Category Archives: poetry

Hannah Stephenson, “Good Job You Now Know the World’s Secrets”

poetry

Good Job You Now Know the World’s Secrets
Hannah Stephenson

Good Job You Now Know the World’s Secrets

If snow were a message
and it is

it would mean
falling

is the source
of all repair

Comment:

Still staring at Andy Dixon’s “Portrait of a Schoolteacher,” which inspired Stephenson’s poem. The teacher looks like she is composed of several things: children’s colorful scribbling, traditional expectations (note the dress and the hat), and her own humanity (her face is where the most color is concentrated). I get the rough feeling that there’s a hierarchy of things in this painting. The traditional expectations are completely colored over or shaped by what the children imagine. But the teacher’s humanity is the only thing that matters in the end: we’re looking at her face, wondering if she’s fallen apart, stitched together, or even projecting beyond all that.

Onto the poem. I get the feeling that it starts from the notion that the teacher has fallen apart and been reconstructed. But it’s only a start: “snow” gives this poem no color, whereas the portrait is extremely colorful.

The poem, to be sure, begins blunt. You may wonder if snow is a message. Well, it is a message. It means falling “is the source of all repair.”

And yet reading the poem involves a falling motion that is gentler. The second line of each stanza resolves the first and links the next stanza, except for the last. Ok, you say, isn’t that true of every poem? Well, yes, but two things peculiar to this case. First, there is direct import for the theme and drama, as this poem only begins blunt. Moreover, the second line is shorter than the first, as if it was a piece that broke off from the first.

The first stanza wonders if snow is a message and quickly cuts of all debate. But it does resolve that snow “is” something. It softens in the next stanza; “is” turns to “would mean,” and the only thing meant is “falling.” The title of the poem is sarcasm, but it took between 10-15 words to see anger abate a bit, turn into something else.

That abating is a recognition of self. The third stanza gives us a conclusion of sorts. The three words of the first line parallel the three of the second. “The source of all repair” is a grounding. “The” makes way for “all,” and a “source” does not just generate a new being, wholly separate from the one hurt. What are the world’s secrets? Whatever enables it to keep on going, with only temporary materials, and somehow respond and be shaped by what seem to be stronger – maybe even truthful – pains.

Emily Dickinson, “A face devoid of love or grace” (1711)

dickinson, poetry

With thanks to Temperance Dewar & Margaret Mahoney

A face devoid of love or grace (1711)
Emily Dickinson

A face devoid of love or grace,
A hateful, hard, successful face,
A face with which a stone
Would feel as thoroughly at ease
As were they old acquaintances —
First time together thrown.

Comment:

The toughest thing to do in discussing a work of art is articulate the problem it introduces and its relevance. When I first read this poem, I thought it was an elaborate way of saying the speaker wanted to throw a stone at someone’s face.

That is, in essence, the drama of the poem. But it is a bit more complicated than that. “A face devoid of love or grace, / A hateful, hard, successful face” – this is all the speaker’s imagination. Nowhere is any particular physical feature mentioned. More importantly, the whole image depends on a rather curious thesis. Devoid of love or grace? Stoking the fire of one’s own hate? That yields hardness and success.

It looks like the speaker is imagining a face for a particular purpose. The face she wants to throw a stone at is most likely her own. The second part of the poem warrants close attention:

A face with which a stone
Would feel as thoroughly at ease
As were they old acquaintances —
First time together thrown.

A stone feels “thoroughly at ease” with the face imagined. In fact, it’s like they were “old acquaintances,” those thrown together who realized how similar their souls were. A friendship might be forged between hate and anger! The drama of the poem, in my view: the speaker is putting on what she thinks is a hateful face to achieve something. She is not entirely comfortable with herself doing this.

But why is it relevant? The drama of the poem can only suggest the larger issue. Margaret made some suggestions that got me thinking if the speaker is trying to get herself to break up with someone. Small faults have to be exaggerated even in more reasonable break ups. While there doesn’t have to be hatred, the whole process is hateful. I think that’s the correct line of thought, but the problem is more general. In life, we have to do hateful, cold things against others. Those things don’t have a “love” or “grace” as regards others, but do have a logic and even a kinship of their own. It’s like there’s a set of rules we work ardently to deny, but at times they assert their necessity, and we wonder what we’ve become. The irony is “first time together thrown:” the speaker knows too much for that to be true.

Emily Dickinson, “A lane of Yellow led the eye” (1650)

dickinson, poetry

A lane of Yellow led the eye
Emily Dickinson

A lane of Yellow led the eye
Unto a Purple Wood
Whose soft inhabitants to be
Surpasses solitude
If Bird the silence contradict
Or flower presume to show
In that low summer of the West
Impossible to know —

Comment:

For the wanderer, time passed. The day’s yellow became the purple of the wood. Even as one who would rather see for himself – know through experience – there was the distance of seeing and an anticipation. The “soft inhabitants” to be are the darkness of night. Somehow sleep and death connect; that much he knew. But how sleep’s “soft inhabitants,” those who are and will be, relate to death and nothingness – well.

The only hint of the question’s power: the soft inhabitants surpass solitude. This is mysterious, as it unites sleep and death in a whole beyond one’s perception. It makes no sense to talk about a producer of images (sleep) or not-being as the whole. The wanderer recognized what we slowly realize, that the “solitude” surpassed is his own. That sleep and death are an incomprehensible whole is exactly the problem.

He moved away from himself to try and view it, and perhaps himself, better. But the natural world in the face of a dying light is powerless. Every song or shriek of a bird seemed to be absorbed by silence. A flower’s growth and display meant nothing as the sun grew dimmer. One thing stood out for him as he reflected, “the low summer of the West.” Summer can be associated with intense passion, and perhaps none is more intense than that which would lead one to link sleep and death. I’m doing a close read of Macbeth with a friend; it is stunning how many times various characters muse on sleep, death, and the state of their ambition.

Whether bird or flower were explicitly contradicted by day’s end is “impossible to know.” The wanderer’s passion set up the identification of sleep and death. He wanted to know how day’s end might reflect the end of himself and perhaps of all things. But knowledge doesn’t work that way; it does not necessarily come from what’s logical, i.e. that an end in time can inform one’s end or the end of time itself. The eye saw in “Yellow,” “Purple,” then soft inhabitants. It saw in color more than form, metaphor more than fact. The wanderer cannot get a certain knowledge from his sight, but then again, the fundamental issue is not knowledge.

Hannah Stephenson, “Fever”

poetry

Fever (from The Storialist)
Hannah Stephenson

Fever

I have set myself adrift on a river.
I have built the river.

Because I have not slept
I think it is raining
from the upper sky to the middle sky

but never reaching me.

If the self were
symptom,

an inner tube inflated,

where is the mouth
that let the rubber nozzle
drink from its breath.

I wrench something from the ground
but say
look what the world is bringing to me.

Comment:

Hannah Stephenson’s website is composed of “poems inspired by images.” The work she calls “Fever” was originally titled “Good Odds.” I think I understand the visual joke that inspired the artist’s own title. You’ll notice that most sets of shapes in the artwork have a counterpart elsewhere in the work. The triangle that reminds of beams of light at the right corresponds with a small triangle at the center; it looks like there are rays with rounded ends at the upper center and the bottom left that radiate from a central point. It feels like the piece is a sly comment on expectations. If your eyes start at one part, you find something similar later, but it is reduced, fragmented, or enlarged. Of course, one does not know exactly what happened from one shape to the next; the whole is more jumbled than continuous.

Onto the poem. Stephenson sees the art as fevered. “I have set myself adrift on a river. / I have built the river” – if you build, build carefully, end up with a jumble: well, you’re adrift.

At first, building is the problem. It requires every bit of one’s focus (“I have not slept”) and a view of what is completed from above or below (seeing the rain as entirely beyond one). Unfortunately, you’re the one building; nothing’s been fully formed yet. So what does this mean for self-construction? It’s like knowing you’re a river but only seeing the water as rain, knowing it in its partiality and at a distance. You’re doing and making but never growing.

“If the self were symptom:” the speaker tries to change the problem and fails. However, she does make a certain progress. The poem before “if the self were symptom” shows “building” to have a peculiar strength. It unifies cause and effect; the building results in a fevered, fragmented self, but it is still a self. Isolating the self – calling it a symptom – means trying to find another who caused it, another sort of “self.” This is, on its face, a failure. It’s like saying there’s another person within us who’s responsible for free will.

One can attempt recourse to the Other as the breathy cause of an inflated tube, but the progress of this part of the poem is its focus on the counterfactual. We look at the self as a symptom and a cause. Hence, the image of the speaker floating upon the self. She is the river and upon the river. There is no building, but floating. The river is built, and she’s looking at a self.

Can this work? Is the fever broken?

I wrench something from the ground
but say
look what the world is bringing to me.

This last stanza gives us a human being who is not stranded, not floating, but grounded. Complete enough to “wrench something from the ground.” We’re back at the beginning, it seems: didn’t she build a river? Didn’t this lead before to getting divorced from it, lost upon it?

This time, she speaks and marks the action. She doesn’t just expect her building and floating to give visible, accessible testament. The wrenching and the speaking are at a remove from a unity of action and self. They are not the same as the inflating or the floating, either: the self is not a symptom. It is a cause, but a peculiar one. If you emphasize your agency, you exaggerate not just your power but also your understanding of yourself. To say “look what the world is bringing to me” as opposed to “I wrench” is to see yourself as part of a process and see that process as recognizing you. This understanding may also fail. But this poem was about beginnings, and this approach seems a surer bet.

Jane Kenyon, “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer”

poetry

Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer (from The Oregonian)
Jane Kenyon

We turned into the drive,
and gravel flew up from the tires
like sparks from a fire. So much
to be done — the unpacking, the mail
and papers; the grass needed mowing …
We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree,
the limbs so heavy with fruit
they nearly touched the ground.
We went out to the meadow; our steps
made black holes in the grass:
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

Comment:

This is a love poem, sure, but I wonder what exactly to do with its overtones of sensuality and indulgence. Is the couple coming back from obligation or vacation?

Their car causes gravel to fly up “like sparks from a fire.” It sounds sensual, but it is also the everyday, the mundane, exaggerated. Kenyon’s joke: gravel like sparks is more exciting to think about than unpacking or tending to the mail or lawn. The reluctance to get out of the car is in both body and mind. Why did the speaker notice the engine tick?

Either way, released from obligation or vacation, to confront the everyday is to wonder why all over again. There’s a really funny idea at play here. One goes from one indulgence in the case of vacation straight into another. And it feels justified. Kenyon brings us to a pear tree, the famous image of St. Augustine’s crimes and guilt. Here, the fruit on it looks good to eat and is easy to take. The couple in action recreates the Fall, stepping away from their domicile and its maintenance, but is grateful. Maybe “indulgence” is the wrong word. Maybe it’s that we can seamlessly move from times we enjoy to the people we love that is important, that we can take pleasure and it is far from wrong, far from neglectful.

David Baker, “Heaven”

poetry

Heaven (from The Atlantic)
David Baker

All afternoon the sprinkler ticks and sprays,
ticks and sprays in lazy rounds, trailing
a feather of mist. When I turn it off,
the cicadas keep up their own dry rain,
passing on high from limb to limb.
I don’t know what has shocked me more,
that you are gone, that I am still here,
that there is music after the end.

Comment:

To keep loving someone, to know you will keep loving someone is small solace immediately after their loss. But eventually it becomes the everyday: you know you remember.

We make machines that tick and release in rhythm, over and over. The sprinkler creates the mist with its streams. Every subsequent stream rises, but only follows the mist of what was before. An upward reaching is done separately and together, both at once.

One might say the machines we make mirror wistful longings more than anything actually in nature. Fair enough. There are insects that release tick-like noises in rhythm. Their clatter communicates to human ears below signs of life, but it also communicates directly to other cicadas in the trees.

“Music after the end” – only rhythms and silences framed with hope. It is quietly beautiful, to know you’ve been given something you will never give up. The hope of following one’s greatest love in that love is made good, simply by persevering. What we needed to know – what they can tell us – is that for all our failings and losses, we still can give and receive.

Jane Kenyon, “Evening Sun”

poetry

With thanks to Margaret Mahoney and Laura Garofalo

Evening Sun (from Poetry)
Jane Kenyon

Why does this light force me back
to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress, and the skirt
made a perfect circle.
                         Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible . . . . The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms, and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
                         And I knew then
that I would have to live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and stilI what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart.

Comment:

Right now, I’m tearing my hair out at the number of 20-somethings I personally know who are desperately seeking validation from their peers and only their peers. They’re not doing a damn thing for anyone else except themselves, not recognizing the voices of those older or younger. I’ve never seen so much selfishness and self-absorption. The value of “be like children to enter the kingdom of heaven” is lost on me: I just see nasty, brutish, overgrown babies.

And then there’s this poem, which like all art has a certain ridiculousness and a power. I’ve been musing on it for a little while. The question Kenyon’s speaker asks, “Why does this light force me back to my childhood,” is not really answered by the image of her twirling in the evening sun, the joy and sorrow felt once, or even the sorrow that is at the moment igniting her heart.

“Huh?” you rightly ask. You say the sorrow she feels now connects with her childhood. Of course the light reminds her of the origin of the pain she feels. But that’s where this poem almost gets ridiculous. How can a child have such an insight, one enduring and defining adulthood on a higher level? This is not to say children cannot have a moral maturity far beyond their years, or go through inhuman experiences with a dignity that would break even the most battle hardened. It is just to say that the degree of self-knowledge required to recognize that maturity and have it be a driving force is highly unlikely.

So let’s go through the poem stanza-by-stanza to see exactly what the speaker’s dilemma is, why she feels her own question in some way unanswerable. “I wore a yellow summer dress, and the skirt made a perfect circle:” she is like the sun in how she is clothed, not in motion. But in motion, she again resembles the sun: “Turning and turning until it flared to the limit was irresistible.” She is the point at which all things revolve around, not just revolving herself. I take the whirling of the “grass and trees” to not just be a statement of her perception, but a brief moment where she was the sun, the source of light.

It is easy to say she wasn’t. That brief moment of unadulterated joy, of forgetting oneself entirely and just being blissful, was lost immediately. The child somehow realized that all of life would be nothing but trying to attain those moments in one way or another. A funny thing – it does not matter if she realized she was not the sun or was more like the sun than she thought. It will also go on “living” and being everyday itself, but for a longer time than her. Even the sun isn’t what it is supposed to represent. Again, we’re supposed to believe a child understood all this, and knew the deeper lesson. That we love and know we will lose and still keep loving to try to have those moments where life justifies itself. That our love and joy is the same thing as sorrow, and sorrow is therefore one’s heart.

But this poem does make sense in light of Jesus’ admonition. A child does learn that life is not getting everything, all at once. A child does learn that the best moments are moments one might never have again. There is such a thing as an innocent joy, a joy that loves its innocence and is not trying to forcibly replicate it, as it wants to see the world more than make it. When I think about this, I realize the problem with the 20-somethings isn’t their childishness. It’s that they have a caricature of adulthood they doggedly pursue. Kenyon’s speaker, on the other hand, is still wondering about that light once upon a time. She’s wondering about why she’s forced back to her childhood, when the pain endures even today.

Kay Ryan, “Still Start”

poetry

Still Start (from Poetry)
Kay Ryan

As if engine
parts could be
wrenched out
at random and
the car would
still start and
sound even,
hearts can go
with chambers
broken open.

Comment:

I brushed this poem aside several times, thinking there wasn’t much happening except the obvious. But something nagged and pushed me to go back each time. This time, it wasn’t a small voice inside my head, but just rereading my journal to see what I was working on.

A counterfactual is proposed: a car with engine parts wrenched out at random can “still start” and sound. This is the exact same as how broken hearts keep going.

So fine. We’re not machines, because we go on in an even dumber way – that was my first read.

This time, I became fixated on “still start.” It’s a strange expression. It has some very dark implications; I felt it implied “still born” in a way. It isn’t simply equivalent to “yet will start in spite of.” It is the image of “starting” while still, making one wonder if something started so can move at all or is ready to die again.

To extend the metaphor a bit less morbidly: maybe all of us “still start.” Our being contains potential and pain; there are spaces within us distributed randomly. Thing is, our being is realized in time. To put something incomplete out there is to watch it “go” as a cruel joke. It makes a sound and seems to move, but it doesn’t accomplish an end except by chance. The heart/engine isn’t precisely because it is.

This brings us to more extended metaphor. The only way the heart can be is to be whole in time. Time, then, has the burden of making us “go” and making us count. It does the former in a way no matter what; our speaker grudgingly hints it may also do the latter. One might be tempted to write the speaker off as a romantic, seeing love and disappointment as a totality that they aren’t necessarily. That doesn’t quite do justice to the fact that some losses are utterly crushing, that time is a cruel taskmaster of a machine. The darkness of this poem is that in spite of it all, our hearts are crucially dependent on mechanism. Disappointment isn’t our regret we weren’t loved. It’s our thought that we didn’t love well enough.

Alison Croggon, “Small Things”

poetry

Small Things (from Lost Poems)
Alison Croggon

I worry for the small things
- Raising Arizona

those with teeth and thick skulls
need no advocates.
their fists are dumb machines
smashing the earth,
clumsy with the insolence
of wounded giants.
everyone knows
when the sly world plots
and slides a flat blade
through their shouting skins

and those with flexible tongues
they can look after themselves.
they use words like dangerous toys
spinning a beam of colours
into a white shield.
pain stares in its blank slant
and goes away empty handed.

but small things can’t argue
their way into shelter
when the world explodes on them
implacably as stars.
they have only feathers
for the hurricanes
and thin leaves for the fires.
when bulldozers eat their houses
they squat on the edge of valleys
with nowhere to go.
The world is too mean for trust
but generous enough for murder.
It’s getting worse. I worry
for the small things.

Comment:

I deal with a lot of fundamentalists as well as men and women in their 20′s with issues. Today I dealt with a young fundamentalist who thinks he has it all together. He opened by accosting me pretty mercilessly but I took it. Then a short time later I made one brief comment to be careful regarding the circles he was in (believe me, what he’s up to is more than likely a lot, lot, lot darker than joining a megachurch) – was just saying watch out, be a bit balanced. This got me more insults. For some reason, I was expected to be friendly. I left with the intention of never talking to him again.

The feeling is less anger and more an overwhelming sadness. I spent a considerable amount of time earlier thinking about how to be more useful to others. There’s a limit to this; sometimes you have to insist on your rights, as to allow yourself to be dehumanized is to let others dehumanize themselves and others. Of course, a number of others say most people who think there’s a limit to being useful are just whiners who have no intention of helping anyone or themselves.

I believe the poem above encapsulates that sadness well. The dumb, who are stubborn, stupidly strong, and insolent can hurt us if we’re out of position. If we’re looking not to harm, they’ll harm us.

What the poem does beautifully is give us cults from its “state of nature” imagery. I know, I’m twisting the meaning a bit here: Croggon does say “sly world,” which indicts political society generally. I want to narrow it now because I think I see a glimmer of something more. Cults are not really stubborn or greedy. They’re groups formed around a certain slyness, as they eliminate the simply pained and insolent. In doing so, they replace a primal call for justice with the idea that power over everything can be had. See what we did to what was a barbaric obstacle? All problems in life can be eliminated the same way; that’s the nature of all problems.

“The sly world plots,” then, is not the sum total of politics. It’s a will to control that complements the worst demagoguery all too well. Those with “flexible tongues” are not necessarily the heart of politics. In fact, they wreck lawful orders which work to be just from the inside out. I’ve been thinking about this poem describing cults primarily because of how the tongues use words to spin colors into a “white shield.” Flexible tongues take a diversity and oversimplify it; they hide behind purity. Some of the most powerful demagogues seem to have control over life, seem to be impervious to pain. They sell an extremist vision under a guise of happiness.

I guess that’s why young people getting more cultish disappoints me. Being young should generally mean being skeptical of “it’s too good to be true” promises. Granted, there’s always going to be some who overreact to an injustice and demonstrate how powerful credulity can be. But the poem’s setting before the third stanza captures my feeling about how the young I’m around are thinking. They’re not really concerned with justice. They know who’s wrong and they think they know the way to happiness. They have the answers people 60 years older think they have, except people 60 years older HAVE to think they have those answers. There’s no time for skepticism then, and even some of the most dogmatic elderly find ways of remembering they don’t know everything, that showing generosity, patience and tolerance are the true signs of inner strength.

“Small things,” on my reading, are children and valuables we can so easily pass over. They are attacked by both man and fortune; the worst fundamentalisms exist to annihilate them utterly. There’s no stopping and smelling roses, watching birds, or reading books that someone of a different race or creed wrote. All things incompatible with the Truth must be purified, including genuine innocence. Credulousness is made the virtue of obedience, of loyalty. That’s our world: throwing out pleas for open-mindedness, justifying wholesale slaughter as strength. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that Madison’s “factions” can collapse into cults in any number of circumstances. What’s so stunning nowadays is how that can happen when we have everything, how we can decide that the most vulnerable and least accepted are somehow worthy to be burned.

Tom Pickard, “anabatic”

poetry

anabatic (from Poetry)
Tom Pickard

at first they recce,
      easy,
around the edge of  breath

then gathered gangs unleash
and breach

but the wind has no objective,
riding the slope of my roof

Comment:

Recently, a lot of discussion about class and inequality. From what little I’ve glanced, the data on the subject is strange. It may not be the case that inequality hurts economic growth; we can certainly see that getting more (by implication: some have less) can be an incentive for productivity. And no one is saying that things should be perfectly equal. But I don’t know how much the data can actually help one know whether there is a problem or not. The effects of inequality are political and immediate. If you feel marginalized, you necessarily have to work from your gut and less with the data.

“Your gut,” in this case, would have two rather strong propositions working for it. First, “meritocracy” in its pure form is unjust in some ways. When you tie people’s worth to merit, you don’t just push others aside for a task or reward. You cut off their opportunities to do anything worthwhile. Since we don’t run a pure meritocracy, things can get worse. People get to the top and then find ways of rigging things slightly in their favor. Those small advantages turn into the biggest gains especially if all other things are equal. We continually exaggerate how little others work in our own minds to justify ourselves.

I think this poem speaks to another proposition/problem. That starts from this question: do we know what we want? Like birds who perform reconnaissance of a sort (“recce”), we dance a bit, in a way huddling together. “Around the edge of breath:” not just that the birds are within each other’s breath, but maybe the speaker’s breath is visible, leading his line of sight to the birds.

So maybe the birds are getting ready to escape winter. That is a necessary good which would aid them all. They gather, unleash their force, breach the wind and fly. It sounds like they’ve harnessed their power for an end. It should impress.

Instead, the speaker muses that “the wind has no objective / riding the slope of my roof.” The wind has to carry those birds to a degree; it is a mark of guidance. The speaker sees it as “riding the slope of my roof,” as something other than a construct. We’re back to the famous nature/convention distinction, with survival and fortune for the birds holding court in “nature.” Those birds are powerful, free, together and still have quite a trek ahead of them.

The poem refuses to romanticize this. It focuses on the simplicity of rising (“anabatic”), how one is almost inebriated for a moment with power. It’s natural and at the same time not something that might achieve anything for the creature involved.

Going back to class and inequality: we try to conceive of merit abstractly. There are people with higher SAT scores, businesses that make more money, values that achieve goods. But merit is defined with regard to specific ends; it’s not quite a general ability. And, regarding our survival or our good, we don’t really know what we need or even what means are available at a specific time. That might be the best libertarian argument, that a market has to flourish in order to get a diversity of goods and services for a number of needs. But it is undercut by the lack of respect given to the very concept of equality; those goods and services need to actually get to people. The birds speak to a natural equality that our conventionality never properly accounts for. It would be nice to hear people respect each other for trying.