I have not been keeping this blog up to date!  You may have noticed.

Anyway, here’s an annotation I wrote a little while ago about Lisa Jarnot’s book Ring of Fire.  I liked this book enough that I’m planning to buy a copy when the opportunity arises.  Right now I just have it from the school library.

(essay after the jump)

Annotation on Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire

Maybe it’s silly, but I found myself getting really annoyed with one of the blurbs on the back of this book.  I’m going to quote the whole thing, just to get it out in the open air of this white page.  “The remarkable poems in Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire seem to come to us out of some profound, yet distant, sadness.  Rising on wave after wave of near endless iteration, like a linguistic Mandelbrot set, they arrive in the long moment after loss as the signature and enactment of an initiation-the primal collision and redemptive force of breathing between the tensile structure of the poem and the frangible space of living.”  This lengthy sentence was written by someone named Patrick Pritchett, writing for Jacket Magazine.  I had to look up what a Mandelbrot set was, and also the meaning of frangible.  So I learned some new vocabulary.  And there’s something nice about a lengthy sentence when its construction holds together.  But there was just something in me that yearned for much simpler language.  And this promotional blurb on the back of the book just cannot, could never, live up to the pleasure I received from the language within the book.

And it’s Lisa Jarnot, after all, that I’m supposed to be writing about, not jacket filler on the back of a volume of her poetry.  So, let’s start with the opposite end of the book-the front cover, specifically the title.  As someone who is currently working on putting together a collection of poems, I know it does me good to look at how other poets have accomplished this task successfully.  Jarnot’s title is not only attractive, it is also a perfect introduction to her book.  I don’t know whether the poems came first, or the title, but I do know that the image of fire occurs repeatedly throughout the book, from beginning to end.  This repetition creates the “ring” of the book’s title.  A ring is something that circles back to its beginning, something in which the beginning and end come together.

One of the fire poems that I especially liked was “What In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?”  To start with, the title of this poem is absolutely fun to read and to say.  To read it out loud is to become the firelover, starter of fires.  Behind me, two candles burn atop a table.  The poem itself is a rich collection of fire images and stories of fires.  It starts in the space of the speaker’s memory, telling of the many instances of fires, whether small or large, that happen throughout a person’s life.  Fires are a universal human experience.  We could all list specific bonfires from our childhood, specific stoves or candles, a box of matches, a cigarette, perhaps even larger fires (a house, a wildfire) that scarred us, haunt us.  From the personal experience, the poem then moves outward, mentions Prometheus and other tales of fire in story and culture, general uses of fire.  It ends with the image of glass: “the way it starts from broken glass/ reflections, the way it melts sand into useful glass,/ the way it can be used to shape things into glass-shaped/ swans and other birds.”  The glass birds are a lovely way to end the poem.  It is as if the fire is taking flight.

Another lovely ending is the final poem of the book.  Its title, “The Specific Incendiaries of Spring,” brings the idea of fire in a new direction.  It makes me picture plants bursting into flower in the same way that a flame bursts forth.  Within the lines of the poem the image of kerosene is repeated, but so is the image of rain.  I like this experience of a new perception as the last poem in the collection.  Just like the glass birds in the previous poem I mentioned, it creates a sense of movement outward for the final idea, instead of a feeling of firm closure.  It’s the end of the book, but the book is still moving.  And this, again, supports the concept of the ring in the book’s title.  A ring is something that keeps moving, circling and circling.

So, in moving away from this book, even though I might still be spinning around its ring, I am hoping to take with me a lot of inspiration on how to put together a cohesive and successful collection of poetry, one that feels as if it was meant to be a whole.  I think I may have been fearing that too much repetition of an image or idea would become boring quickly.  But from this book I can see that repetition can be embraced.  I can trust my creativity and make it work for me to use repetition as a tool towards expansion of an idea and not just monotony.

Book: May Sarton’s collection of poetry A Grain of Mustard Seed. I mentioned this poem, the Invocation to Kali, before, back when I first bought the book. Well, I liked it so much that I ended up writing a whole annotation on it. And my enthusiasm seems to have come through in the essay, because my advisor responded by saying that she didn’t think she liked May Sarton, but now she wanted to get a copy of this book and read it for herself.

Fierce Poetry: May Sarton’s Invocation to Kali

“She comes to purge the altars in her way,

And at her altar we shall have to pray.”

I am beginning my annotation of May Sarton’s poem “The Invocation to Kali” with a quotation from the poem, because the poem itself begins with a quotation from Joseph Campbell’s book The Masks of God, and that quote drew me strongly into the poem when I first read it. Campbell’s words detail the goddess Kali’s existence as a being who is both constantly hungry and constantly giving birth, personifying the cycle of destruction and creation. Sarton has used the idea of this goddess to explore and struggle with the human tendency for amazing violence, specifically the concentration camps during World War II. The poem is composed of five sections, and in each one Sarton has chosen to write in a different poetic form. Both the length of the poem and the formal decisions feel very natural to the poem’s subject matter. It feels as though Sarton has chosen carefully in the creation of each of these sections, making sure that the poem has the time and space to move through its struggle at a natural pace and not be rushed or cramped. Each section’s tone and form feels natural to its content.

I was especially interested in Sarton’s decision to compose the third section of the poem, the one about concentration camps, in the form of a sestina. This is a difficult form, and many of the sestinas I’ve read before have felt forced and awkward. The ones I’ve tried to write myself have certainly been pretty bad! It’s an especially interesting choice for Sarton here, because it’s used in the central section of the poem—both physically and emotionally central. This is where the poem moves into specifics, where Sarton provides an example to support what she’s saying philosophically in the rest of the poem. I think the sestina succeeds here because its subject matter is so baffling and uncomfortable. The repetitive and circling nature of the form mirrors the way the human mind reacts naturally to horrible thoughts. The mind scurries and tries to escape or justify, but the awful images keep coming back. The whole poem is about this same truth—we cannot escape the fact that we do terrible things sometimes. We must come to terms with the existence of Kali, because we can’t have light without darkness.

The final section of the poem was also an interesting formal choice to me. After reading the rest of the poem, I was expecting another piece divided into even stanzas, probably with end-rhymes and standard line-lengths. Instead, the fifth section is composed in free verse. But again, Sarton’s interesting choice works perfectly within this poem. The move to free verse creates a sense of opening at the end, releasing the reader somewhat from the tension of the rest of the poem. This section also feels very much like a prayer, so it gives the feeling of being in a form without being as strictly formal as the rest of the poem. One could also say that this section is formal in the other sense of the word, that it has solemnity and dignity. Its language is elevated, and it is the first time that Kali is addressed directly in the poem: “Kali, be with us. / Violence, destruction, receive our homage.”

Finally, I just want to point out how fabulous this stanza from the first section is. Since it speaks of poetry, I feel that as a poet I have to give this stanza its due respect. I think these words can speak for themselves, therefore I am going to both begin and end this annotation with a quotation.

“I am the cage where poetry

Paces and roars. The beast

is the god. How murder the god?

How live with the terrible god?”

I love poetry that gives me a push. Here’s an annotation that I wrote about Lucille Clifton’s poetry. She’s a new and exciting delight to me, and I know I should have been reading her work a long time before I actually did.

The Strength of Lucille Clifton’s Voice
Lucille Clifton’s poetry is crafted with nearly no capital letters, yet almost standard punctuation. In reading her book Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, I was impressed with the consistency of this technique/style over the span of time, twelve years, and five collections of poetry that the book contains. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a strong sense of a single poet’s unique style and voice. It isn’t only the lack of capitalization that forms Clifton’s voice, of course, but the choice to write in mostly lowercase letters is an important choice. It is also a choice that blends with the other elements of Clifton’s voice to create a strong and unique poetry.
When Clifton does use capital lettering in her poems, of course, it stands out and demands the reader’s attention. I noticed this especially in the poem “my dream about the second coming.” This poem describes a strange new pregnancy for Mary, years after the first birth of Jesus: “mary is an old woman without shoes. / she doesn’t believe it. / not when her belly starts to bubble/ and leave the print of a finger where/ no man touches. / not when the snow in her hair melts away.” Even Mary’s name is left in all lowercase letters, which makes the last stanza of the poem all the more startling: “when Something drops onto her toes one night/ she calls it a fox/ but she feeds it.” It’s an almost unsettling sentence, because “something” is such a vague word, yet given so much importance by the capitalization. I like the animal feeling of the entire poem, too. It feels as if Mary is so old that she has forgotten everything except the instinct to feed what she gives birth to, whether it’s a fox or Something else.
The image of the fox seems to be another important element in Clifton’s poetry throughout the years. The above poem about Mary is from the collection “next,” published in 1988. The collection “The Terrible Stories,” published in 1996, contains a whole series of poems about foxes. One of these contains another unexpected use of capitalization. Titled simply “fox,” it begins with a quotation from Mary Oliver from her poem “Foxes in Winter”: “…The foxes are hungry, who could blame them/ for what they do?…” Clifton takes the phrase “who could blame them” and changes it to “who can blame her,” creating a single female fox, rather than a pack of foxes. This female fox thus becomes an individual, a character. She is described as hopeful, and she is also persistent: “and when she is not satisfied/ who can blame her for refusing to leave, / for raising one paw up and barking, / Master of the Hunt, why am i/ not feeding, not being fed?” The contrast of the capitalization in this poem is especially apparent because of the lowercase “i” that appears on the same line. This Master of the Hunt is obviously a powerful being, a god or a king, far more important than the poor little fox. But the fox stands up for her rights anyway, and stands as a symbol for the female spirit in general, and a symbol for any who are oppressed yet hopeful.
Lucille Clifton’s experiences as a black woman, and her voice for social justice in all realms, are just as central to her poetry as any stylistic choices. Perhaps I should say that these topics are even more central to Clifton’s voice than her style of writing about them. The powerful use of capitalization would have no reason to exist without an important topic to form around. Social justice poetry is something that I long to write well, but I don’t think that I can ever reach the level of Lucille Clifton. I love the image of the fox as a female spirit, something fierce despite its small size. Sharp teeth. A flavor of the trickster mythology.
I want to talk about one more poem with a significant use of capitalization. This poem, to me, seems to be all about the experience of womanhood. It comes from the same collection as the first poem I discussed, and follows the same format of an all-lowercase poem that startles the reader with a sudden capitalization at the end. This one is titled “my dream about time.” It begins, interestingly, with the line “a woman unlike myself is running,” and I say that this is interesting because of the word “unlike.” I almost slid over that word the first time I read this poem because I expected it to say “like,” and then I was startled to find that the word was in fact the opposite from what I’d expected. I think that this gives the poem a flavor of the universal. If Clifton can dream about a woman unlike herself, she can dream about all women, and write about them, too.
The poem gives the sense of womanhood as a difficult experience. The woman runs through the entire poem, and the words are strung together at a breathless pace to match her running. As in many dreams, the setting is a strange and frightening house “with too many windows which open on/ a world she has no language for.” The woman seems to be trapped in this house, an echo of the stereotype that a woman’s place is in the home. But it is the last image that is most chilling: the woman opens the only door that she can find and enters a room full of clocks “and as she watches/ all of the clocks strike/ NO.” How many times have women been told “no?” They are not allowed or not supposed to or not able to do what they want. The capitalization makes this word into a shout, a slap in the face. The reader is relieved to wake up from the dream that is the experience of this poem. But the reader cannot escape the memory of having read it, or forget the truth of the poem. Lucille Clifton’s poetry sticks with you.

A litany is a form of poetry that repeats and repeats, repeats and circles. I’ve been trying to make friends with it lately, both through reading and writing. Here’s a little annotation essay of mine on some of Joy Harjo’s litanies:

Exploring the Litany: Poetry by Joy Harjo

After reading Joy Harjo’s How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975-2001, I realized that I slightly regretted not choosing to read a single collection of Harjo’s poetry for this annotation, rather than a selected-poems volume, because the three poems that I had the strongest reaction to were all taken from a single one of Harjo’s books, She Had Some Horses. This is, of course, a signal that I need to find that book and read it in its entirety. And there were plenty of other lovely poems elsewhere in the compilation, so my time reading the whole volume was not at all wasted. Then I noticed another similarity between my three favorite poems-all three were heavy on repetition. Two of the poems, “Remember,” and “I Give You Back,” are both litanies, although the latter may be more accurately termed a modified litany. The third poem, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,” I wouldn’t call a litany, but rather a story told in a non-linear manner, with the use of circling and repetition. I want to focus here on the litany form, but keeping in mind that the way a litany makes use of repetition could be used in any sort of poem, to some degree.

A litany is more than just a list of repeated words and phrases; it is a form of repetition in which each new line increases a poem’s tension until the meaning and emotion of the poem reach a climax. Then the reader is released, feeling changed by the experience. Take the poem “Remember,” for instance. Already, with just the title, the reader’s emotions are engaged. Remembering is something we all do. Sometimes we fear to remember and sometimes we fear not to remember. The title puts the word in a form of a command, and this command is carried through the entire poem. The reader is instructed to remember whether or not she wants to. The poem is also framed by this word-it stands alone as the title, and it stands alone on the last line of the poem. Within this frame is the list of all that Joy Harjo wants her readers to remember. The list begins with a personal tone: “Remember the sky you were born under” and “Remember your birth, how your mother struggled/ to give you form and breath.” By the end, the ideas have expanded to the universal: “Remember you are all people and all people/ are you. / Remember you are this universe and this/ universe is you.” And perhaps one of the things that made this poem particularly memorable to me was the fact that it ended with the idea of language, and I love language. Joy Harjo says, “Remember the dance language is, that life is. / Remember.” And I do. I try to remember everything the poem has told me to remember, and I definitely remember the poem itself.

The other litany poem by Harjo that I wanted to explore, “I Give You Back,” also deals with something that all people experience, but this time it is fear rather than memory. This, of course, gives the poem a darker tone. And I think the darkness and heaviness of its subject matter is perhaps the reason that Harjo chose to modify the repeated phrases throughout the poem. Each place in the poem where there is a change gives the reader a chance to take a breath, to step back for a second, and then square her shoulders to go forward. The first repeated phrase of the poem is “I release you.” “I release you, my beautiful and terrible/ fear.” The phrase then changes briefly to “I give you back,” then returns to “I release you.” The first half of the poem concludes with “I release you” repeated four times.

Next, there is an eight-line stanza where each line begins with the phrase “I am not afraid.” This feels like a natural change; it is logical that someone who has released her fear would not be afraid. The last line of this stanza, “I am not afraid to be loved.” is followed by a space break, and then the isolated line, “to be loved, to be loved, fear.” This line returns the reader’s attention to the fact that the poem is not just about the speaker, but it is about the speaker directly addressing her fear as a character, someone or something very close to her, her “beloved and hated twin.”

After this come three stanzas that bring the poem to its powerful conclusion. The use of repeated phrases to begin lines becomes less important in this part of the poem, but there are several instances of repeated sentence structures. And there is one use of repetition towards the end of the poem that I found especially poignant: “You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice/ my belly, or in my heart my heart/ my heart my heart.” The obsessive, punctuation-less repetition here shows clearly how emotional the speaker’s voice has become by the end of this poem.

The poem concludes with the words, “But come here, fear/ I am alive and you are so afraid/ of dying.” The speaker has moved all the way from releasing her fear to welcoming it back into her arms. But to me it does not feel like the way the poem ends is a betrayal of anything that was proclaimed earlier in the poem. Instead, I believe the speaker has realized that she is not afraid to be afraid, a significant realization. The use of repeated phrases in the litany style allowed Joy Harjo to elevate the emotional level of this poem, and by changing those phrases throughout the poem she allowed the speaker to have an epiphany. Although the poem may not be a true litany, it was my favorite of the two poems I’ve been discussing, and the one that affected me most.

I’ve put this photo I took of a covered bridge here because I’m posting (after the jump) an annotation I wrote about Eleni Sikelianos’s book, The California Poem, and since I’ve never been to California, I did some thinking about what her book would be like translated into Vermont language. Vermont is my home state. And Vermont is very proud of its covered bridges.

The California Poem Annotation: The Delights of Cross-Genre Literature

In The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos, the use of cross-genre/ multi-genre methods becomes a way for the boundaries of the work to expand beyond the words on the page, beyond the bindings of the book, and beyond the reader’s expectations. There is a feeling of extreme largeness to this book; this largeness is necessary for the book to be true to the largeness (in both size and personality) of its subject, the state of California. Reading The California Poem, I got the feeling that Sikelianos would have included, if it were possible, singing voices broadcast from between her pages, the smell and temperature of a Pacific Ocean breeze, and hands that could reach out to touch or pinch or tickle me. But of course these things aren’t really feasible in a book made of paper and ink, so instead there are words that flow across the pages in a manner that feels kin to Walt Whitman, and these words are supplemented with collages, photographs, reproduced postcards, and line drawings.

And the words themselves are not just in the form of expansive lines scattered across the pages, but also in quotations, charts, footnotes, endnotes. This could be termed scrapbook poetry, I think. Words, this book shows, can be a visual medium as well as a manifestation of language. As Sikelianos herself says about words in one poem, “RISE UP—–phonemes/ cum genomes, let/ language disintegrate, tiny/ technology in the compost heap; gumdrops; I mean/ our species; the ovicidal moonfish slips/ into Sirius, Canis Major-bright my words dive-/ bombing swallows angry at my hair & slip/ new gods// into the sky…” I’m not sure if I could dissect the exact meaning of those lines, but to me they create an impression of language as something organic, alive, and active.

To return to the idea of a scrapbook: I would define a scrapbook as something similar to a collage, a statement of self formed from fragments of both your own and other people’s creations. A scrapbook can draw from both the very personal and from the very public. A love letter next to a newspaper clipping, etc. So, too, with The California Poem. The book addresses both the author’s personal experience of the state of California and the public history and geology of the state. There is a photograph of the author as a child in 1972 and there is a photograph of earthquake damage in 1925. There are quotations from widely varying sources. Perhaps the inclusion of visual art is another sort of quotation. In any case, the effect is to tell the reader that this book doesn’t just have one thing to say-it has layers and layers of things to say. The inclusion of footnotes and endnotes especially supports this layering effect. And layers, of course, add to the book’s feeling of largeness.

I couldn’t help wondering, while reading this book about California, what a sister book about Vermont would be like, in the same style. I’ve never been to California, but I live in and grew up in Vermont, so it helped me in my attempt to understand Sikelianos’s techniques to imagine applying them to my own home and experiences. It seems to me that you have to truly know a place, to love it and to also know exactly what its dirt looks and smells like, to write a poem like this. What would a book-length Vermont poem be like? Just the idea of it half makes me want to write it right now. It would have to be packaged a little differently-a taller, narrower book to match the tall peaked roofs that Vermont houses have to shed snow in the winter.

The word Vermont comes from the French, means green mountains, which are really more like rolling hills. There’s a strong sense of shelter to this landscape. Perhaps the pieces of poetry would have to be smaller. It is not a land of extremes like California. No Death Valley here. Just narrow dirt roads to get lost on. And I don’t know much about the native Americans who lived here before European colonization, the Abenaki. I would have to learn more about them, and also refresh my memory of the revolutionary war history. Samuel de Champlain. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. Whereas California has the gold rush, western expansion, a sense of horizon. There’s no connection to the ocean here in Vermont, just Lake Champlain, which is shared with New York. I think there was a campaign a few years ago to register Lake Champlain as one of the great lakes but I really feel that the lake is something else, some other special category of its own. There’s legend of the Champlain monster, “Champ” or “Champie.” In the winter most of it freezes over. And I imagine the winter landscape here in Vermont as having something kin with haiku. The snow as a blank page, and the bare trees as brushstrokes forming characters forming poems. And the people of Vermont are different from the people of California, or at least I’m lead to believe so from movies. Hollywood. Vermonters see themselves as independent. Stoic, resourceful. The importance of privacy. The state motto is “freedom and unity.”

But I am starting to write that Vermont book right now, which isn’t necessary. What I meant to say was that looking at my own state as if it were the main character of a book-length poem helped me to understand Eleni Sikelianos’s undertaking. The California Poem is something quite impressive and enjoyable to read, all the more so because of all the directions it draws its material from.

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been travelling and I’m on a break from school at the moment, but I have this one last annotation that I wrote for this past semester that I hadn’t posted yet, so here it is!  It’s on Carol Guess’s book The Femme’s Dictionary.  This book, according to my advisor, was supposed to be my “candy” at the end of the semester, something fun and refreshing after all the hard work, my dessert.  It was good, but it wasn’t my favorite thing of the semester.  Anne Carson has to take that place!

Of course, I have lots of other thoughts on writing and gardening and life, etc., and I do want to get back to posting more regularly.  But for now, here’s Carol Guess:

Dealing with Cliché Head-on

            The title of Carol Guess’s book The Femme’s Dictionary sends me right into the confusing land of lesbian slang and queer terminology in general.  I’m a lesbian, and I’ve had plenty of thoughts and conversations about the butch/femme dynamic, trying to explore and understand these words that were presented to me as I became aware of my sexuality.  Once you “come out” to the world, there’s a huge expectation for you to apply labels to yourself.  Queer.  Bi.  Gay.  Questioning.  Butch.  Bull.  Femme.  Top.  Bottom.  Lipstick Lesbian.  Etc.  This book, calling itself a dictionary, could be placed in my hands just to explain all that.  But am I a femme, and is this my dictionary?  I am female, and happy to be so, but I don’t necessarily define myself by how feminine I am.  I don’t wear makeup.  Where does this place me between butch and femme, and is this book meant to speak to me?

            Of course, these terms “femme” and “butch” and all the rest are clichés, oversimplifications of a spectrum that really exists only in a very nebulous way, describing only small parts of a person’s entire personality.  Carol Guess is perfectly aware that these words are overused and limiting.  She uses them in this book not at the level of their cliché value, but at the level of a conversation with cliché.

            I would say that Guess’s method of interacting with overused words and ideas is a very reliable technique for the creation of quality in politically-charged or politically-motivated poetry.  What she does is to turn each cliché completely inside out.  Instead of stating any kind of message or opinion overtly, which would have forced her to use tired language-to adopt some of the very words that she’s at the same time attempting to dissect-she creates poems completely out of images.  This doesn’t sound revolutionary as I’m describing it here, but it works wonders to create complex, sometimes confusing, but always interesting poems with real people as characters rather than the flat, paper people of a cliché.  Speaking as a reader, these poems are a bit of a challenge, but in a very good way.  As I read through the surprising and complex imagery of each poem, moments of understanding felt treasure-like, the effort of considering a poem’s images was rewarded with a feeling of discovery.

            The poem “Which One of You is the Man?” is an excellent example.  It titles itself with one of lesbian culture’s frustratingly-overused ideas.  This is a question that I’ve personally been asked multiple times.  Sometimes the question comes sarcastically, implying something invalid about a same-sex relationship.  Sometimes it has come with genuine curiosity from a person trying to understand how two women can function as a couple.  In both cases my standard answer has become to say that there is no man.  We’re both women.  That’s kind of the point of the whole idea of being a lesbian culture.  I feel a sense of annoyance just typing those sentences, though, and I’m certain that my annoyance would show up very clearly if I tried to write a poem with that same title.

            Carol Guess’s poem does not seem annoyed to me at all.  But I suppose the one thing it has in common with my response to the man question is that it refuses to answer that question at face value.  The question implies that only “A” or “B” are possible answers.  To which I said, crudely, “neither,” and Guess says, beautifully, “I’ve seen a tie undo itself/ because it felt the pulse of her throat/ and admired the precarious math of human life.”  This is a powerful image because it hints at the idea of the cliché-a necktie is a strong symbol in our society of the man, the businessman, the holder of power.  But in the poem it is clear that the wearer of the tie has power over it as an object, and then the tie removes itself, leaving the wearer free to be simply human.

            Later in the poem the speaker brings in another of our culture’s favorite ideas about manhood.  That is, that the man is dominant in every way, right down to being the person on top while a couple is having sex.  Guess gives this idea its own question in the poem: “Which one of us lies/ on top of the other, steering until pleasure/ feels simple, because detached from choice?”  Asking more questions is another way to avoid answering that first question.  And not giving an answer to a question can be a way of saying that the answer doesn’t matter.  The poem does not state which one, A or B, lies on top and steers, because to answer would be to give value to the initial question.

            The images of the necktie and the embrace of sex, although not giving in to cliché, are at least examples of images that have associations with the idea of manhood.  But there are other places in the poem where the images are completely unrelated to that cliché, and this gives a whole new layer to the poem’s response to the title question.  The first line of the poem says, “The flecked eye of a fish is a window.”  This is a surprising idea on its own, and its position at the beginning of the poem gives it even more power to surprise.  This is the sort of thing I was talking about when I described Guess’s poetry as sometimes challenging.  Because it’s confusing.  What does a fish have to do with any of this?  And what is the eye a window to?  But Guess follows this with other images of food animals (cows, and hearts for sale at the grocery store), and images of seeing inside things.  This creates not a simple answer, but a structure in which I can find my own meaning within the poem.  Something about humanity and life trumping any question of gender.

            I’m very impressed with Guess’s success in this book, her ability to move so far away from the questions asked by cliché, and yet still sort of answer them in her own way.  The poem I’ve just discussed did give me a message, but it was a very personal one, and it didn’t force any opinion on me.  On the following page sits a poem with the title “But You Two Girls Don’t Have the Right Equipment,” a placement that bolsters the message of the first poem.  I just hope that when I set out to write about things that are politically important to me, maybe even some of these same subjects that Guess tackles in this book, that I can do it with as much power and subversion of the expected.

This photo is of an oddly-shaped carrot that I bought at the farmer’s market.  Not only was it interesting to look at, it was also very crisp and tasty!  But I’m not posting it here right now because of its flavor.  I decided to use this photo for this blog post because a lot of people told me the carrot looks like a hand.  A witch hand, perhaps.  And the following annotation on a poem by Rilke is also somewhat focused on strange hands.

“One of the Old Women”

I keep coming back to this one poem of Rainer Maria Rilke’s in the volume The Unknown Rilke, translated by Franz Wright. I keep returning to this poem because I don’t understand it, but it has enough interesting images in it that I want to understand it, so I read it over and over again. It’s not the kind of nonsensical poem that the mind just slides over without being caught by anything. Instead, it feels almost like there’s a part of me that does understand the poem, does draw meaning from the strange characteristics of the old woman, but the part of me that understands isn’t a part of me that my conscious mind is fully in touch with.
 

This is one of those situations where I wish that I was multilingual and could read the poem in its original language. If I could do that, I could weigh other possible translations of the words that attract and confuse me: “the enigma of their scabs,” “the hand, secretly waiting.” Unfortunately, I only speak English, and a little Spanish, so I have to make do with what I have-this one translation-to try to figure out why this poem attracts me so much. Perhaps also to try to understand the poem’s overall meaning, but I’m ok with having lingering questions about that. I do want to know about that secretly waiting hand though.
 

Starting at the beginning of things, I can at least pinpoint why the title makes me stop at this poem when I’m flipping through the book. It’s because, in general, I like the idea of old women. I will myself one day be an old woman, and I hope also that there’s still some lingering cultural respect for our elders, the wisdom of the crones, etc. And this title makes it clear that there are lots of old women, not just one. The subject of the poem is a single one of them, but the title implies that there are whole flocks of such women wandering the streets of Paris, where the poem is set, and the phrasing of the poem continues throughout to describe them in multiple.
 

I think perhaps that I have also managed to pinpoint why this poem gives me such a feeling of half-understanding it, even though I can’t quite verbalize exactly what it is that I think I understand. It’s because the poem is speaking to me directly! That is, this poem is written in second-person voice, and even contains a parenthetical aside to the reader in the first two lines: “(you know how that is, don’t you).” The only phrase that comes before this aside is “sometimes in the evening,” giving me, the reader, very little information with which to decide whether I actually do “know how that is.” But the speaker thinks I know. And these words, by addressing me directly, pull me into the poem.
 

So, suddenly I’m involved with this scene in which an old woman stops ahead of me on a Paris street, then coaxes me along beside “a building with no end.” When I read, in a poem, that something has no end I’m immediately vaulted into symbolic territory. And it may be due to that one line that I became so fixated on the meaning of this poem, and yet so uncertain. It seems possible that without that one line I might have viewed the poem as a description of an actual scene. But a building cannot be endless in real life, and knowing this I begin to see something beyond reality in the rest of the poem. Actually, this reminds me of an interesting statement in another one of Rilke’s poems in this book, “Walk at Night.” The two poems feel similar to me, although “Walk at Night” is much less image-centered than “One of the Old Women.” In it, Rilke says, “here a sudden brilliance or there a glimpse momentarily grazes us as if it were precisely that in which resides what our life is.” I think that “One of the Old Women” has grazed me, and now I’m trying to grasp what it says about what my life is.
 

And there are these few images in it that stand out to me with huge importance. First, there is the “enigma of their scabs,” which is one of the elements the old women use to coax you (me) along beside that strange eternal building. This stands out to me because scabs are such an unpleasant thought; whether they’re from some illness or from wounds, they’re not a symbol of health. So what is it about them that has a power of attraction enough to pull you (me) to follow the old woman? Maybe this question itself is the enigma. The woman is shabby and somehow unpleasant, yet fascinating at the same time. Why?
 

Then there’s the strange hand that the old woman hides somewhere within her layers of clothing. In the poem it sounds almost as if she has an extra, mutant hand, just for the purpose of keeping hidden “secretly waiting in back of and under their collar, longing for you.” The longing of this hand has an echo of motherhood. I picture it curled at the woman’s breast. But the most interesting thing about it is the specific idea Rilke gives to the hand’s desire: “longing maybe to wrap up your hands in some piece of paper they’ve saved.” Hands are sensitive, active things. In this poem, and in general, they are a point of connection between two people. And I immediately thought that the scrap of paper in the poem had to be the poem itself. Since this phrase is the end of the poem, I’m left with a feeling of circularity. The poem has reached out its strange old woman’s hand and wrapped itself around my own hands. I’m not sure exactly what to do with it, this scrap of paper, this poem, but I can’t put it down.

It’s snowing pretty heavily outside, which actually looks quite lovely, despite the fact that I’ve had enough of winter.  But the snow is a sleepy, peaceful, pure sort of image, so I’ll take it for now.  I’ll take it and let it guide me to a warm place in the bed and a nap under cozy blankets while that bluish light sifts into the room.  Yeah, I couldn’t sleep again last night.  But I’m sleepy now. 

After the jump: an annotation on Franz Wright’s book Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems.  And discussion of an insomnia poem.  You can read it while I’m snoozing.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: Franz Wright’s Flavor

            To show you how close Franz Wright’s poetry struck to my bones, I present to you the final poem from his collection Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems, and I inform you that I read this poem in the early hours of the morning after a night of insomnia, right at that time when the sky slowly loses its darkness outside the living room windows.

“First Light”

It’s raining

in a dead language.

The empty house filled with the sound

of your name

abruptly whispered,

once,

before you finally slept.

            So, in some ways, this feels like a poetry that I could have written myself.  Certainly, this particular poem feels that way, except that these are Wright’s words, not mine.  For instance, I doubt it would have occurred to me to use the word “abruptly.”  I probably would have said “suddenly” or perhaps nothing at all, letting the timing of the whisper be described only by the title and the last line.  I respect “abruptly,” though, and it is a decent indicator of what Wright’s poetry is like compared to my own-a little rougher.  More abrupt, even.

            My experience of reading this poem about sleeplessness while experiencing sleeplessness myself makes a nice anecdote, and easily illustrates why I felt an instant connection to Wright’s poetry, but there’s a lot more to my experience of this book that isn’t so easily reduced to anecdote.  And it comes back to that sense of instant familiarity.  The thing is, I’m not used to entering a book of poems exclusively through its subject matter.  My education has trained me to experience poetry from the angle of craft, appreciating word choice, line breaks, rhyme, imagery, symbolism, structure, etc. with subject being just one element out of many.  But some of Franz Wright’s poems engaged my emotions so quickly that they circumvented the education-formed section of my thoughts, and I was left feeling but not necessarily understanding. 

            Reading this book, I was constantly forced to ask myself whether my reaction to a poem was just because I empathized strongly with its subject matter or whether it was due to Wright’s treatment of that subject matter.  Did Wright’s poetic craft make the emotions sharper, more universal, heightening the intensity of any basic factual similarities between my own life and the events in the poems, or did Wright’s craft have little to do with my reading experience?  Or, in other words, was I affected by something simple or by something complex?  And since my emotions were engaged, I found it that much harder to look at these poems objectively.  At the end of each one I felt a haze, a sense of things slipping through my fingers.  The emotion remained with me, but clarity about the elements of poetry I’d just experienced was lacking.

            Of course I know that it’s really impossible for me to read a poem without having a reaction to the way it’s put together as a poem.  Franz Wright has practiced craft in writing each poem in this book, and even if I can’t see it at first because I’m distracted by other things, that craft is still playing a part in my reading.  If these poems weren’t carefully crafted, then I would have noticed, jarringly, problems and inconsistencies and been ejected from the poems, frustrated.  This did not happen.  I remained engaged with the poetry throughout the book.  But to see and understand exactly how Franz Wright’s craft was keeping me engaged, I had to go back and look at a poem over again until I’d got over that initial emotional reaction that so clouded my intellectual capacities.

            Take that poem “First Light” for example.  My very first reaction to it was a shiver of self-recognition, almost a mystical experience, as if the poem had told my fortune.  If I’m remembering correctly, I think I focused on the idea of my name being called, and thought something about how the poem itself had sort of just called my name.  I would have said “ooooh” if there had been someone else in the room to talk to.  But as I re-read the poem in that moment, and again as I typed it out at the beginning of this annotation, I began to see the many things that Franz Wright had done to craft the poem in ways that went hand in hand with its subject matter to create my strong and vivid reaction.

            I’ve already mentioned the word “abruptly.”  There’s also the way the third line first hints at the sound of the rain, then connects to the sound of the name being whispered, creating an element of surprise.  There’s the way the word “once” stands alone on its own line, reinforcing its own meaning.  There’s the strange idea of the “raining in a dead language,” enough to engage the mind in many rich thoughts while seeking the meaning of that phrase.  And then the idea of the dead language connects to the speech later in the poem, the whisper of the name.  And the fact that the name is whispered rather than spoken.  I could go on.  And I could create similar lists for all the other poems in this book.  But the light of morning is lurking behind my curtain, and I really should get to bed.

Here’s another annotation.  This one’s on Lyn Hejinian’s book My Life.  As you will gather if you read on, I was kinda baffled by this book, and it took me a long time to get through it even though it’s rather small as a physical object.  In the end I decided that I didn’t feel confident enough to write something essay-ish and academic about it, but I thought I could manage to approach it creatively, so I tried to imitate the style without exactly understanding what I was doing.  It seemed to be an appropriate way to express the jumble of my thoughts, though, and maybe I’ve developed a slightly higher level of understanding in the process.

Click to read the annotation:

An Annotation on Lyn Hejinian’s My Life in the Style of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life

smell of black rubber

The snow was so white that it made my teeth feel quite yellow.  Standing in a warehouse.  Smell of black rubber.  Leaning on a stack of winter tires.  Reading a small white book.  The way words taste like the room you’re in.  Reading a storybook with a small child.  Pointing to the pictures.  Carried in a pocket for months.  The struggle to understand someone else’s personal language when your own language intrudes and questions every word.  A mother spreads her children around her.  Gratitude.  Patience.  My new black boots like winter tires for my feet.  There’s a sort of dusty halitosis to the room, as if it were an old man with no one to care for him, all the people too busy to sweep or vacuum.  And yet this waiting, nothing else to do but read the little white book, my attention forced on it so that the memory of reading is quite vivid, although my memory of what I read dissipates quickly.  My pink ankles, burned by the deep snow, desperate for dry socks.  There are products arranged on the shelves, faded and jumbled, and it seems that no one ever buys them.  Here I am in a pile of words.  The effort of searching for meaning, the related effort to hold on to a thread and free it from a tangle.  Shifting from foot to foot.  If you’re a mother and you need to change your infant’s diaper, you just do it on the floor, quickly and efficiently.  Need is met.  What wizardry is this?  Later we hide that sort of thing.  I keep thinking that I’m just about to be flooded with the light and energy of understanding.  Just around the corner.

faced with a lack of imagination

Perhaps I am leaving a few blonde hairs on the blue cloth of the train seat, in return for the chocolate stains the seat is leaving on my canvas pants.  Do you know which side to sit on, he asks, to see the view of the river? Clanging and tapping.  At what point am I justified in building a brick wall?  A large white bird.  I’m going today to spend some time with a friend.  On Coney Island we suddenly stepped into open space.  It was too cold, but refreshing.  She asks a lot of questions.  Perhaps the book just jumbles the order of the sentences, just as the mind is a jumbled landscape.  I record the words of the graffiti in my little notebook to use later in poetry.  Faced with the limits of my imagination, I must travel in order to fill my mind with new images.  She was startled to come downstairs and see me sitting on the couch where I’d been awake all night.  There is a paper taped to the wall in the guest bedroom for keeping a list of adjectives describing the noises made by the ancient heating pipes.  Hissing and struggling.  I read the first chapter out loud.  It is often justified to question the genre of things like this.  For a long time we walked in the wrong direction, thinking that the yarn shoppe would be on the next block.  Wind off the ocean.  A construction site hidden behind a plywood wall.  She said she understood why the book was confusing to me.  Was it poetry?  But if so, I was fooled by the shape on the page.  Frequently we found ourselves on trains.  A stranger will speak to you and it will be an awkward moment.  The employee of the bookstore who said he never reads.  Loose boards on the boardwalk.  She said she though she’d be exhausted by all that stream of consciousness stuff. My legs are tired, but I have to keep walking.

thinking in circles

I must admit that I’m irritated by one of the repeated phrases, “a pause, a rose, something on paper.”  On the couch, three crocheted blankets and a cat on my lap.  The wheeled cart of free books in the lobby of the library.  I have a task to do, and I feel like it’s taken me years.  Thinking becomes hazy and circular.  A blue quilted bag with many pockets inside.  A white book small enough to fit in a pocket.  My birthday.  She’s caught up with me now, and maybe it’s better that way.  Imitation is how I deal with confusion.  I still haven’t figured out the significance of that repetition.  All I wanted was a new friend.  Should I be counting sentences, digging in the upturned earth for a key?  The ethics of writing a phone number on a slippery scrap of paper.  The idea: to cheat and make this into a creative writing assignment-an annotation on, in the style of.  Too many sweet delicious white chocolate balls in one sitting.  It seems a foreign language that I failed to learn how to speak.  They say that if you watch television it helps.  I could have just asked her what she thought, I suppose, but I didn’t.  Instead developing strategies for becoming a grand wizard on a computer game.  Just the one idea.  Theory of the importance of each sentence, like poetry.  Each word.  In the end, I have little patience with puzzles.  A sea bird just skimming along the top of the waves.  Isolation.  I have to pursue my one idea because it’s all I have.  Traveling again soon.  Even if I never reach the cold, wise depths.  Eat more salt.  Walk in black boots until my feet hurt.  Hands crouched at the edge of the keyboard.

This wooden ball was found on the shore of Lake Champlain, I think one of the times that S and I spent the weekend in Chazy, NY when we were living in Burlington.  We theorize that it’s probably an old croquet ball.  But it’s also a meaningful, magical object.  A discovery.  A mystery.  That’s why I love walking along a beach (doesn’t everyone?), because each pebble or bit of glass or trinket you pick up has been hidden by weather and water, and then is revealed to you in that moment when your eyes settle on it.  I find that I always want these objects to act as symbols for me, to solidify the peace that I feel while walking along the shore so that I can carry that peace with me just by taking a few pebbles and shells in my pocket.

I’ve included this photo here as a preface to this annotation I’m posting, because the poem I focus on in the annotation is about beachcombing and a similar spherical find–one of these glass fishing floats.

Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre Annotation-Storytelling in Poetry

            The book Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre by Lois-Ann Yamanaka consists entirely of poetic monologues in the voices of several different girls and women in a Hawaiian community.  The poems are written in dialect, so that the cultural identity of the book’s characters comes alive through the language.  In addition to this, many of the poems focus on racial characteristics and experiences, such as in the poem “Tita: Japs” where the character Tita describes the experience of using special glue to create a fold in her eyelid so that she looks less oriental.  As the characters in the book came alive to me through these details, it got me thinking about characters within poetry in general and the concept of poetry as storytelling.  As a writer, I’m more comfortable with, and therefore more likely to write, poems that fall more into the “contemplative” category.  Is that what’s called “lyric” poetry?  I’ve forgotten some of the vocabulary I learned as an undergrad.  What I’m trying to describe is poetry that consists of just one intense moment.  This is different from a story, whether in a poem or any other form of writing, where images and moments build consecutively and characters change and develop from the beginning to the end.

            Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre falls solidly into the category of storytelling poetry.  The feel of reading this book is very similar to the feel of reading a collection of short stories.  Yet there are still elements and moments in this book that made me suddenly very aware that I was reading poetry.  And I don’t mean that as a criticism of the book.  Rather, I am referring to moments when I became aware that a poetic technique had enhanced my experience of the characters and story in a particular poem.  I suppose that what I’m trying to describe here is the intersection of two genres, and the ways that techniques of more than one genre can work together to enhance a text.  Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre isn’t a particularly avant garde book, but it does feel like somewhat of a hybrid to me.  Actually, maybe it would be better described as borrowing from historical forms, like the storytelling poetry of the Odyssey and such, rather than creating something radically new.

            Regardless of how one would classify this book, it is very good, and even though I read it a few months before sitting down to write this, it still has me thinking of ways to bring storytelling to my own writing.  In particular, I have a project I’ve been contemplating for quite a while, something that I originally envisioned as a novel.  I’m rather intimidated by fiction writing, so I never wrote more than a few sentences of the first chapter.  But after reading Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre I realized that my project could work as a series of poems and I have a renewed excitement about getting started on it, and I’ve even done a little more writing.

            My reflection on Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, after reading the book, has focused mostly on one poem that I found particularly powerful.  I think that this poem serves as a perfect example of my thoughts about the intersection of poetic and storytelling techniques.  The poem, “Glass” uses a technique that is familiar to me because it’s something I’ve struggled to bring to my own poetry.  That is, endings that are open and expansive, rather than tightly closed.  Someone once described my poetry as ending as if with the sound of a gong announcing the message.  I was giving too much to my readers, rather than letting them find their own meanings and conclusions, or allowing them to carry a poem’s ending into their own thoughts.  Yamanaka’s poem “Glass” certainly succeeded in allowing extended thought for me.  I’ve been able to hold its final image in my mind and contemplate it from several angles, and I feel that I’ve had a very rich experience of this poem.

            In addition to having a poetically successful ending, “Glass” also serves an important structural role in the storytelling category.  “Glass” is the last poem in the third section of the book, making its ending the end of the story as well as of the single poem.  This section of the book is spoken in the voice of a young girl with an unhappy family life.  She describes abusive actions from her mother and a somewhat tense and rivalrous relationship with her sisters.  She is befriended by a taxidermist, Bernie, and he and his wife become alternate parent figures for her.  By the time I reached the end of this group of poems, I was quite engaged and concerned with the precarious happiness of the narrator.  The tension between the positive and negative experiences in her life was very strong.  In “Glass,” Bernie takes her beachcombing, searching for glass fishing floats washed up from the ocean.  These are both beautiful and rare, and the narrator wants one badly.  The fragility of these glass floats seemed to me to be a symbol of the narrator’s happiness.  The act of beachcombing also helped to ground the poem in the landscape of Hawaii, reminding me of the specific geographical and cultural elements of this book.

            In the end, the narrator does find a float for herself.  This was satisfying to me as a reader, to have a search fulfilled by a discovery, but what was even more satisfying was that sense of opening at the end of the poem.  Instead of tying up any loose ends in the story, or returning the narrator to her everyday life, Yamanaka focuses the poem on that moment of discovery, and lingers with the glass ball for a moment before letting the reader and the character go.  The last two lines in the poem describe the reflection of the sky and the narrator’s eyes in the blue glass as she stands with the sphere in her hands, unifying an infinite outer world, the sky, with an infinite inner world, the eyes (as a window to the soul).