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.