the grief and beauty and energy that I imagine death does. A burst of light, a streak of color, a motion, and that's it. Beautiful.
And, the last day being come, Man stood alone
Ere sunrise on the world's dismantled verge,
Awaiting how from everywhere should urge
The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none
Did come, -- but indistinct from every realm
Of earth and air and water, growing more
And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar
Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm
His ears; and as he looked affrighted round
Every manner of beast innumerable
All thro' the shadows crying grew, until
The wailing was like grass upon the ground.
Asudden then within his human side
Their anguish, since the goad* he wielded first,
And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst,
Darted compressed and vital. -- As he died,
Low in the East now lighting gorgeously
He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed**
Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed
To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.
Trumbull Stickney 1905
* A pointed stick for driving cattle and other animals
** In rainbow-colored armor
I think my time with William Blake is attuning me to apocalyptic poetry - poems that reach farther than a certain moment. Take this poem, for example. It is essentially Stickney's vision of the Judgment Day; one wonders what kind of vision he had that prompted him to write it this way. Though there are, I suppose, no real warm visions of the apocalypse, this is a particularly cold and lonely one. There is no visitation by a god, merely the wails of animals and a giant sea-serpent. Stickney also folds in imagery from Genesis, inverting it for the End of Days. We have all of the elements of a "typical" apocalypse - judgment, chaos, Biblical diction, but Stickney builds on it in his own way.
The first stanza, though, assembles traditional elements; it begins with "And," indicating that this is a continuation of some previously established story. The diction here is distinctly Biblical. "Ere," "the Coming of the Lord," and "behold" draw upon Biblical conventions. Furthermore, the syntax of "being come" is recognizably Old Testament, as well. This first stanza recalls earlier episodes in the Bible - we have a Man standing alone on the edge of the world, which conjures up the image of Adam cast out of Eden, or perhaps Satan standing on the brink of Hell in Paradise Lost. But this is neither Adam nor Satan; the Man waiting here is man with a capital M, the final representative of humanity, a figure vague enough to be any one of us.
The second stanza, then, begins to re-write the Apocalypse, for no Lord comes to judge, merely an "indistinct" wailing from all around. By withholding the source, Stickney puts the reader in the same, confused space as Man. All we know is that there is a roar coming "from every realm / Of earth and air and water." The internal rhyme between "come" and "dun," "water" and "louder," the mixed use of polysyndeton and asyndeton (excessive use of conjunctions, no conjunctions), and the structural rhyme in the stanza (a-b-b-a) build the roar's energy. Stickney rhetorically turns up the volume again with the diction - this noise is high and low; the use of "heavier" lends it an almost tangible quality.
It is no surprise, then, that the Man is terrified in the third stanza. He looks "affrighted round," and suddenly is surrounded by the noisemakers: "every manner of beast." Their wail is so constant that it becomes part of the scenery, blanketing everything like grass. We can't restrict the line "the wailing was like grass upon the ground" to that, however; like the word "heavier" the second stanza, this similie gives the cacophony a physical presence. If we could see it, it would ripple like grass, comprised of as many individual strands. Also, "grass" is usually a more peaceful image, conjuring fields and gardens. As such, it adds a note of hope to this din; this is perhaps the saddest part, I think, for it makes us remember what is lost forever. The Apocalypse is emphatically an end, which grass' peaceful connotations reminds us of.
Though we don't know if the animals are the only things producing this noise, we know that they contribute to it in force. Their presence contorts Biblical convention, twisting the naming of the animals in Genesis. This reference heightens the poem's terror, for it contrasts these tortured cries with Eden's scene of fecund delight. They have fallen far, indeed.
Then, too, the animals are the arbiters of judgment in Stickney's apocalypse. Because the syntax is so knotted in the fourth stanza (mirroring Biblical diction and the tortured scene at hand), it is hard to see the chain of causality. We may rearrange the lines to read "Since man weilded a cattle prod, and since he did not give the animals enough to drink when they were thirsty, the animal's anguish suddenly darts 'compressed and vital' into his side." Man is judged because he was controlling and cruel. Stickney draws upon Matthew 25: 30-46. (Matthew or Jesus or somebody - anybody know who?) says that the righteous will be saved, "(35) For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, (36) naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me." Those who treat Jesus' lesser creatures with respect will be saved, but those who trod upon those beneath them will be cast into hell. Stickney adapts this by eliminating God in the process; the animals are enough to judge Matthew.
As he dies, pierced by their anguish, he sees the final destruction of the world. Another animal - a sea serpent in iris armor - stabs the sun, bringing about the end of time. With the image of the sea-monster in rainbow armor, Stickney again inverts Biblical convention. In Isaiah and Job, the sea monsters Leviathan and Rahab exist as conquered beings. They represent God's power in His ability to destroy them. Since Stickney has, so far, effaced God from this Apocalypse, it follows that the final agent of destruction be something that could only exist if God didn't. Stickney again works against a concept of a loving, benevolent, God with the rainbow armor. The rainbow was supposed to be God’s covenant to protect man and beast. It signaled, even when a storm came, God would keep us safe. To put God’s symbol of protection on the monster destroying the earth openly mocks Gods’ promises and powers.
More than the religious elements, the most striking element of the poem's end is the breathtaking, apocalyptic diction. If this is the end of things, what a way to go. The final dawn is "lighting gorgeously" the East as the sea serpent strikes the sun, plucking it from its resting place. There is something etherial about the word "transfixed," and "gorgeous," and "pluck," out loud, are nearly corporeal. Their robust, sensibile aspect heighten the power of this last moment, especially in contrast with the flatness of "the dead sea." But that, too, is a flat explanation. I think that I can't explain why the last stanza is so moving. We talk in my aesthetics class about how. in all discussion of art, we hit this wall where words fail. The only way I can even begin do it justice, I think, is to say that it carries the grief and beauty and energy that I imagine death does. A burst of light, a streak of color, a motion, and that's it. Beautiful.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Poem of the Week 3/6/2006: from The Dream Songs
from The Dream Songs*
4
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken pà prika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed. Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.--Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
--Black hair, complexion latin, jeweled eyes
downcast . . . the slob behind her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.
*"[The Dream Songs are] essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof" [Berryman's note]. These poems were written over a period of thirteen years. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fifth edition.
John Berryman 1964
If you have never had a chance to look over John Berryman's Dream Songs, I highly recommend it. They are a strange collection of despairing poems, often broaching the rascist, the heartbreaking, the worrisome, and even the psychotic. You can see a little of that in this one; Henry's friend talks to the blackface incarnation of Henry Mr. Bones out of nowhere, and Henry frets to himself over his ideal woman.
The first stanza captures Henry's literal appetite for this woman. He describes her with food words - the choice of chicken paprika is no coincidence, for that is a spicy food, and this woman is hot. Then, too, instead of fainting with hunger, he faints with interest. Hunger is so important in this stanza that it leaves its usual part-of-speech, becoming a verb. Then, too, the diction is tense and energized. Words like "compact" and "springing" tighten the diction, while the interesting &s and à add visual stimulus. The genius in this first section, though, is how Berryman dismantles any real sexual threat. The word hunger itself avoids a hyper-masculine sex-drive, for to be hungry is to be weak. The, too, "twice" stands alone, its lowercase first letter meekly nodding to the value of those two glances.
Henry reinforces this servility when he talks of "falling at her little feet." There is something askew in his imagined plea to her. To begin, he is hyper-detached from himself, speaking in the third person and giving his adoration to his eyes. Instead of enjoying things himself, "Henry's dazed eyes" relish the woman. Then, too, he lists time in "years of nights," alluding to the years and years of nights spent eating alone and, presumably, sleeping alone.
Despite this sad picture, Berryman creates a moment of hope for Henry by placing a line break between "I advanced upon" and "my spumoni." At the edge of line 10, we hope that Henry will really go talk to her. Instead, he despairs, turning from the hot woman to his cold ice cream. Henry's absent friend then enters, trying to console him by saying that, essentially, there are other fish in the sea. But the friend doesn't get it - he says that the world is full "wif feeding girls" as if the only special thing about this one is that she is eating.
Henry barely hears the weak comment though. He is too lost in thought about this fantastic, "jeweled" woman. We follow his thoughts as they trail off in ellipses, giving us space to imagine this Venus, to think of Henry hungering for her. Henry shows the innocence of his longing when he muses about her He ponders her genitals, thinking almost sweetly of their wonders. The next line, "the restaurant buzzes," signals the beginning of the end for this poem. The word "buzz's" sharpness acts like an alarm, begin to shake the image of this restaurant loose from Henry's dream.
As the place begins to disintegrate, so do Henry's hopes. He despairingly acknowledges the truth - that "she might as well be on Mars" for all that he will be able to speak with her. His final thought swivels inward, and he turns her unavailability into something that disintegrates his self-worth. The line "there ought to be a law against Henry"'s depressing tone contrasts with the matter-of-fact way in which Henry says it. It's almost a throwaway, and we get the sense that he has been repeating things like this for a long, long time.
The final line, Henry's friend's answer "there is," compresses the tragedy. Even Henry's friend dully acknowledges that, yes, Henry as a human is forbidden from the pleasures of this world. He is indeed barred from contact. Despite the rippling, engaging diction, Henry is insulated. He disassociates himself by using the third person, of course, but he fades out of being by the last line. He is so unimportant that he doesn't get the last say in his own experience.
I didn't mean to pick such a sad poem for today - I happen to love this one for its tightly wound images and slightly psychotic tone. Henry is a fascinating man, sad and lovely. I hope that you all will take a look at more of the Dream Songs - you can pick them up one by one or chip away at the work as a whole. Henry is worth spending some more time with, I think.
4
Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken pà prika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her
or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed. Brilliance." I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.--Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
--Black hair, complexion latin, jeweled eyes
downcast . . . the slob behind her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.
*"[The Dream Songs are] essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof" [Berryman's note]. These poems were written over a period of thirteen years. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fifth edition.
John Berryman 1964
If you have never had a chance to look over John Berryman's Dream Songs, I highly recommend it. They are a strange collection of despairing poems, often broaching the rascist, the heartbreaking, the worrisome, and even the psychotic. You can see a little of that in this one; Henry's friend talks to the blackface incarnation of Henry Mr. Bones out of nowhere, and Henry frets to himself over his ideal woman.
The first stanza captures Henry's literal appetite for this woman. He describes her with food words - the choice of chicken paprika is no coincidence, for that is a spicy food, and this woman is hot. Then, too, instead of fainting with hunger, he faints with interest. Hunger is so important in this stanza that it leaves its usual part-of-speech, becoming a verb. Then, too, the diction is tense and energized. Words like "compact" and "springing" tighten the diction, while the interesting &s and à add visual stimulus. The genius in this first section, though, is how Berryman dismantles any real sexual threat. The word hunger itself avoids a hyper-masculine sex-drive, for to be hungry is to be weak. The, too, "twice" stands alone, its lowercase first letter meekly nodding to the value of those two glances.
Henry reinforces this servility when he talks of "falling at her little feet." There is something askew in his imagined plea to her. To begin, he is hyper-detached from himself, speaking in the third person and giving his adoration to his eyes. Instead of enjoying things himself, "Henry's dazed eyes" relish the woman. Then, too, he lists time in "years of nights," alluding to the years and years of nights spent eating alone and, presumably, sleeping alone.
Despite this sad picture, Berryman creates a moment of hope for Henry by placing a line break between "I advanced upon" and "my spumoni." At the edge of line 10, we hope that Henry will really go talk to her. Instead, he despairs, turning from the hot woman to his cold ice cream. Henry's absent friend then enters, trying to console him by saying that, essentially, there are other fish in the sea. But the friend doesn't get it - he says that the world is full "wif feeding girls" as if the only special thing about this one is that she is eating.
Henry barely hears the weak comment though. He is too lost in thought about this fantastic, "jeweled" woman. We follow his thoughts as they trail off in ellipses, giving us space to imagine this Venus, to think of Henry hungering for her. Henry shows the innocence of his longing when he muses about her He ponders her genitals, thinking almost sweetly of their wonders. The next line, "the restaurant buzzes," signals the beginning of the end for this poem. The word "buzz's" sharpness acts like an alarm, begin to shake the image of this restaurant loose from Henry's dream.
As the place begins to disintegrate, so do Henry's hopes. He despairingly acknowledges the truth - that "she might as well be on Mars" for all that he will be able to speak with her. His final thought swivels inward, and he turns her unavailability into something that disintegrates his self-worth. The line "there ought to be a law against Henry"'s depressing tone contrasts with the matter-of-fact way in which Henry says it. It's almost a throwaway, and we get the sense that he has been repeating things like this for a long, long time.
The final line, Henry's friend's answer "there is," compresses the tragedy. Even Henry's friend dully acknowledges that, yes, Henry as a human is forbidden from the pleasures of this world. He is indeed barred from contact. Despite the rippling, engaging diction, Henry is insulated. He disassociates himself by using the third person, of course, but he fades out of being by the last line. He is so unimportant that he doesn't get the last say in his own experience.
I didn't mean to pick such a sad poem for today - I happen to love this one for its tightly wound images and slightly psychotic tone. Henry is a fascinating man, sad and lovely. I hope that you all will take a look at more of the Dream Songs - you can pick them up one by one or chip away at the work as a whole. Henry is worth spending some more time with, I think.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Poem of the Week 2/27/2006: Liquid Paper
Liquid Paper
Smooth as a snail this little parson
pardons our sins Touch the brush tip
lightly and abracadabra a clean slate
We know those who blot their brains
by sniffing it which shows
it erases more than ink
and with imagination anything
can be misapplied . . . In the army
our topsergeant drank aftershave squeezing
my Old Spice to the last slow drop
It worked like Liquid Paper in his head
until he'd glide across the streets of Heidelberg
hunting for the house in Boise Idaho
where he was born . . . If I were God
I'd authorize Celestial Liquid Paper
every seven years to whiten our mistakes:
we should be sorry and live with what we've done
but seven years is long enough and all of us
deserve a visit now and then
to the house where we were born
before everything got written so far wrong
Peter Meinke 2003
This poem mixes sadness and love, shock and whimsy, and aurally leads us every-which-way in its presentation of compassion. Its music is astounding; I highly encourage you to read it out loud to yourself, or at least pay attention when you are reading it quietly. Slam poetry seems to have informed it in cleverness, cadence and structure. Slam often tweaks a word or common phrase (herein, Meinke changes "with imagination anything is possible" to "with imagination anything can be misapplied"). Like "Liquid Paper," slam communicates form through alliteration, rhythm (not just end-rhyme, which is an old, used form, if that makes sense), volume, and pauses; on one level, the white, blank spaces on the page recall these gaps. On another, as my friend Dustin pointed out, they are like little whited-out spaces on their own, perhaps suggesting that the poet himself has been blessed with liquid paper.
Reading this poem several times will cast the first stanza differently. Read lightly, the image of a snail creeping across the page is sweet and whimsical, it being amusing to think of the squat Liquid Paper bottle as the plump priest come to redeem us. With a measure of sobriety, however, it turns into a quiet miracle-worker; "sins" conveys a moral flaw, something important and guilt-worthy. Then, too, the repition of the S sound in "smooth," "snail," "sins," and "slate," the P sound in "parson" and "pardon," and T sound in "touch" and "tip" add an aural intensity that oversteps the fanciful opening images. This edge hints at the next stanza's darkness.
Other than its rhetorical techniques, this section is clear, if somber. Meinke touches on the human capability to distort and destroy. Taken with the white-out's previous association with a parson, this capability appears more sinister; things that were light and amusing in the first stanza are suddenly fragile, corruptible. Humans can thus turn aftershave from something to save us from the horrors of stinging skin or smelling bad to something that saves us from the horrors of war. This leap from the micro to the macro is one of Meinke's most effective strategies. He funnels despair into everyday things. The consonance (repeated consonant sounds) in the final lines literally evoke what it is to be squeezed, pressed, compacted, drained.
Thus, the next line's slowness stops us in our tracks. The breaks between two and three-word groups slow the reading to a crawl, forcing us to think about what it is to have one's memories erased. The toxic smell of white out comes to mind, suggested by the earlier allusion to drug abuse.
Smooth as a snail this little parson
pardons our sins Touch the brush tip
lightly and abracadabra a clean slate
We know those who blot their brains
by sniffing it which shows
it erases more than ink
and with imagination anything
can be misapplied . . . In the army
our topsergeant drank aftershave squeezing
my Old Spice to the last slow drop
It worked like Liquid Paper in his head
until he'd glide across the streets of Heidelberg
hunting for the house in Boise Idaho
where he was born . . . If I were God
I'd authorize Celestial Liquid Paper
every seven years to whiten our mistakes:
we should be sorry and live with what we've done
but seven years is long enough and all of us
deserve a visit now and then
to the house where we were born
before everything got written so far wrong
Peter Meinke 2003
This poem mixes sadness and love, shock and whimsy, and aurally leads us every-which-way in its presentation of compassion. Its music is astounding; I highly encourage you to read it out loud to yourself, or at least pay attention when you are reading it quietly. Slam poetry seems to have informed it in cleverness, cadence and structure. Slam often tweaks a word or common phrase (herein, Meinke changes "with imagination anything is possible" to "with imagination anything can be misapplied"). Like "Liquid Paper," slam communicates form through alliteration, rhythm (not just end-rhyme, which is an old, used form, if that makes sense), volume, and pauses; on one level, the white, blank spaces on the page recall these gaps. On another, as my friend Dustin pointed out, they are like little whited-out spaces on their own, perhaps suggesting that the poet himself has been blessed with liquid paper.
Reading this poem several times will cast the first stanza differently. Read lightly, the image of a snail creeping across the page is sweet and whimsical, it being amusing to think of the squat Liquid Paper bottle as the plump priest come to redeem us. With a measure of sobriety, however, it turns into a quiet miracle-worker; "sins" conveys a moral flaw, something important and guilt-worthy. Then, too, the repition of the S sound in "smooth," "snail," "sins," and "slate," the P sound in "parson" and "pardon," and T sound in "touch" and "tip" add an aural intensity that oversteps the fanciful opening images. This edge hints at the next stanza's darkness.
Other than its rhetorical techniques, this section is clear, if somber. Meinke touches on the human capability to distort and destroy. Taken with the white-out's previous association with a parson, this capability appears more sinister; things that were light and amusing in the first stanza are suddenly fragile, corruptible. Humans can thus turn aftershave from something to save us from the horrors of stinging skin or smelling bad to something that saves us from the horrors of war. This leap from the micro to the macro is one of Meinke's most effective strategies. He funnels despair into everyday things. The consonance (repeated consonant sounds) in the final lines literally evoke what it is to be squeezed, pressed, compacted, drained.
Thus, the next line's slowness stops us in our tracks. The breaks between two and three-word groups slow the reading to a crawl, forcing us to think about what it is to have one's memories erased. The toxic smell of white out comes to mind, suggested by the earlier allusion to drug abuse.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Poem of the Week 2/20/2006: The Cold Green Element
The Cold Green Element
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker
who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,
Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.
And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
and grew a brillant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.
The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;
I've seen myself lately in the eyes
of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,
in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
my murdered selves
sparked the air like muted collisions
of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone's inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.
But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.
Irving Layton 1940
Before I begin, a note about the form: the fourth line in each five line stanza is indented, though Blogger absolutely refuses to show it.
Irving Layton died earlier this year, but it seems that he was thinking about death long before that. Not that this should be surprising - I have heard it said that what defines humans is our knowledge of our deaths. "The Cold Green Element" deals with a dreamlike vision of death, moving through surreal images of death and sadness, fear and despair. There is not quite a cohesive plan; rather, the poem's consciousness moves like thought, flowing from one thread to the next, always retaining a consciousness of the whole. Layton preserves the hopeless tone through the various hallucinogenic scenes, emphasizing the fragmented tale of a lost young man.
Well, there's a question. Is this man lost? The first stanza, at a glance, indicates no, for he is clearly on a garden path. But humans are constantly on paths. Being lost is not knowing what path you are on, or perhaps if that path is the right one. This narrator recognizes the path but not the meaning, so I would argue that he is no less lost than you or I. Am I being broad and preach-y today? I have felt like that the entire day. Ah well.
As the speaker continues his narrative, he meets the first omen of death: the black-hatted undertaker. This undertaker is headed down the same road, suggesting that this path is indeed death. This undertaker saw the narrator's "heart lying in the grass," an image that accomplishes several things at once. It is first shocking in its frankness; we almost glide over this observation, accepting it as true. Then, too, it intertwines humans and nature, continuing the garden imagery and perhaps alluding to death's part in the natural order of things.
The next image is delivered just as casually and is perhaps even odder. Layton writes of a dead poet "who now hangs from the city's gates." Both the gate reference and the allusion to the Pacific evoke images of San Francisco, lending this poem its first definite sense of geography. The realism ends there, though. Crowds who, "if it twitched its feet in the air / ... would sit at its feet peeling their oranges" flock to see this poet. This strange scene relays a phobia, perhaps, of voyeurism, or an intense awareness of being viewed. The "oranges" inclusion lends the diorama a twist of suburban oddity. The people sit and eat their California snack watching a dead body like TV. It distills people's fascination with destruction and the grotesque.
More importantly, I think that the scene is one of defeat - the poet is dead out of water, perhaps lambasted by his peers - which would explain (in part) the next stanza. Because the narrator turns to the tree "like a lover," and because it has a crown of leaves, this stanza is positive. He may be turning to it in comfort, for it survived a shock of lightning just as he hopes to survive a shock of voyeurism, death, or humiliation.
It doesn't give him much comfort, however, for the rest of the poem is an agglomeration of fragmented, despairing images of fear and death. The narrator sees himself emasculated through old women's eyes. I choose the word "emasculated" because Layton employs old women and "manhood" in this stanza of loss. The crones seem to represent a loss of fertility, a deadening of sexuality. We again see the narrator's very human concern for his loss of virility, for he has of late "spent streams mourning [his] manhood."
The next line, "in whose pupils," could refer to the women's pupils or his manhood's pupils; in any case, the viewed image is one of blood and death. Layton again reveals a consciousness of man's eventual tumble into death by twisting the sun's rays, associated with life and growth, into smears of blood. Life turns to death, inevitably. The poem is fixated on this image; its reappearance in the seventh stanza underlines its thematic centrality.
The line "my murdered selves" is interesting, because not only does it again connote death, but it conveys the sense that this narrator has been thinking of his death for a long time. He has accrued possible selves that died in different (probably horrific) ways. These images bang together "in muted collisions / like fruit." Layton again mixes death and fruit, creating a tension between the morbid and the bright. It also again brings together an image of death with that of fertility, nodding towards the cyclical way of things.
This order is terrifying to the narrator, however. He sees death as a black dog with yellow eyes, forever pursuing him. This dog can smell his blood, we learn, because somebody inadvertently showed it the smeared catalpa leaves. You know how something can almost feel crueler when somebody didn't think about what they were doing than when they pointedly did it? That kind of coldness and utter disregard can (though of course won't always) cut deeper than calculated malice.
All of this said, the poem ends hopefully. Despite the path that fate clears for all of us, the narrator will sing even as he falls down into the abyss like the worm in the robin's throat. This recklessness is due to "the cries of young boys:" perhaps the childlike belief in immortality, or a kid's hope. There is a kind of desperate tenacity to the final lines, "I am again / a breathless swimmer in that cold green element."
There is more to the final resolution than some American beat-the-odds mentality, though. This poem was a personal journey to a fierce resolve, one filled with a kind of love, if that makes any sense. You may find that almost every poem in this blog has something to do with love, and this poem has a very strange form of it. I feel love for this narrator's will to overcome his fear, and I think that he loves himself, too, enough to try, at least.
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker
who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,
Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.
And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
and grew a brillant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.
The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;
I've seen myself lately in the eyes
of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,
in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
my murdered selves
sparked the air like muted collisions
of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone's inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.
But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.
Irving Layton 1940
Before I begin, a note about the form: the fourth line in each five line stanza is indented, though Blogger absolutely refuses to show it.
Irving Layton died earlier this year, but it seems that he was thinking about death long before that. Not that this should be surprising - I have heard it said that what defines humans is our knowledge of our deaths. "The Cold Green Element" deals with a dreamlike vision of death, moving through surreal images of death and sadness, fear and despair. There is not quite a cohesive plan; rather, the poem's consciousness moves like thought, flowing from one thread to the next, always retaining a consciousness of the whole. Layton preserves the hopeless tone through the various hallucinogenic scenes, emphasizing the fragmented tale of a lost young man.
Well, there's a question. Is this man lost? The first stanza, at a glance, indicates no, for he is clearly on a garden path. But humans are constantly on paths. Being lost is not knowing what path you are on, or perhaps if that path is the right one. This narrator recognizes the path but not the meaning, so I would argue that he is no less lost than you or I. Am I being broad and preach-y today? I have felt like that the entire day. Ah well.
As the speaker continues his narrative, he meets the first omen of death: the black-hatted undertaker. This undertaker is headed down the same road, suggesting that this path is indeed death. This undertaker saw the narrator's "heart lying in the grass," an image that accomplishes several things at once. It is first shocking in its frankness; we almost glide over this observation, accepting it as true. Then, too, it intertwines humans and nature, continuing the garden imagery and perhaps alluding to death's part in the natural order of things.
The next image is delivered just as casually and is perhaps even odder. Layton writes of a dead poet "who now hangs from the city's gates." Both the gate reference and the allusion to the Pacific evoke images of San Francisco, lending this poem its first definite sense of geography. The realism ends there, though. Crowds who, "if it twitched its feet in the air / ... would sit at its feet peeling their oranges" flock to see this poet. This strange scene relays a phobia, perhaps, of voyeurism, or an intense awareness of being viewed. The "oranges" inclusion lends the diorama a twist of suburban oddity. The people sit and eat their California snack watching a dead body like TV. It distills people's fascination with destruction and the grotesque.
More importantly, I think that the scene is one of defeat - the poet is dead out of water, perhaps lambasted by his peers - which would explain (in part) the next stanza. Because the narrator turns to the tree "like a lover," and because it has a crown of leaves, this stanza is positive. He may be turning to it in comfort, for it survived a shock of lightning just as he hopes to survive a shock of voyeurism, death, or humiliation.
It doesn't give him much comfort, however, for the rest of the poem is an agglomeration of fragmented, despairing images of fear and death. The narrator sees himself emasculated through old women's eyes. I choose the word "emasculated" because Layton employs old women and "manhood" in this stanza of loss. The crones seem to represent a loss of fertility, a deadening of sexuality. We again see the narrator's very human concern for his loss of virility, for he has of late "spent streams mourning [his] manhood."
The next line, "in whose pupils," could refer to the women's pupils or his manhood's pupils; in any case, the viewed image is one of blood and death. Layton again reveals a consciousness of man's eventual tumble into death by twisting the sun's rays, associated with life and growth, into smears of blood. Life turns to death, inevitably. The poem is fixated on this image; its reappearance in the seventh stanza underlines its thematic centrality.
The line "my murdered selves" is interesting, because not only does it again connote death, but it conveys the sense that this narrator has been thinking of his death for a long time. He has accrued possible selves that died in different (probably horrific) ways. These images bang together "in muted collisions / like fruit." Layton again mixes death and fruit, creating a tension between the morbid and the bright. It also again brings together an image of death with that of fertility, nodding towards the cyclical way of things.
This order is terrifying to the narrator, however. He sees death as a black dog with yellow eyes, forever pursuing him. This dog can smell his blood, we learn, because somebody inadvertently showed it the smeared catalpa leaves. You know how something can almost feel crueler when somebody didn't think about what they were doing than when they pointedly did it? That kind of coldness and utter disregard can (though of course won't always) cut deeper than calculated malice.
All of this said, the poem ends hopefully. Despite the path that fate clears for all of us, the narrator will sing even as he falls down into the abyss like the worm in the robin's throat. This recklessness is due to "the cries of young boys:" perhaps the childlike belief in immortality, or a kid's hope. There is a kind of desperate tenacity to the final lines, "I am again / a breathless swimmer in that cold green element."
There is more to the final resolution than some American beat-the-odds mentality, though. This poem was a personal journey to a fierce resolve, one filled with a kind of love, if that makes any sense. You may find that almost every poem in this blog has something to do with love, and this poem has a very strange form of it. I feel love for this narrator's will to overcome his fear, and I think that he loves himself, too, enough to try, at least.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Poem of the Week 2/13/2006: Canal Bank Walk
Canal Bank Walk
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Patrick Kavanagh 1960
Today is my sister's birthday, and I could wish her nothing more than the passion found in this poem. It is a love sonnet, in its way. Not directed at any single person, it rushes headlong into the world of the senses and experience. There are Romantic overtones here - a man walking alone, commenting on his surroundings, wishing to imbibe nature, to live on the edges of his nerves. Kavanagh updates the traditional lyric format, though, in giving the poem a pulse, at once musical and corporal.
** I will finish this poem up within the next several days - Happy Birthday Emmy, and Happy Valentines Day to the rest! **
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Patrick Kavanagh 1960
Today is my sister's birthday, and I could wish her nothing more than the passion found in this poem. It is a love sonnet, in its way. Not directed at any single person, it rushes headlong into the world of the senses and experience. There are Romantic overtones here - a man walking alone, commenting on his surroundings, wishing to imbibe nature, to live on the edges of his nerves. Kavanagh updates the traditional lyric format, though, in giving the poem a pulse, at once musical and corporal.
** I will finish this poem up within the next several days - Happy Birthday Emmy, and Happy Valentines Day to the rest! **
Monday, February 06, 2006
Poem of the Week 2/6/2006: Want Bone
Want Bone
The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth's bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.
The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.
Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away,
The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
my flower my fin my life my lightness my O.
Robert Pinsky 1990
"Want Bone" is aptly titled. From sexual desire to paucity to simple, innocent longing, Pinsky's poem explores different states of wanting, though it emphasizes erotic desire. Underlying the erotic images and sharply tailored details is that want implies some mode of absence. The imagery, diction, and cadence explore the ache of wantingness.
The first stanza establishes the poem's eroticism, theme (wanting), and central image. It opens with the "tongue of the waves [tolling] in the earth's bell," which is blatantly sexual. The bell is not just a suggestive shape, however; its tolling conveys emptiness, hollowness - that space of absence inherent in desire. The next line, "blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue," presents the kind of simple, energetic, dense imagery appearing throughout the poem. Repeating "blue" simplifies the visual field, readying us for the poem's central image, the shark's jaw.
The jaw, named "the want bone," actualizes wantingness. The bone is described by a series of "nothings," both connecting the jaw to longing and linking desire and absence. The jaw "gaped on nothing but sand," "tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing," and is "uncrushed, unstrung." In defining the jaw by what it lacks, Pinsky reiterates the connection between the jaw, desire, and absence.
He springloads the tension in the poem with his acute attention to detail; there are very few filler words like "and" or "the." Each line is packed to the brim, but, paradoxically, packed with nothingness. This tension, too, heightens the vibrancy in the lines. The phrase "scalded toothless harp" is at once jarring and brilliant; it juxtaposes the searing (scalded) with the impotent (toothless) with the musical (harp). This jangling set of images sends a shock of energy through the poem, heightening the desire. Pinsky emphasizes the erotic nature of this desire in describing the jawbone as "the shape of birth and craving" that is forever "mouthing O."
The following stanza reworks the same devices; Pinsky focuses the beam of energy with his marvelous consonants and twists that force with sexual imagery. Notice the strength of the phrase "groined spirals." Tack on "pleated like a summer dress" for a little erotic content and juxtaposition and you have a line absolutely packed with desirous energy. Pinsky redirects our attention to the absent inherent in wanting by asking "where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?" He openly wonders where the shark has gone, perhaps gesturing at our own lost gashes of pleasure. Is this a little trip into nostalgia? It certainly borders on yearning, that heart-lead lean to the past.
The next lines, "infinitesimal mouths bore it away, / The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean" demonstrates self-similarity across scale. Just as Pinsky has pared away any extraneous imagery, so the billions of bacteria nibbled away at the shark. Then, too, the action and rhythm in the verb choices "scrubbed and etched and pickled" encourage the energy of desire, its strong focus. Perhaps the poem's energy reflects the strength of sexual desire or simply wanting. Perhaps, the poem suggests, wanting is absence strung with energy.
In the final three lines, the verb tense suddenly switches to present, indicating that this desire is ongoing. I find this list fascinating - it departs the terse, sexualized images of previous stanzas, approaching a wider set of desires. Each "my" phrase implies something different, though I will let you find those for yourself. Broadly, they touch on innocence and comfort, protection, ownership, joy, and, finally sexuality. The case could be made that the poem leaves the realm of erotic desire here, but I would argue that these elements are incased within erotic desire. That is, any sexual feelings will immediately or eventually include some mode of innocence and affection.
I had a very hard time writing about this poem, partially because it was difficult to make myself focus and write for a couple of hours, and partly because the poem is so rich. I struggled with the alternate (and equally valid) thesis arguing that the poem, while acknowledging erotic desire, was more diverse in scope, addressing the energy inherent in wanting, the absence of wanting, and different modes of wanting. However, these all fit within the sexual desire thesis I chose. I thought that I would make you aware of the other argument, though, so that you can see how beautiful this poem is. I think there is a lot of beauty in brilliant craft and complexity. So who knows. This PotW is descending into my little ramble, so this is when I bid you all a good night and start working on tomorrow's poem!
The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth's bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.
The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.
Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away,
The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
my flower my fin my life my lightness my O.
Robert Pinsky 1990
"Want Bone" is aptly titled. From sexual desire to paucity to simple, innocent longing, Pinsky's poem explores different states of wanting, though it emphasizes erotic desire. Underlying the erotic images and sharply tailored details is that want implies some mode of absence. The imagery, diction, and cadence explore the ache of wantingness.
The first stanza establishes the poem's eroticism, theme (wanting), and central image. It opens with the "tongue of the waves [tolling] in the earth's bell," which is blatantly sexual. The bell is not just a suggestive shape, however; its tolling conveys emptiness, hollowness - that space of absence inherent in desire. The next line, "blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue," presents the kind of simple, energetic, dense imagery appearing throughout the poem. Repeating "blue" simplifies the visual field, readying us for the poem's central image, the shark's jaw.
The jaw, named "the want bone," actualizes wantingness. The bone is described by a series of "nothings," both connecting the jaw to longing and linking desire and absence. The jaw "gaped on nothing but sand," "tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing," and is "uncrushed, unstrung." In defining the jaw by what it lacks, Pinsky reiterates the connection between the jaw, desire, and absence.
He springloads the tension in the poem with his acute attention to detail; there are very few filler words like "and" or "the." Each line is packed to the brim, but, paradoxically, packed with nothingness. This tension, too, heightens the vibrancy in the lines. The phrase "scalded toothless harp" is at once jarring and brilliant; it juxtaposes the searing (scalded) with the impotent (toothless) with the musical (harp). This jangling set of images sends a shock of energy through the poem, heightening the desire. Pinsky emphasizes the erotic nature of this desire in describing the jawbone as "the shape of birth and craving" that is forever "mouthing O."
The following stanza reworks the same devices; Pinsky focuses the beam of energy with his marvelous consonants and twists that force with sexual imagery. Notice the strength of the phrase "groined spirals." Tack on "pleated like a summer dress" for a little erotic content and juxtaposition and you have a line absolutely packed with desirous energy. Pinsky redirects our attention to the absent inherent in wanting by asking "where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?" He openly wonders where the shark has gone, perhaps gesturing at our own lost gashes of pleasure. Is this a little trip into nostalgia? It certainly borders on yearning, that heart-lead lean to the past.
The next lines, "infinitesimal mouths bore it away, / The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean" demonstrates self-similarity across scale. Just as Pinsky has pared away any extraneous imagery, so the billions of bacteria nibbled away at the shark. Then, too, the action and rhythm in the verb choices "scrubbed and etched and pickled" encourage the energy of desire, its strong focus. Perhaps the poem's energy reflects the strength of sexual desire or simply wanting. Perhaps, the poem suggests, wanting is absence strung with energy.
In the final three lines, the verb tense suddenly switches to present, indicating that this desire is ongoing. I find this list fascinating - it departs the terse, sexualized images of previous stanzas, approaching a wider set of desires. Each "my" phrase implies something different, though I will let you find those for yourself. Broadly, they touch on innocence and comfort, protection, ownership, joy, and, finally sexuality. The case could be made that the poem leaves the realm of erotic desire here, but I would argue that these elements are incased within erotic desire. That is, any sexual feelings will immediately or eventually include some mode of innocence and affection.
I had a very hard time writing about this poem, partially because it was difficult to make myself focus and write for a couple of hours, and partly because the poem is so rich. I struggled with the alternate (and equally valid) thesis arguing that the poem, while acknowledging erotic desire, was more diverse in scope, addressing the energy inherent in wanting, the absence of wanting, and different modes of wanting. However, these all fit within the sexual desire thesis I chose. I thought that I would make you aware of the other argument, though, so that you can see how beautiful this poem is. I think there is a lot of beauty in brilliant craft and complexity. So who knows. This PotW is descending into my little ramble, so this is when I bid you all a good night and start working on tomorrow's poem!
Monday, January 30, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/27/2006: First Song
First Song
Then it was dark in Illinois, the small boy,
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder's ache
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
Galway Kinnell 1960
Oh poetry about love. This poem melds form and content; I hope to show you here how the form twists in on itself, cradling and loving its song. That its title is "First Song" is not surprising, given the music Kinnell achieves through unity of form. His images sing with the rhyme, which reinforces the repetition which emphasizes the content. The harmony of form and content make this poem beautiful.
You ask, can she argue that the poem is or is not beautiful? In some ways, yes. In my aesthetics class right now (I have a feeling that several future PotWs will contain that phrase), we are read an essay by Clive Bell. Therein, he argues that all true art will have "significant form," which is basically a self-consciousness of structure. Now I disagree with Bell on his argument and several of his other claims, but I agree that, fundamentally, art is concerned with form. And if I can explain why I see the form as beautiful, then perhaps you might agree. My discussion might add to your view of the poem. Or you might think that the form is beautiful in other ways, or perhaps not beautiful at all, and that is one reason why we talk about poetry and art. We are discussing why we think something is beautiful (unified, graceful, coherent).
Every word is a workhorse in "First Song," accomplishing multiple tasks. In the first stanza, the oft-used internal rhyme like "Illinois" and "boy," "dung" and "hung," "thing" and "crying," establishes unity from line to line and casts a childlike feel onto the poem. The unity presages the connectedness the boy eventually experiences, and the innocence underlines the final message of pure joy. Then, too, this is the most compressed internal rhyme in the poem, perhaps reflecting the boy's extreme tiredness. The diction in the first stanza articulates this empathy as well. The phrase "a sapped thing" tenderly regards the exhausted boy like a wilted flower. We imagine that all he can do is sit and listen.
"Weary to crying," his intellect retreats, allowing his elemental parts to tune in. The pond frogs "call on his ear" as if coming to court him out of his misery. The concert turns into a dance when two boys come out of the cornfield bearing "cornstalk violins / And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins / And the three sat there scraping of their joy." The sweetness and whimsy of it come through in diction like "rubbed" and "scraped" and images like "cornstalk violins." I love that cornstalks can't actually produce a melody in the conventional sense; they rustle. That's all. But, the narrator notes, it was "fine music."
Then it was dark in Illinois, the small boy,
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder's ache
A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
Galway Kinnell 1960
Oh poetry about love. This poem melds form and content; I hope to show you here how the form twists in on itself, cradling and loving its song. That its title is "First Song" is not surprising, given the music Kinnell achieves through unity of form. His images sing with the rhyme, which reinforces the repetition which emphasizes the content. The harmony of form and content make this poem beautiful.
You ask, can she argue that the poem is or is not beautiful? In some ways, yes. In my aesthetics class right now (I have a feeling that several future PotWs will contain that phrase), we are read an essay by Clive Bell. Therein, he argues that all true art will have "significant form," which is basically a self-consciousness of structure. Now I disagree with Bell on his argument and several of his other claims, but I agree that, fundamentally, art is concerned with form. And if I can explain why I see the form as beautiful, then perhaps you might agree. My discussion might add to your view of the poem. Or you might think that the form is beautiful in other ways, or perhaps not beautiful at all, and that is one reason why we talk about poetry and art. We are discussing why we think something is beautiful (unified, graceful, coherent).
Every word is a workhorse in "First Song," accomplishing multiple tasks. In the first stanza, the oft-used internal rhyme like "Illinois" and "boy," "dung" and "hung," "thing" and "crying," establishes unity from line to line and casts a childlike feel onto the poem. The unity presages the connectedness the boy eventually experiences, and the innocence underlines the final message of pure joy. Then, too, this is the most compressed internal rhyme in the poem, perhaps reflecting the boy's extreme tiredness. The diction in the first stanza articulates this empathy as well. The phrase "a sapped thing" tenderly regards the exhausted boy like a wilted flower. We imagine that all he can do is sit and listen.
"Weary to crying," his intellect retreats, allowing his elemental parts to tune in. The pond frogs "call on his ear" as if coming to court him out of his misery. The concert turns into a dance when two boys come out of the cornfield bearing "cornstalk violins / And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins / And the three sat there scraping of their joy." The sweetness and whimsy of it come through in diction like "rubbed" and "scraped" and images like "cornstalk violins." I love that cornstalks can't actually produce a melody in the conventional sense; they rustle. That's all. But, the narrator notes, it was "fine music."
Monday, January 23, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/23/2006: An Ode to Asymmetry
An Ode to Asymmetry
What you unearth is an unearthly thing:
what clings to it is neither root nor soil
nor any *thing*, but evanescent, scentless
thought, a hovercraft that crosses on twin foils,
back and forth the agitated waters of the mind,
and never lands. And what it crosses, it negates;
it crosses out.
Like the antimatter
of the universe, with all of matter's properties
reversed: when it meets a particle of
matter, the pair annihilate each other--
in their place: pure energy, radiant light,
as if destruction were divine. Not so!
For symmetry is broken from the start,
from which all things descend, and here we are.
When the universe began--Creation
as Big Bang--for reason science can
not explain, the balance tipped toward
matter: more was made of matter
than of its absent antimatter twin.
Perfect symmetry would have equaled
pure annihilation, that nothingness
of which both Indian saint
and French logician
dream, exquisite binary machine--
Being and Nothingness: ka-boom.
And knowing that, the thought, unearthly,
which these lines at first unearthed, dissolves,
a cloud that had obscured the sun:
the ocean waves continue as before, embrace
with foam the swimmer on her board
(each bubble a lens to catch the light),
the mountain rises from the ocean's floor,
and out in space, the galaxies spin on,
the stars wink back at everything:
root, plant, orangutan,
blue planet, rutabaga, kitchen sink.
Eleanor Wilner 2005
Sometimes I want to stop everyone I see and tell them that yes: poetry exists, and I love it, and then I love them. Is that strange? Perhaps. In any case, I think that it is one of the byproducts of reacting to something aesthetically. The reason I took so long to write this Poem of the Week is that I love it so much. I can't write about many of my favorite poems. I almost don't want to - I make notes in my book, but I don't want to come at the poem with ropes and a thesis. Sometimes I just want to surrender to it.
This is something we talked about in my aesthetics class - great works can move us to silence. And yet we chatter endlessly about what James Joyce meant if the period in the third episode was just a typo and what could this mean etc. Some might say that the entire field of literary criticism is an attempt to intellectualize what we ought to just be loving. There are certainly professors, students, and critics who fall away from their love for literature, but I think that most of us are just desperately trying to understand what we love so much. I know that that's what this blog is for me - an endless attempt to express my love for poetry. I hope that you can all see that. I try to hold on to it as much as possible. If I go into literary criticism, I want to attempt to always infuse my work with love. I don't know if that's forever possible, but it is certainly possible to try.
This is a poem that traverses the universe and the properties of matter to end with extraordinary love. Asymmetry glimmers out at every level, and we appreciate it. There is a Romantic twist in the title; "An Ode to Asymmetry" perhaps references Keats' famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "Ode to a Nightingale." It's thus probably about beauty or truth. Or love! I think, in the end, it's a poem about love, beauty, and appreciating what is around us.
The structure is circular; it begins with a thought and flies to the edges of the universe before returning to that thought. In the first stanza, the dominant metaphor is that of the human mind as the earth. You dig up this thought as if from the mind's soil and it hovers over the brain's "agitated waters." This thought is never named. Much of the poem attempts to describe this thought, and, by the end, we get the idea that it is something disturbing and destructive. Perhaps even symmetrical.
We know this thought is "like the antimatter / of the universe, with all of matter's properties / reversed." It destroys what it touches, albeit in a flash of "pure energy, radiant light." The next line, "as if destruction were divine," does not mean "as if destruction were holy:" rather, "as if destruction were the way of things." Luckily, the universe does not have matter and antimatter in proportion. It is unbalanced, and from that inequality we descend. This idea is familiar - humans descend from a break in creation, from imperfection, from some original sin. Perhaps this poem is another theory of the fall of matter.
It is positive, though. Luckily in the creation of the universe, "the balance tipped toward / matter." The poem suggests that it perhaps favored asymmetry because "perfect symmetry would have equaled / pure annihilation." I am not sure who the Indian saint is (any ideas, anyone?), but the French Logician is probably Jacques Derrida. He started Deconstructionism, a movement arguing against meaning. Essentially, he writes that language is an inconstant structure, and that we can never really "know" any word's definition. There is an infinite looping of definitions - each word is defined by more words, so each definition cancels out the word. Meaning doesn't exist. I could be wrong about the reference - any feedback is welcome! The phrase "exquisite binary machine" takes a little dig at technology's binary system because it's connected to symmetry, perhaps pushing against our society's idealization of machines.
The last stanza is a love stanza. The disturbing thought dissolves, and the mind's earth recedes to the real one. This earth embraces its swimmers, the mountains and the ocean move in harmony, and the very galaxies wink at the odd, lovable elements of this world. It reminded me of the title of one of Richard Wilbur's poems, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World." Perhaps asymmetry does as well.
What you unearth is an unearthly thing:
what clings to it is neither root nor soil
nor any *thing*, but evanescent, scentless
thought, a hovercraft that crosses on twin foils,
back and forth the agitated waters of the mind,
and never lands. And what it crosses, it negates;
it crosses out.
Like the antimatter
of the universe, with all of matter's properties
reversed: when it meets a particle of
matter, the pair annihilate each other--
in their place: pure energy, radiant light,
as if destruction were divine. Not so!
For symmetry is broken from the start,
from which all things descend, and here we are.
When the universe began--Creation
as Big Bang--for reason science can
not explain, the balance tipped toward
matter: more was made of matter
than of its absent antimatter twin.
Perfect symmetry would have equaled
pure annihilation, that nothingness
of which both Indian saint
and French logician
dream, exquisite binary machine--
Being and Nothingness: ka-boom.
And knowing that, the thought, unearthly,
which these lines at first unearthed, dissolves,
a cloud that had obscured the sun:
the ocean waves continue as before, embrace
with foam the swimmer on her board
(each bubble a lens to catch the light),
the mountain rises from the ocean's floor,
and out in space, the galaxies spin on,
the stars wink back at everything:
root, plant, orangutan,
blue planet, rutabaga, kitchen sink.
Eleanor Wilner 2005
Sometimes I want to stop everyone I see and tell them that yes: poetry exists, and I love it, and then I love them. Is that strange? Perhaps. In any case, I think that it is one of the byproducts of reacting to something aesthetically. The reason I took so long to write this Poem of the Week is that I love it so much. I can't write about many of my favorite poems. I almost don't want to - I make notes in my book, but I don't want to come at the poem with ropes and a thesis. Sometimes I just want to surrender to it.
This is something we talked about in my aesthetics class - great works can move us to silence. And yet we chatter endlessly about what James Joyce meant if the period in the third episode was just a typo and what could this mean etc. Some might say that the entire field of literary criticism is an attempt to intellectualize what we ought to just be loving. There are certainly professors, students, and critics who fall away from their love for literature, but I think that most of us are just desperately trying to understand what we love so much. I know that that's what this blog is for me - an endless attempt to express my love for poetry. I hope that you can all see that. I try to hold on to it as much as possible. If I go into literary criticism, I want to attempt to always infuse my work with love. I don't know if that's forever possible, but it is certainly possible to try.
This is a poem that traverses the universe and the properties of matter to end with extraordinary love. Asymmetry glimmers out at every level, and we appreciate it. There is a Romantic twist in the title; "An Ode to Asymmetry" perhaps references Keats' famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "Ode to a Nightingale." It's thus probably about beauty or truth. Or love! I think, in the end, it's a poem about love, beauty, and appreciating what is around us.
The structure is circular; it begins with a thought and flies to the edges of the universe before returning to that thought. In the first stanza, the dominant metaphor is that of the human mind as the earth. You dig up this thought as if from the mind's soil and it hovers over the brain's "agitated waters." This thought is never named. Much of the poem attempts to describe this thought, and, by the end, we get the idea that it is something disturbing and destructive. Perhaps even symmetrical.
We know this thought is "like the antimatter / of the universe, with all of matter's properties / reversed." It destroys what it touches, albeit in a flash of "pure energy, radiant light." The next line, "as if destruction were divine," does not mean "as if destruction were holy:" rather, "as if destruction were the way of things." Luckily, the universe does not have matter and antimatter in proportion. It is unbalanced, and from that inequality we descend. This idea is familiar - humans descend from a break in creation, from imperfection, from some original sin. Perhaps this poem is another theory of the fall of matter.
It is positive, though. Luckily in the creation of the universe, "the balance tipped toward / matter." The poem suggests that it perhaps favored asymmetry because "perfect symmetry would have equaled / pure annihilation." I am not sure who the Indian saint is (any ideas, anyone?), but the French Logician is probably Jacques Derrida. He started Deconstructionism, a movement arguing against meaning. Essentially, he writes that language is an inconstant structure, and that we can never really "know" any word's definition. There is an infinite looping of definitions - each word is defined by more words, so each definition cancels out the word. Meaning doesn't exist. I could be wrong about the reference - any feedback is welcome! The phrase "exquisite binary machine" takes a little dig at technology's binary system because it's connected to symmetry, perhaps pushing against our society's idealization of machines.
The last stanza is a love stanza. The disturbing thought dissolves, and the mind's earth recedes to the real one. This earth embraces its swimmers, the mountains and the ocean move in harmony, and the very galaxies wink at the odd, lovable elements of this world. It reminded me of the title of one of Richard Wilbur's poems, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World." Perhaps asymmetry does as well.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/16/2006: Little Red-Cap
Little Red-Cap
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?1
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –
which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
But then I was young – and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.
Carol Ann Duffy 1999
1see Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” line 48, “Every woman adores a fascist”
I guess that I had never really thought about the archetypal significance of fairy tales, though I now can’t think why not. Often, the simplest stories hold some of the greatest truths, and the ones that stay on the cultural radar like Little Red-Cap (the original British title for Little Red Riding Hood) do so because they continue to hold relevance. This incarnation points out that Little Red-Cap is a story of childhood’s end, the transition from innocence to experience. Duffy’s poem is a riff on a theme appearing in texts from the Bible to the Little Prince, and a particularly firey one at that.
Rather than ruminating about the now-grown-up girl or nostalgically sighing about lost childhood, “Little Red-Cap” throws us full-force into the heady whirlwind of adolescence. Finding love, sex, passion, independence, darkness, and poetry is so consuming that it replaces the traps of nostalgia. This poem hands us a girl ready to throw her child-self into the fire of experience and march into the woods alone.
Indeed, the poem begins “At childhood’s end,” almost the name of a physical place. Here, the landscape itself points towards a more aware, dangerous, sexual world. “The houses [peter] out / into playing fields,” perhaps symbolizing the gradual diminishment of childhood securities, and garden plots, gesturing at sexuality, are “kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men.” As Little Red-Cap walks to the edges of this land, her surroundings stretch vast and bade, the only inhabitants a forsaken rail line and a hermit. Childhood seems empty, at its end.
Enter the wolf. She claps eyes on him, and her world shifts. The word “clap” recalls a thunder-clap, foreshadowing the coming tempest. He is alluring, rugged, adult, and exotic. His language is different, his paws are rough, and his chin bears a forbidden sign of adulthood: wine. In every way, we can imagine, he is different from the soft, safe world of childhood. Unfamiliar and magnetic. She registers his eyes, teeth, and ears again, but, rather than frightening, they are seductive. His eyes can watch her, his ears can hear her, and his teeth, well, we’ll leave that to the imagination.
Thus, rather than being tricked by the wolf, per the original tale, Little Red-Cap seeks him out, choosing to grow up. This is a ritual most girls (and I imagine many guys) will recognize: parading oneself, making oneself noticed, inhabiting that exhilarating vision of the self as attractive, “sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif.” And so he buys her a drink, her first.
She then feels the need to justify herself, saying, “You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.” This line is tremendously important. Rhetorically, it rehearses a compressed internal rhyme. These patches of simple rhyme appearing throughout the poem perhaps reveal Little Red-Cap’s final vestiges of childhood rearing their head and maintain the consciousness that this was (at one time) a children’s tale. Then, too, it is crucial that poetry is the reason she chooses experience. Not the wolf, but an idea, a thought-structure, a compressed arrangement of words. Thus, we may meditate on what this reveals about experience. Perhaps she, like me (and perhaps you), finds poetry to be the passion of her life. I think that the answer is not so literal, though. Poetry's richness and challenge and mystery were perhaps alluring, or its individuality, or its energy. Perhaps becoming an adult is poetic, beautiful.
That she acknowledges the reason for becoming an adult shows that she accepts it is *her* choice. This choice is not lightly made, either. The next several lines demonstrate her acceptance of the darkness in the change, the difficulty changing.
After all, Little Red-Cap is a tale for children, so folding an allegory for growing-up into a traditional kid’s structure is somewhat genius.
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.
He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,
my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes
but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?1
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –
which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
But then I was young – and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe
to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.
Carol Ann Duffy 1999
1see Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” line 48, “Every woman adores a fascist”
I guess that I had never really thought about the archetypal significance of fairy tales, though I now can’t think why not. Often, the simplest stories hold some of the greatest truths, and the ones that stay on the cultural radar like Little Red-Cap (the original British title for Little Red Riding Hood) do so because they continue to hold relevance. This incarnation points out that Little Red-Cap is a story of childhood’s end, the transition from innocence to experience. Duffy’s poem is a riff on a theme appearing in texts from the Bible to the Little Prince, and a particularly firey one at that.
Rather than ruminating about the now-grown-up girl or nostalgically sighing about lost childhood, “Little Red-Cap” throws us full-force into the heady whirlwind of adolescence. Finding love, sex, passion, independence, darkness, and poetry is so consuming that it replaces the traps of nostalgia. This poem hands us a girl ready to throw her child-self into the fire of experience and march into the woods alone.
Indeed, the poem begins “At childhood’s end,” almost the name of a physical place. Here, the landscape itself points towards a more aware, dangerous, sexual world. “The houses [peter] out / into playing fields,” perhaps symbolizing the gradual diminishment of childhood securities, and garden plots, gesturing at sexuality, are “kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men.” As Little Red-Cap walks to the edges of this land, her surroundings stretch vast and bade, the only inhabitants a forsaken rail line and a hermit. Childhood seems empty, at its end.
Enter the wolf. She claps eyes on him, and her world shifts. The word “clap” recalls a thunder-clap, foreshadowing the coming tempest. He is alluring, rugged, adult, and exotic. His language is different, his paws are rough, and his chin bears a forbidden sign of adulthood: wine. In every way, we can imagine, he is different from the soft, safe world of childhood. Unfamiliar and magnetic. She registers his eyes, teeth, and ears again, but, rather than frightening, they are seductive. His eyes can watch her, his ears can hear her, and his teeth, well, we’ll leave that to the imagination.
Thus, rather than being tricked by the wolf, per the original tale, Little Red-Cap seeks him out, choosing to grow up. This is a ritual most girls (and I imagine many guys) will recognize: parading oneself, making oneself noticed, inhabiting that exhilarating vision of the self as attractive, “sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif.” And so he buys her a drink, her first.
She then feels the need to justify herself, saying, “You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.” This line is tremendously important. Rhetorically, it rehearses a compressed internal rhyme. These patches of simple rhyme appearing throughout the poem perhaps reveal Little Red-Cap’s final vestiges of childhood rearing their head and maintain the consciousness that this was (at one time) a children’s tale. Then, too, it is crucial that poetry is the reason she chooses experience. Not the wolf, but an idea, a thought-structure, a compressed arrangement of words. Thus, we may meditate on what this reveals about experience. Perhaps she, like me (and perhaps you), finds poetry to be the passion of her life. I think that the answer is not so literal, though. Poetry's richness and challenge and mystery were perhaps alluring, or its individuality, or its energy. Perhaps becoming an adult is poetic, beautiful.
That she acknowledges the reason for becoming an adult shows that she accepts it is *her* choice. This choice is not lightly made, either. The next several lines demonstrate her acceptance of the darkness in the change, the difficulty changing.
After all, Little Red-Cap is a tale for children, so folding an allegory for growing-up into a traditional kid’s structure is somewhat genius.
Monday, January 09, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/9/2006: Elegy for Jane
Elegy for Jane
My Student, Thrown by a Horse
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
Theodore Roethke 1953
An elegy, as I am sure most of you know, is a poem written in memory of one who has died. I choose this particular elegy for its energy, precise images, and delicate tenderness. "Elegy for Jane" gracefully captures the real girl Jane; in 22 compact lines, we almost see this flesh-and-blood girl and the love she brought forth. In animating Jane, the poem allows us to recognize Jane's beloved characteristics in those around us. She is, like all of us, and individual with universal traits.
Roethke reminisces about her (yes I am muddling speaker/author) personally, leaving the universal recognition up to the natural images and the readers. The first line, "I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;" demonstrates a very personal and even intimate view of this girl. He regards the nape of her neck, connoting vulnerability, and talks of her curls as soft, delicate tendrils. The connection with plants here rehearses the consistent twining of man and nature. In the next line, Jane smiles like a pickerel, a fish with a wide, oblong grin. The assonance in "quick look" heightens the energy in the poem, which again appears consistently throughout the poem. This energy reflects Jane's energy, and makes the thought of her loss even sadder. As if a light has winked out in the sky.
The next several lines, "how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her, / And she balanced in the delight of her thought, / A wren, happy, tail into the wind, / Her song trembling the twigs and small branches" again display natural imagery and energy. Because it shifts almost fully into a natural metaphor, the poem's universality comes through especially clearly. Perhaps I should pause and explain why natural imagery is universalizing. Excepting a few cases, a wild animal is not named. That is, one salmon, to the human eye, looks no different than any other salmon. "Salmon" or "wren" or "tendril" is universal, encompassing all salmon, all wren, and all tendrils. The natural metaphors in "Elegy" are tailored for an individual, Jane, so they are at once broadly relevant and personally applicable. The choice of a wren gestures that Jane was light, energetic, and graceful. Even the word "wren" sounds small and nimble.
Jane doesn't just inhabit natural images, though; she works in harmony with them, evident in the lines "the leaves, their whispers turned to kissing; / And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose." Here, the environment also expresses the love felt for Jane. It was everywhere, in the leaves, the brooks, the flowers and even the mold. For those good and bad, her presence delighted.
But she was not always effervescent. Roethke writes, "when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth, / Even a father could not find her." Her emotions were strong and clear; I believe that this characterization also makes her more real. She is a creature of pure emotion, sadness or happiness, which makes her easy to imagine and even empathize with. We all, I expect, experience straight emotions from time to time.
The speaker's affection begins to seep into the poem in the next lines, "My sparrow, you are not here, / Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow." Affection and nostalgia, really. Again, too, we note the tender, universal/personal images and Jane's bubbly grace. When Roethke writes, "If only I could nudge you from this sleep, / My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon," and I want to nudge her, too. I want to nudge everyone who has ever fallen. This poem, for me, is so beautifully and powerfully loving. And I suppose that an elegy should be a form of love poem, though I haven't read enough elegies to recommend examples or counterexamples. I like the idea of an elegy as a love poem.
The poem ends with a line that could be construed as problematic: with the implication that a father (male) or lover (stereotypically male) should have rights over remembering her. It sidesteps controversy, though, because the narrator is (arguably) male and her teacher. I think that he is only referring, in the end, to his possible position to her. He would usually love a girl because he is (a) her father or (b) her lover. How do we reconcile being neither of these things? Perhaps we don't have to, the poem suggests. Love exists outside our typical models. And indeed, it can be surprising to find that you love someone when you have no "right" to. My stepmother told me that she sometimes looks at a stranger working away at his life and imagines that he is her son. I found that so beautiful, and have tried it often. It's amazing how easy it is to love people, if you only see them as lovable. I try to look at girls as if they were one of my sisters or best friends. They become so clear and pure. I think that looking at Jane in this poem provides that same experience. She is a stranger, but looking at her through loving eyes, we love her as well. By seeing another that loves her, we may love her too, in a way. The narrator's affections, cloaked in natural imagery, guide us to affection and tenderness. Surprising, no?
My Student, Thrown by a Horse
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
Theodore Roethke 1953
An elegy, as I am sure most of you know, is a poem written in memory of one who has died. I choose this particular elegy for its energy, precise images, and delicate tenderness. "Elegy for Jane" gracefully captures the real girl Jane; in 22 compact lines, we almost see this flesh-and-blood girl and the love she brought forth. In animating Jane, the poem allows us to recognize Jane's beloved characteristics in those around us. She is, like all of us, and individual with universal traits.
Roethke reminisces about her (yes I am muddling speaker/author) personally, leaving the universal recognition up to the natural images and the readers. The first line, "I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;" demonstrates a very personal and even intimate view of this girl. He regards the nape of her neck, connoting vulnerability, and talks of her curls as soft, delicate tendrils. The connection with plants here rehearses the consistent twining of man and nature. In the next line, Jane smiles like a pickerel, a fish with a wide, oblong grin. The assonance in "quick look" heightens the energy in the poem, which again appears consistently throughout the poem. This energy reflects Jane's energy, and makes the thought of her loss even sadder. As if a light has winked out in the sky.
The next several lines, "how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her, / And she balanced in the delight of her thought, / A wren, happy, tail into the wind, / Her song trembling the twigs and small branches" again display natural imagery and energy. Because it shifts almost fully into a natural metaphor, the poem's universality comes through especially clearly. Perhaps I should pause and explain why natural imagery is universalizing. Excepting a few cases, a wild animal is not named. That is, one salmon, to the human eye, looks no different than any other salmon. "Salmon" or "wren" or "tendril" is universal, encompassing all salmon, all wren, and all tendrils. The natural metaphors in "Elegy" are tailored for an individual, Jane, so they are at once broadly relevant and personally applicable. The choice of a wren gestures that Jane was light, energetic, and graceful. Even the word "wren" sounds small and nimble.
Jane doesn't just inhabit natural images, though; she works in harmony with them, evident in the lines "the leaves, their whispers turned to kissing; / And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose." Here, the environment also expresses the love felt for Jane. It was everywhere, in the leaves, the brooks, the flowers and even the mold. For those good and bad, her presence delighted.
But she was not always effervescent. Roethke writes, "when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth, / Even a father could not find her." Her emotions were strong and clear; I believe that this characterization also makes her more real. She is a creature of pure emotion, sadness or happiness, which makes her easy to imagine and even empathize with. We all, I expect, experience straight emotions from time to time.
The speaker's affection begins to seep into the poem in the next lines, "My sparrow, you are not here, / Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow." Affection and nostalgia, really. Again, too, we note the tender, universal/personal images and Jane's bubbly grace. When Roethke writes, "If only I could nudge you from this sleep, / My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon," and I want to nudge her, too. I want to nudge everyone who has ever fallen. This poem, for me, is so beautifully and powerfully loving. And I suppose that an elegy should be a form of love poem, though I haven't read enough elegies to recommend examples or counterexamples. I like the idea of an elegy as a love poem.
The poem ends with a line that could be construed as problematic: with the implication that a father (male) or lover (stereotypically male) should have rights over remembering her. It sidesteps controversy, though, because the narrator is (arguably) male and her teacher. I think that he is only referring, in the end, to his possible position to her. He would usually love a girl because he is (a) her father or (b) her lover. How do we reconcile being neither of these things? Perhaps we don't have to, the poem suggests. Love exists outside our typical models. And indeed, it can be surprising to find that you love someone when you have no "right" to. My stepmother told me that she sometimes looks at a stranger working away at his life and imagines that he is her son. I found that so beautiful, and have tried it often. It's amazing how easy it is to love people, if you only see them as lovable. I try to look at girls as if they were one of my sisters or best friends. They become so clear and pure. I think that looking at Jane in this poem provides that same experience. She is a stranger, but looking at her through loving eyes, we love her as well. By seeing another that loves her, we may love her too, in a way. The narrator's affections, cloaked in natural imagery, guide us to affection and tenderness. Surprising, no?
Monday, January 02, 2006
Poem of the Week 1/2/2006: A Little Moonlight
A Little Moonlight
I.
Given inconstancy, the resistless
affair that has been my body (as if
there were no place to go from anywhere except
deeper, into those spaces the hand makes by
tugging the flesh, where it is part-able,
more open, or as if I believed, utterly, what
legend says about violation — how it leads
to prophecy, the god enters the body, the mouth
cracks open, and a mad fluttering, which
is the future, fills the cave, which is
desire, luck and hazard, hazard and luck),
I should perhaps regret more. But it’s grown
so late: see how dark, outside?
II.
Suspecting, even then,
that the best way to avoid being
broken by flaw would be to shape my life
around it — flaw coming slowly
to define the self, as shells make of the glass
that holds them a little kingdom
of sea — I followed him, and have only once
looked back. Oh, I contain him
as the lion’s chest contains the arrow
that death displaces, effect always mattering
more than cause: pull the arrow free —
brandish it. By now it must weigh
almost nothing . . .
III.
I agree, to hope for a thing is to believe in it,
or at least to want to. When does belief
become expectation? Like committing
a crime, confessing to it, and thinking
confession might equal apology, mistaking
apology for to wipe clean away,
you turn your face to me. — What?
Trees in a wind. Their mixed
invitation of leaves flourishing as if unstoppable,
as if foliage were the greater part of it, the part
I could love best, or should learn to say I do
more often. Tell me why, when what I loved
from the start was how eventually each leaf must go.
Carl Phillips 2005
Starting a new year, intent is incredibly powerful. This week is a clear opportunity to reimagine, to say the things that have never been said, to look forward. And so with this Poem of the Week, I want to tell you all why I write an extra essay each week and offer you a poem that reflects the thoughtfulness occassioned by a new year. I will start with my intent. Number one, I have this blog because I enjoy it. It keeps me working through my Norton Anthology, helps me with my writing, and provides a low-pressure environment in which I can explore poetry. It's so easy to get caught up in whatever trivialities pull me away from my passion. The PotW helps me stay engaged.
More importantly, though, I want to share poetry. At a New Year's party yesterday, a man told me that he couldn't remember the last time he'd read a poem. I was so sad that I wanted to take a book off of the shelf right then and there and read one to him, but I supposed that presumptious and forward. Perhaps I should have, though; he was an english major in college long ago. It saddens me to hear to hear how little poetry most people have read. I of course don't expect most to feel as I do, but people don't have to totally comprehend or love an art form to appreciate its beauty. I hope that the PotW helps you register poetry's deepness and richness. I hope that it gives you a chance to slow down and contemplate in your busy life. I hope that it provides you with an extra spot of beauty. I hope that it makes poetry less scary. Even in some of my upper level lit classes, people were at a loss when confronted with a poem. But poetry ought not be scary. I hope that you can see that exploring a poem is as simple as slowing down, noticing the words on the page, and asking questions. A poem is not scary, but beautiful. I hope that it gives you some tools to approach a poem with, even if those tools are thought structures, ways of thinking about poems.
I originally hoped that it would be a forum for many to discuss, but I think that I have discouraged this by writing such long responses. Comment if you'd like, but I think that I instead hope merely that you react. This is not an academic blog wherein we are having a thesis-oriented, utterly informed discussion. The PotWs are my personal thoughts about a poem (and other ramblings that perhaps provoke you. Though long-winded, I intend it as a gift of beauty and an offering of what I love. All together, I hope that the Poem of the Week is a personal, stimulating, free-form, beautiful ramble for you and me.
So that done, we have the chance to look at this narrator's long, beautiful ramble. I see this poem as a collection of musings. The three section structure makes it light and pensive. Rather than preaching, it merely wonders, explores. I think that many can probably relate to these kinds of thoughts, for the narrator reflects on flaws, spirituality, hope and most of all growth. I get the sense here that these are little trains of thought that the narrator somehow chose to put into a poem form. They are ripples in the speaker's stream of consciousness, important enough to set apart in a poem. They appear to come from different sense of time; I suppose, then, that the question is whether they achieve unity or not. Let us look at each alone, and explore any sense of unity at the end.
The first section has a marvelous syntactical structure. Without the parentheses, it would read, "Given inconstancy, the resistless / affair that has been my body... I should perhaos regret more. But it's grown / so late: see how dark, outside?" He muses that he ought to perhaps regret more because life has been bumpy, not as expected. His response to his own question is so casual, so effortless that it reminds me of a dear, old friend so comfortable he doesn't need anything other than metaphors. It's too late to regret anything, he sighs.
If the frame-sentence structure is so casual, then, the parenthetic lines' strength makes them almost tangible. Indeed, the images unify emotional and erotic bodies, powerfully coiling body and soul. The first "as if" postulate, read with the body equating emotions, tells of acute introspection, as if looking inside is a physical act, pulling apart the flesh to see where the blood is flowing. This resonates deeply with me, for I think that introspection is difficult and essential and as literally vital as pulling apart one's flesh.
The second "as if" again splits between an emotional and a physical body, this time moving into a more erotic realm. By using the words "violation," "cave," and "desire," Phillips is almost explicitly sexual. The sexuality animates spirituality, though, again unifying body and soul. The violation brings on prophecy, which, god-like, "fills the cave." Thus, a mystic experience is as strong as rape, as climax, as the deepest physical intimacy.
I have a hard time reconciling these postulates with inconstancy. I suppose that introspection and spirituality are inconstant, for they have to be struggled with daily. This explanation isn't quite satisfactory to me; if you have any ideas, feel free to post a comment or email me!
The second part is my favorite for its empowerment. The speaker discusses how to deal with flaws, and his frank, refreshing answer is to embrace them. Deeply. Flaws, he implies, provide the structure over which we can grow and heal. Flaws are thus a kind of skeleton, but we must recognize them in order to develop around them. He confidently says that we, like shells in a fishtank, can make a "kingdom / of sea" by seeing the container, the flaw, as beautiful. Linking flaws and a fishtank, too, implies that a flaw is a sort of container, and, true, flaws often limit. Imperfections like fear, anger, defensiveness and more insulate us from one-another. Indeed, "limitation" is in the thesaurus under flaw.
The syntax, true to stream-of-consciousness, interrupts this section as well. Without the dashes, its first stanza reads, "suspecting, even then, that the best way to avoid being broken by a lfaw would be to shape my life around it, I followed him, and have only once looked back." Who is this him? I suggest that it is perhaps an inside advisor who makes mistakes, what my mom would call "the right mistake." It strikes me now that following one's flaws is another way of being true to oneself. Thus, the narrator talks of living and acting from truth. There are few greater lessons.
I love that this section is so empowered; the speaker equates himself to a lion, and bravely announces that one ought to brandish the flaw once one has internalized it. Be proud of what you are, good and bad! Brandishing a flaw also implies owning it and controlling it. When you go to wave the flaw to the world, then, the flaw is probably diminished. It is humble, too, expressed in the ellipses' trailing off and the fragmented syntax. I love this stanza; it convinces me that I would want to be friends with this speaker, whoever he is.
Beginning, "I agree to hope for a thing is to believe in it, / or at least to want to," the third section addresses the logical leaps we make in hoping, believing, apologizing, and redeeming. I write "leap" because these transformations are perhaps problematic. The speaker has a good point, after all. I know that I have jumped from belief to expectation before; this poem articulates a normal human tendency. By putting words to this action, "A Little Moonlight" rehearses another of poetry's functions. When it puts words to varying human tendencies, emotions, situations etc., it makes us aware of them, allowing us to move forward.
I want to finally notice, then, the great exhale ending this poem. The narrator's quiet thoughts about trees look with love and sweetness on death, on endings, on passing away, and I find this so appropriate for the beginning of a new year. We all have the chance to love our own little lives and selves even as they are passing away, or perhaps because they are. For me, I feel that I am growing, growing bigger, growing older, growing wiser and happier and sadder all at once; I am - we all are - growing away from who we used to be, but that is the thing to love most. Just like the beloved leaves that will tumble off of the tree, so we are tumbling into something new every second, and we can love the fluttering leaves and we can love the gusting wind. Love. The word falls onto the page.
I.
Given inconstancy, the resistless
affair that has been my body (as if
there were no place to go from anywhere except
deeper, into those spaces the hand makes by
tugging the flesh, where it is part-able,
more open, or as if I believed, utterly, what
legend says about violation — how it leads
to prophecy, the god enters the body, the mouth
cracks open, and a mad fluttering, which
is the future, fills the cave, which is
desire, luck and hazard, hazard and luck),
I should perhaps regret more. But it’s grown
so late: see how dark, outside?
II.
Suspecting, even then,
that the best way to avoid being
broken by flaw would be to shape my life
around it — flaw coming slowly
to define the self, as shells make of the glass
that holds them a little kingdom
of sea — I followed him, and have only once
looked back. Oh, I contain him
as the lion’s chest contains the arrow
that death displaces, effect always mattering
more than cause: pull the arrow free —
brandish it. By now it must weigh
almost nothing . . .
III.
I agree, to hope for a thing is to believe in it,
or at least to want to. When does belief
become expectation? Like committing
a crime, confessing to it, and thinking
confession might equal apology, mistaking
apology for to wipe clean away,
you turn your face to me. — What?
Trees in a wind. Their mixed
invitation of leaves flourishing as if unstoppable,
as if foliage were the greater part of it, the part
I could love best, or should learn to say I do
more often. Tell me why, when what I loved
from the start was how eventually each leaf must go.
Carl Phillips 2005
Starting a new year, intent is incredibly powerful. This week is a clear opportunity to reimagine, to say the things that have never been said, to look forward. And so with this Poem of the Week, I want to tell you all why I write an extra essay each week and offer you a poem that reflects the thoughtfulness occassioned by a new year. I will start with my intent. Number one, I have this blog because I enjoy it. It keeps me working through my Norton Anthology, helps me with my writing, and provides a low-pressure environment in which I can explore poetry. It's so easy to get caught up in whatever trivialities pull me away from my passion. The PotW helps me stay engaged.
More importantly, though, I want to share poetry. At a New Year's party yesterday, a man told me that he couldn't remember the last time he'd read a poem. I was so sad that I wanted to take a book off of the shelf right then and there and read one to him, but I supposed that presumptious and forward. Perhaps I should have, though; he was an english major in college long ago. It saddens me to hear to hear how little poetry most people have read. I of course don't expect most to feel as I do, but people don't have to totally comprehend or love an art form to appreciate its beauty. I hope that the PotW helps you register poetry's deepness and richness. I hope that it gives you a chance to slow down and contemplate in your busy life. I hope that it provides you with an extra spot of beauty. I hope that it makes poetry less scary. Even in some of my upper level lit classes, people were at a loss when confronted with a poem. But poetry ought not be scary. I hope that you can see that exploring a poem is as simple as slowing down, noticing the words on the page, and asking questions. A poem is not scary, but beautiful. I hope that it gives you some tools to approach a poem with, even if those tools are thought structures, ways of thinking about poems.
I originally hoped that it would be a forum for many to discuss, but I think that I have discouraged this by writing such long responses. Comment if you'd like, but I think that I instead hope merely that you react. This is not an academic blog wherein we are having a thesis-oriented, utterly informed discussion. The PotWs are my personal thoughts about a poem (and other ramblings that perhaps provoke you. Though long-winded, I intend it as a gift of beauty and an offering of what I love. All together, I hope that the Poem of the Week is a personal, stimulating, free-form, beautiful ramble for you and me.
So that done, we have the chance to look at this narrator's long, beautiful ramble. I see this poem as a collection of musings. The three section structure makes it light and pensive. Rather than preaching, it merely wonders, explores. I think that many can probably relate to these kinds of thoughts, for the narrator reflects on flaws, spirituality, hope and most of all growth. I get the sense here that these are little trains of thought that the narrator somehow chose to put into a poem form. They are ripples in the speaker's stream of consciousness, important enough to set apart in a poem. They appear to come from different sense of time; I suppose, then, that the question is whether they achieve unity or not. Let us look at each alone, and explore any sense of unity at the end.
The first section has a marvelous syntactical structure. Without the parentheses, it would read, "Given inconstancy, the resistless / affair that has been my body... I should perhaos regret more. But it's grown / so late: see how dark, outside?" He muses that he ought to perhaps regret more because life has been bumpy, not as expected. His response to his own question is so casual, so effortless that it reminds me of a dear, old friend so comfortable he doesn't need anything other than metaphors. It's too late to regret anything, he sighs.
If the frame-sentence structure is so casual, then, the parenthetic lines' strength makes them almost tangible. Indeed, the images unify emotional and erotic bodies, powerfully coiling body and soul. The first "as if" postulate, read with the body equating emotions, tells of acute introspection, as if looking inside is a physical act, pulling apart the flesh to see where the blood is flowing. This resonates deeply with me, for I think that introspection is difficult and essential and as literally vital as pulling apart one's flesh.
The second "as if" again splits between an emotional and a physical body, this time moving into a more erotic realm. By using the words "violation," "cave," and "desire," Phillips is almost explicitly sexual. The sexuality animates spirituality, though, again unifying body and soul. The violation brings on prophecy, which, god-like, "fills the cave." Thus, a mystic experience is as strong as rape, as climax, as the deepest physical intimacy.
I have a hard time reconciling these postulates with inconstancy. I suppose that introspection and spirituality are inconstant, for they have to be struggled with daily. This explanation isn't quite satisfactory to me; if you have any ideas, feel free to post a comment or email me!
The second part is my favorite for its empowerment. The speaker discusses how to deal with flaws, and his frank, refreshing answer is to embrace them. Deeply. Flaws, he implies, provide the structure over which we can grow and heal. Flaws are thus a kind of skeleton, but we must recognize them in order to develop around them. He confidently says that we, like shells in a fishtank, can make a "kingdom / of sea" by seeing the container, the flaw, as beautiful. Linking flaws and a fishtank, too, implies that a flaw is a sort of container, and, true, flaws often limit. Imperfections like fear, anger, defensiveness and more insulate us from one-another. Indeed, "limitation" is in the thesaurus under flaw.
The syntax, true to stream-of-consciousness, interrupts this section as well. Without the dashes, its first stanza reads, "suspecting, even then, that the best way to avoid being broken by a lfaw would be to shape my life around it, I followed him, and have only once looked back." Who is this him? I suggest that it is perhaps an inside advisor who makes mistakes, what my mom would call "the right mistake." It strikes me now that following one's flaws is another way of being true to oneself. Thus, the narrator talks of living and acting from truth. There are few greater lessons.
I love that this section is so empowered; the speaker equates himself to a lion, and bravely announces that one ought to brandish the flaw once one has internalized it. Be proud of what you are, good and bad! Brandishing a flaw also implies owning it and controlling it. When you go to wave the flaw to the world, then, the flaw is probably diminished. It is humble, too, expressed in the ellipses' trailing off and the fragmented syntax. I love this stanza; it convinces me that I would want to be friends with this speaker, whoever he is.
Beginning, "I agree to hope for a thing is to believe in it, / or at least to want to," the third section addresses the logical leaps we make in hoping, believing, apologizing, and redeeming. I write "leap" because these transformations are perhaps problematic. The speaker has a good point, after all. I know that I have jumped from belief to expectation before; this poem articulates a normal human tendency. By putting words to this action, "A Little Moonlight" rehearses another of poetry's functions. When it puts words to varying human tendencies, emotions, situations etc., it makes us aware of them, allowing us to move forward.
I want to finally notice, then, the great exhale ending this poem. The narrator's quiet thoughts about trees look with love and sweetness on death, on endings, on passing away, and I find this so appropriate for the beginning of a new year. We all have the chance to love our own little lives and selves even as they are passing away, or perhaps because they are. For me, I feel that I am growing, growing bigger, growing older, growing wiser and happier and sadder all at once; I am - we all are - growing away from who we used to be, but that is the thing to love most. Just like the beloved leaves that will tumble off of the tree, so we are tumbling into something new every second, and we can love the fluttering leaves and we can love the gusting wind. Love. The word falls onto the page.
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