Category Archives: poetry

Kay Ryan, “Chop”

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Chop (from Poetry)
Kay Ryan

The bird
walks down
the beach along
the glazed edge
the last wave
reached. His
each step makes
a perfect stamp–
smallish, but as
sharp as an
emperor’s chop.
Stride, stride,
goes the emperor
down his wide
mirrored promenade
the sea bows
to repolish.

Comment:

I was at a sports bar tonight and I couldn’t do a thing there. Everyone came in with their group and no one was particularly prone to saying hi or sharing a conversation with strangers. The bartenders were these gorgeous women with tattoos, and the tattoos were elaborate enough to be conversation starters. Emphasis on “start,” as there wasn’t much of a middle or end.

So let’s talk about our speaker in this poem. She’s watching a bird walk – maybe there’s a bit of a waddle? – down the beach. She gives us three sentences about this. In the first sentence, she mentions “bird” and “beach,” but elaborates that the last wave created a “glazed edge” upon which the bird walks along. In the second sentence, she talks about the footprints this bird makes as he steps. They are perfect stamps, “sharp as an emperor’s chop.” You can read about chops here; they are official stamps that were as good as a signature of the emperor. In the third sentence, she talks as if the bird was the emperor, striding down a “wide mirrored promenade” belonging to him, repolished by an obedient sea.

Okay then! This is already a step up from my bar conversation – the speaker is a crazy person with big ideas. As is always the case with Kay Ryan, her speaker’s imagery is “as sharp as an emperor’s chop.” A lot rests on “the glazed edge the last wave reached;” this is a mirror, sure, but a mirror created by the sea or ocean. It isn’t hard to stretch the idea of water a bit further and assert that no less than time reflects the bird, giving it back a perfect, even idealized image, maybe of itself. Ryan’s speaker does not say “mirror” initially. “A glazed edge” is literally a reflective line, and maybe even not a line. Where the ocean meets the earth is not clearly drawn or given, just like the present is nothing but what has passed turning into the future.

So what does it mean that Nature gives this little bird back a resplendent image of itself? (This has happened: it is origin of the poem.) That’s a bit tricky, but it’s easy to see that our notions of power start looking pretty pathetic. We create all this conventional machinery, rig up entire systems of belief and virtue, to give an Emperor the power he has. All that power, power over life and death, culminates in his stamp. And we go through even more elaborate lengths to make sure that stamp looks perfect, like the power of God has made itself manifest. And here’s a small bird with small steps making footprints that are just as good, if not better.

But the bird is obviously not waddling along the beach because it is powerful. It probably looks free. To be free is to be mirrored by nothing less than time, which stands outside you. The Emperor ultimately was crafted out of necessities to respond to necessities. His stamp leads to a world of even more conventions and all sorts of pointless pettiness. The bird makes stamps as it walks. It seems to do as it will in a world which exists around it. The bird points to the rest of the world, not just what is man-made with singular purpose. We can learn from the bird, maybe be truly governed by it.

Michael Donaghy, “The Whip”

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The Whip (from Poetry)
Michael Donaghy

After Lu Chi (261-303)

Sometimes your writing’s a soft tangle of subtleties
undercutting one another, blurring the paths
and you arrive at a washed out bridge or rockslide.
Leave it. Don’t try to end what’s finished.
The well aimed phrase is a whip, your poem a horse,
stamping and snorting and straining at the bit.
He wants to win as much as you do, and the whip
will serve better than a web of fine thoughts.
Just make sure you know when you’ve won.

Comment:

“Sometimes your writing’s a soft tangle of subtleties undercutting one another:” ok, um, I guess? That’s a problem which plagues much more talented writers, also known as “writers.”

In any case, the “soft tangle of subtleties undercutting one another” forms a landscape. The “soft tangle” blurs the paths and does so much more, as one wouldn’t “arrive at a washed out bridge or rockslide” otherwise. It’s not hard to imagine calligraphy alongside a natural scene in Chinese and Japanese art, but I wonder if we’re just talking about calligraphy itself, the style and shape of letters formed by our hand.

We’re urged to leave the landscape be. It’s finished. We can wander in it. Why are we trying to end it?

Ah, because of the way we normally use language: “The well aimed phrase is a whip, your poem a horse, stamping and snorting and straining at the bit.” We have a specific end in mind; we constrain and contort ourselves to make it. Still, that brings a lot of power into being, power that contrasts with the natural beauty of the “soft tangle.”

That power has a beauty of its own. It can garner honor and perhaps win us much more. Trained rhetoricians, all of us are:  “He wants to win as much as you do, and the whip will serve better than a web of fine thoughts.” We’re such good rhetoricians that we’ve created something – a horse – that will spur us that much more to our goal. Any doubts or second thoughts are eliminated by the project which takes us over.

“Just make sure you know when you’ve won:” one might be tempted to think a good poem is the balance between natural beauty and the power of the whip and horse. Certainly this poem has gotten its share of praise, and does have some very well aimed phrases. But we are left with a washed-out bridge and rockslide at the end. The primary takeaway is that whatever enterprise which allows us to wander our own thoughts has a value. No one said that “soft tangle” formed a poem, or anything crafted for an audience.

Hannah Stephenson, “How to Put This, Exactly”

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How to Put This, Exactly (from The Storialist)
Hannah Stephenson

Who is here in this body,
and who was here when the body was invented
by birth. Wailing baby, you will one day
walk in the snow alone, as an adult,
you will come to love those who are now
strangers to you, there will be numbers in your life
and cats and laundry. The bravest thing you will do
will happen one day, and then that day will end,
and here come the years all rushing in at you.
Sometimes we know this and sometimes we don’t.

Comment:

I’ll admit it. When the word “soul” first came up studying ancient thought, I winced. It seemed already loaded with religion and traditionalism and pseudoscience. It felt like a way of telling me what to think.

But in order to take older works seriously, you do have to examine the question of soul, and it does reveal itself in ways a fairly secular concept. It ties to an inquiry driving ancient and medieval science: How do we recognize life, exactly? The question twists and turns until we get to ourselves. The soul seems to be responsible for our motion as well as our rationality. How exactly those two things add up, well.

“How to Put This, Exactly” is a beautiful statement of soul. “Who is here in this body, and who was here when the body was invented by birth.” We know you will be or should be something. That’s not our arbitrary expectation, or even our hopes. That’s the fact of you. You always were there, present with us. The soul does exist, and is somewhat alien from the body.

We adults can wonder at the cosmos unveiling itself before us at a child’s birth, but can we say anything to the child about what we feel? Besides pinching cheeks and making kissy faces? We can say something about how life unfolds, how a human being, perhaps, comes to know himself:

Wailing baby, you will one day
walk in the snow alone, as an adult,
you will come to love those who are now
strangers to you, there will be numbers in your life
and cats and laundry.

From walking in the snow and all its implications – loneliness, dealing with adversity – Stephenson moves to loving and learning to be comfortable (“numbers,” “cats,” “laundry”). It feels like a prophecy declaring happiness within reach. What stands out for me is a tension between loving and “numbers.” The rest of the poem speaks to this tension. Does the length of time we live define us, or something else? Usually we talk about virtues being central to our identity, but Stephenson couches this carefully:

The bravest thing you will do
will happen one day, and then that day will end,
and here come the years all rushing in at you.

Again, the drama of this poem is that we’re trying to tell the baby about our euphoria. We’ve said everyday experience can involve love and comfort: you can love and be comfortable, maybe even be loved. What is clear now is that the child at some point has to recognize the importance of these things. Something amazingly brave will be done – one is part of a miracle or something that should be a miracle – and the day doesn’t stop. There’s not one pause, no honor calling you a saint, no “achievement unlocked.” Just like the moment a parent imagines an infant a man in full, there will be a moment where you’ve feel you’ve seen it all – maybe you do know it all – and the virtue you displayed is meaningful only for you.

The “bravest thing you will do” is the catalyst for appreciating life for what it is. The virtue pulls us back to “numbers,” but more importantly “cats and laundry.” In a way, being brave enough to live is life. The whole poem is a prayer of sorts: “Sometimes we know this and sometimes we don’t.” It doesn’t really matter if the kid knows to reflect to find what’s important. As long as she takes the trust given her and tries with it, she’ll learn.

George Szirtes, “Tritina”

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Tritina (from The Rotary Dial)
George Szirtes

Every morning they waited for the postman.
They talked and fretted, or would go for a walk,
examine their nails or fetch something from the cupboard.

Even when there was nothing in the cupboard
it filled the time between rising and the postman
whose steps they listened for, recognizing his walk

on the gravel drive. There was nothing but the postman.
There was always the waiting, and the long walk
up the hill. There was always the talking and the cupboard,

as if the postman could walk straight through the cupboard.

Comment:

At least for me, the drama is in the ambiguity of the details. “Every morning they waited for the postman:” who waited? Were they together? Were they separate? What exactly do they want?

We don’t know any of this. All we can sense is an anticipation that commands. “They” – maybe we – are dependent on it daily. The talking and fretting, going for a walk, examining nails, fetching things from the cupboard – all of this isn’t just frustration. It’s a routine which they actually want, one defining life.

It’s strange to say that. What if the postman delivers something which ends the routine? Isn’t all that’s missing for these people some kind of satisfaction? I don’t think the poem allows such a resolution: “There was nothing but the postman.” One can say I’m taking this out of context, as that is how it felt while these people waited. The whole poem is in the past; the sentiment animating it has disappeared. Of course the postman could give these people their deliverance! It’s just that he isn’t doing so at the time this poem presents.

Or he’s giving something unsatisfactory, perhaps because the desires of the recipients are malformed. Which brings us to my original point, that the frustration is not a mere side product of what they want. “Talked and fretted” is an attempt at human interaction. It fails. Going for a walk corresponds to trying to leave the situation. It fails. Looking at one’s nails? This is just passing time. That fails too. And fetching something from the sometimes empty cupboard attempts to substitute whatever the cupboard holds with what the postman brings. Again, a failure.

What the postman represents is fulfilling human interaction. What he needs to bring can take the place of others, our continual searching and scrutinizing, and even our material wants. The thing is that completely fulfilling human interaction is impossible. We don’t just take another in like we do oxygen or a steak. We’re at a distance from everyone, so much so that sometimes the best thing we can do for another is fight with them or stop communicating entirely. We see the outlines of a love poem, perhaps. One could imagine this poem being about a couple that had kids. Not seeing each other as anything but the necessity of daily existence, they’re hoping to hear back from their progeny. Even if they do, nothing is going to be good enough, and not for the simple reason that a lot of parents are crabby when older.

Again, the frustration is one that’s wanted. Unless communication occurs that makes the unreal real, nothing will satisfy. Just like steps can be heard which indicate exactly what is going on, the arrival of a true letter is the making of a new day (“long walk up the hill”). The postman walking straight through the cupboard encapsulates this logic. One wants to know another can be part of them literally, and is not content to merely hear. Nothing less than complete unity will suffice.

Fourth Reflection: Sappho, “And I said / I shall burn…”

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And I said / I shall burn…
Sappho (tr. Mary Barnard)

And I said

I shall burn the
fat thigh-bones of
a white she-goat
on her altar

Comment:

And in that flame I realized all the will’s effort, all my pain, would be released long before any relief in front of the fire. There would be nothing, still nothing, at that moment.

The funny thing was visualizing it in an imagined pledge. The younger me would have rejoiced in the prospect of sacrifice. Surely the gods would not deny me! Making the greatest sacrifice, calling in a favor: all of this would testify to my devotion to god and her.

The older me understood the trap. I wasn’t really being seduced by the idea that the god had done me favors and could be used accordingly. That was the fundamental problem, sure, but it had a number of complications which branched out into my moral reasoning. Wouldn’t I be ungrateful if were given before and didn’t ask now? Shouldn’t I try if something is truly good for me? Maybe faith is making a decision and saying consequences be damned.

The older me knew that more would burn than the goat if I pursued too fully, too soon. The same thought that leads to trusting providence, the want of the good, can lead one to find the smaller goods for oneself and others. It can lead to a deeper trust that what matters most will make itself available in time. The necessity of the good can impel one to love too strongly. But awareness of goods as necessary can cause one to hold back a bit, maybe learn to trust.

Hannah Stephenson, “Painting”

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Painting (from The Storialist)
Hannah Stephenson

Pull the vines away from the brick
Move the hair that obscures one eye

There is a thing we see and paint
can help to chase it

What is within green What is within
oil paint What is within the hand

In a vow, a search boat
In every hour of sleep, a dark box

Sing the way the artist does
since you will never hold

completely the thing you are sure
you almost see

Comment:

We want to see more, to unearth something. The imperatives of the first stanza, “pull,” “move,” are the things we keep telling ourselves. There’s a funny thing about seeing well. Sometimes, you first start clearing up the fault in external objects (“vines away from the brick”) and then you’re moved back to your own sight (“the hair that obscures one eye”). How do you even know how to see – let alone what you want to see – if you haven’t been seeing properly from the start?

Seeing isn’t something we do as much as we try to do. “There is a thing we see” speaks to the vagueness of needing both images and reality. That paint helps to chase the thing shows we’re committed to the trying. We want to move.

Maybe we can capture an important bit of self-knowledge if we talk about our motion toward objects we create.

Hah. That movement is internal in the worst way. From examining a color (“green”) we move back to its material cause (“oil paint”) and then its effective cause (“hand”). We’re moving back to something, but the external world is splintering and the internal world only has consistency in darkness. “What is within the hand,” what prompted us to paint, is a “vow” we made. Oh great: what’s consistent for us is that we’re like a boat with a light on a dark sea, and that’s inside our heads when conscious. When unconscious, the head is a dark box.

So let’s give up on images for a second. (Btw, very roughly, h/t Nathaniel Cochran & Jacob Klein: Classically, there’s “being” and “image.” A being should have a corresponding image, but good luck matching those two up. What typically happens is that we talk about images and confuse one image for another. To simply put images together in the right categories – well, one might have to be a philosopher.) Let’s just sing. We all paint, and we’re not really painting other objects. Let’s sing ourselves, as it is ourselves we don’t hold completely, ourselves we’re almost seeing.

Why read poetry? – 2/20/14

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for Rose Latimer

1. When I was younger, I attempted to get into poetry twice. The first time was from frustration. Poems were hard, as it wasn’t clear where to start, let alone figure out what they meant. Why did I care? Nothing to do in school than try to feel smarter than everyone else, I guess.

I do remember in sophomore year of high school a class discussion of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” It wasn’t a good discussion. Here’s the poem, if you want to try your luck:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Yeah, it’s pretentious. Snobby-sounding, like it requires accompaniment by a hundred dollar bottle of wine and Faberge eggs. At 16, what did I know? That the “Metro” was the Paris subway was new to me. I was told this was “Imagism,” and I got that the rough idea was simply presenting an image and letting it speak for itself. I doubt the utility of this exercise makes itself felt.

But back then, I just thought it was neat. You could keep trying to interpret it, imagining different scenarios. Maybe the speaker was in a train, passing the platform. The faces would be indistinct, the blur of passing things by might resemble a flowery branch. That sort of works, but not really. It doesn’t seem to tell anything, and it doesn’t make full use of the details the poem provides.

So let’s try the details. The speaker observes a crowd in the subway, seeing their faces as one “apparition.” Those faces unite, but it’s something ghostly, perhaps even dead. Are they all wearing much the same thing? Going to and from work? If those things are the case, their natural individuality is buried – no, maybe flooded, maybe about to be washed away.

2. I read that poem around 16. Then I didn’t do anything with poetry until college. There was a girl I wanted to impress, so I started reading poetry to try and improve my writing. This failed miserably, but it introduced me to Yeats. Yeats’ “Aedh wishes for Cloths of Heaven” was an easy, eloquent, powerful read:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

I still think this is unmatched as a love poem. Of course, I tried to imitate it, struggling to craft sentences with as much emotion, and the result was a number of journals that need to be burned. But the exercise was not entirely fruitless, as I read much more of Yeats. It dawned on me that Yeats, through his words, probably had the ability to romance anyone, and in a way it was an utter failure: see “The Wild Swans of Coole.”

I kept going back to poetry from then on to see experience encapsulated. People took the time to record their experiences and thoughts in verse. It didn’t feel like they were trying to be clever or pretentious, not at all. What I thought they were trying to do was give us a moment, a recollection, worth thinking through and talking about. That giving them an audience could actually be helpful to me – that was an added bonus.

There’s a method for reading poetry I used to preach (see Shakespeare, Sonnet 73), but not so much anymore. All I want to do is listen and read carefully; Lord knows I need to be a lot more patient. I’ve been running into a lot of students lately who are eager to share their theories and views on the whole of things. I’ve been pretty good about listening to them, but I wonder sometimes whether they actually listen to anyone else.

Robert Bly, “A Late Spring Day in my Life”

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A Late Spring Day in my Life (from Poetry)
Robert Bly

A silence hovers over the earth:
The grass lifts lightly in the heat
Like the ancient wing of a bird.
A horse gazes steadily at me.

Comment:

“A silence hovers over the earth” – all is still, for a moment. No speaking, no noise, but if a sound erupts it will be everything. Silence is as if one has to listen.

“The grass lifts lightly in the heat” – there is silence because something else has made itself present. The slight lifting of the grass, the slight warmth: hinting at ruah, the breath of God at Creation? It seems too large a claim at this point (though: “hovers over the earth”), but…

“like the ancient wing of a bird” – in Greek depictions, the Sphinx has wings (constant in other depictions: lion body, man’s head). The odd word out is “ancient:” why was this detail added? It suggests the whole poem is about origins. The Sphinx leaves with “What is man,” leaving the answer to a riddle a riddle.

“A horse gazes steadily at me” – oh, what a strange creature is man! What has been out of place the whole time is the speaker himself.

So is this poem convincing? Does wondering where you are late in life really have overtones of Oedipus? Or does that horse happen to stare a lot? This seems less tragic, less pathetic, more comic. Not that the reflection isn’t serious – it is, and it has important consequences, as the speaker is wondering who he is in the world, what his existence means. But maybe, just maybe, the most important things don’t need the most serious approach.

Third Reflection: Sappho, “Standing by my bed”

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Standing by my bed
Sappho (tr. Mary Barnard)

Standing by my bed

In gold sandals
Dawn that very
moment awoke me

Comment:

As I read more fragments of Sappho, I find some sort of link between the act of writing and eros. It’s tempting to read into these few words something more sexual than actually is there, but I don’t want to deny any such overtones completely.

Rather, I think what’s striking is the quietly natural image, personified. To be awoken by the light of dawn is the gentlest of actions. There is something sexual about it, sure, but it is a part of the idea that someone, maybe the whole of nature, sees you as beautiful. That you are not to be disturbed, that only the slightest feeling, in warm, bright degrees, should give you cause to stir.

The eros of writing, if I stretch this idea, is the revelation of self. But right now I’m thinking I probably would have had a few fancy things to say to a date yesterday.

Katherine Soniat, “Morning Child”

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Morning Child (from “The Swing Girl”)
Katherine Soniat

After our shadows joined hands
bringing out the dark, I was time

smoothing my palms across your
breathing face. I traced tales of cloud

shapes until you believed in sleep.
You slept, waking at dawn for me

to give the day a name. I was Monday
full of roles and hours full of light.

You kept a corral for the sun, rode it every
moment it could stay. It was always time

to crack open the world – the second spring
of a reindeer, rubbing trees and gladness

forming in your head.

Comment:

Was browsing at Half Price Books, floored by this. The most beautiful picture of my mother is her holding a baby me and a plastic shopping bag. It’s not easy to remember in detail. Is it a Polaroid? I feel like it’s winter and we’re both bundled up, but I can’t be sure. I’m probably not looking at the camera. What I do remember is the smile emerging out of a mess of a picture: what shines through the picture is her sheer joy.

I wonder about the power of such memories. We’re talking about memories of memories in the above case. Is the speaker affected by a similar issue? She certainly seems to be remembering her love of a child, and her recounting has overtones of both tenderness and darkness. Cf. the first stanza:

After our shadows joined hands
bringing out the dark, I was time

The dark shadows join hands, “bringing out the dark.” The multiplicity of obscurities ultimately testifies to the reality that cast them, the memories that struggle to overcome and know themselves. No wonder the speaker calls herself “time.”

This is more than a vision. Since the love sounds so maternal, I will refer to the speaker as “Mother.” Mother and child joined hands, exited the cold dark. Mother warmed up child, gave her fantastic tales to allow her to rest:

smoothing my palms across your
breathing face. I traced tales of cloud

shapes until you believed in sleep.

The “shadows” become more concrete, more specific. The drama of the poem resides in the imagery, which is very subtle. We went from shadows to things actually touched. Then we went to the tracing of cloud shapes, which was fantastic speech. As both moving and unreal at the same time, it implies the problem of shadows. Are we condemned to loving what is obscure? To what must flee?

Not quite, for it all adds up another way. “Shadows,” “time,” the implied cold, “cloud.” Mother and child are not just awaiting day. They are making the day itself:

You slept, waking at dawn for me

to give the day a name. I was Monday
full of roles and hours full of light.

It’s crazy. The reciprocal love is the day itself, the first day after the Lord’s day. Normally we’d talk about love fleeting or being permanent. But love is also creative. Here, that time is finite means it can be personified. The older we are, the more we are aware of time. Because of that, our cherishing an innocent lover, one just thrilled to be in the world, merges us and them. It makes us their world, and it makes them detail that world, simultaneously finding and rejoicing. The speaker is time – Monday – possibility.

There is something like a permanence precisely because all things come to an end. We can be all things, and maybe only a child can truly experience that:

You kept a corral for the sun, rode it every
moment it could stay. It was always time

to crack open the world – the second spring
of a reindeer, rubbing trees and gladness

forming in your head.

What Mother sees that many parents forget and forget to believe in: the daring of the child. To ride the sun, to make the most of every moment, is awful hubris. It is hubris because for some reason, we have been given a cold darkness that we are not to make spring. We are to reside in that cold darkness and remember our mortality. Instead, the child brings spring with her. Reindeer spring away, she literally hugs trees, and the world melts. We’re a lot better at saying children are the future when they’re younger. Somehow, we miss this when they’re older, when they’re someone else’s child, when their joy should be infectious but we’re mourning the past as if it didn’t change everything, already.