S read this poem to me earlier this evening and it gave me a fluttery feeling. I don’t get to see the ocean much, so when I do it’s a special time. Most recently, the ocean means writing and creativity to me, because of Port Townsend, Washington, and my Goddard residencies. I get to go again in February. I’ll have these words in my head when I go. And it’s sort of a full-circle thing, too, because I bought this book for S from Copper Canyon Press. From Fort Worden to Vermont back to Fort Worden, with all kinds of poetic flutters and frills in between. From the Puget Sound to the shores of Lake Champlain back to the Puget Sound. Sand in my shoes. Gathering beach glass.

The photograph above is from Coney Island, NY, another place I’ve gazed over saltwater. I’ve never been there in the summer, only in cold weather. L and I gathered shells there.

Here’s the poem I’ve been talking about: From Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions translated by William O’Daly

XLIX

When I see the sea once more

will the sea have seen or not seen me?

Why do the waves ask me

the same questions I ask them?

And why do they strike the rock

with so much wasted passion?

Don’t they get tired of repeating

their declaration to the sand?

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.

sometimes I feel that I have no right to speak, having never been silenced

I have never been beaten with a shaft of metal.

I have never been raped.

I have never had my skin torn open with an explosion of rusted nails.

I have never been splattered by another person’s blood.

I have never pumped my blood into another’s hands.

I have never gone hungry.

I have never lost a toe, a foot, a nose to frostbite.

I have never watched my parents murdered in front of me.

I have never seen my children taken, screamed after them, held out my empty arms.

I have never been locked away, left to rot, confined to silence.

I have never been drowned or half-drowned.

I have never shot a man, a woman, a child.

I have never stood thirsty in a world made only of dust.

I have never turned to sniffing glue to numb the hunger pains.

I have never watched my house burn down.

I have never been burned to death inside my house.

I have never been turned away from my own land.

I have never been a prostitute just to make the rent payments.

I have never been denied education.

I have never been in a land at war.

I have never had the door of the hospital closed on my bleeding face.

I have never had a number tattooed into the delicate skin of my arm.

I have never lived in an apartment that smelled of nothing but urine.

I have never been gunned down for my beliefs.

I have never been decapitated.

I have never been gassed.

I have never had my body stacked, naked, with thousands of other dead.

I have never been a refugee turned away from safety at the border.

I have never been dragged to death down a sandpaper street.

I have never sat in a cement cell, waited for the electric chair, the lethal injection.

I have never been wrongly accused.

I have never been addicted to powder or needles or pills.

I have never been pushed to the ground and trampled in a crowd.

I have never leapt from a seventeenth story window.

I have never had my tongue cut from my mouth.

I have never been trapped deep underground in a collapsed coal mine.

I have never spat blood.

I have never sipped blood.

I have never sickened and wasted in the midst of an epidemic.

I have never stepped on a land mine.

I have never been touched where I didn’t want to be touched.

I have never been kidnapped.

I have never disappeared without a trace.

I have never been silenced.

My next semester of school starts soon, and I haven’t been thinking about poetry much over the past month or two. It’s always there in my mind in the form of little ideas and scraps of language, but I haven’t read any poetry in a while, I’ve only written fragments, and I haven’t thought critically. I haven’t exercised my poetic mind.

So today I stopped by a used book store and parked myself next to the poetry section. I ended up buying five volumes of poetry, and I tried to select ones that I thought I would actually read.

I’m writing this blog post so that I can think about and maybe figure out what attracted me to each of these books. So I’m looking back through them right now and trying to find the poem in each of them that made me decide that the book was worth buying. The titles all made me take these books off the shelf in the first place, of course, so they’re worth thinking about, too. But I’ll stick to the contents for now.

Extensive quoting to follow:

In no particular order (just how the books happen to be stacked on my desk):

1. Like Memory, Caverns by Elizabeth Dodd: from “Thrift.” I like the scene created by this poem, and there’s something pleasing about putting the punctuation in the middle of the line all the time like the poem does. Plus today was a hot day, and I’d just been walking out in it and people watching, so I could relate.

“a man is slapping the air with the thick/ flat of his hand, stepping forward/ and back, almost/ dancing. He is trying to carve/ a shape somehow different/ from this place, the hot close air/ above the street, the vacant/ lot beyond. His belt buckle tilts/ and glints in the sun; he’s sweating/ in his flannel shirt.”

2. A Grain of Mustard Seed, by May Sarton: from “The Invocation to Kali.” I picked up this book because S has been reading some May Sarton recently and really likes her work. But this poem really sold it to me. It has a feeling of something that needs to be said. I also have been feeling like I need to study more long poems. From section one:

“I am the cage where poetry/ paces and roars. The beast/ is the god. How murder the god?/ How live with the terrible god?”

3. Old Man Rubbing His Eyes, by Robert Bly: from “Digging Worms.” This book has attractive little sketchy illustrations that make it fun to flip through. A picture of the title character graces the cover. This particular poem was impressive to me in how it manages to travel huge thematic distances in just four stanzas.

“Dreams press us on all sides, we stagger/ along a wire, our children balance us/ on their shoulders, we balance their graves/ on ours.// Their graves are light. And we unwind/ from some kind of cocoon made by lovers…/ the old tires we used to swing on,/ going faster, around and around, until// with one lurch we grow still and look down at our shoes.”

4. A Day This Lit, by Howard Levy: from “Early Morning Song.” Hmm. Looking back at this poem, I realize that it talks about hot weather, too. How influenced I am by my daily experiences! I like this particular stanza because I thought it was cute how it told me what the lesson of the story was, and also because that lesson wasn’t what I expected it to be.

“Each day here has grown hotter./ Yesterday afternoon, charred/ by both heat and absence,/ I sat still on the porch and tried/ to write you a letter. Just too hot,/ and someone came along who knew/ a waterfall. The lesson is:/ how often we get rescued.”

5.  The Amorous Cannibal, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe: from “The Shadow Minister.”  The title of this book made me smile.  Sort of whimsical and unexpected.  And this poem continued that feeling for me.

“What are the black holes?/ They seem the incomprehensible/ wool of happiness/ knitted into a balaclava/ with staggered stitches.”

Maybe it was the knitting metaphor, too…

Where do ideas for poems come from?  For me, it’s almost always something very small.  An image, a phrase, a brief moment in a conversation–I call them seeds.  It’s when I feel an opening inside my head, a fascination, a connection, the potential for growth.  Then I try to save that feeling, to sort of incubate it in my head until I’m ready to plant it, I guess.  Sometimes nothing ever comes from these seeds, of course.  But sometimes it does.  Yes.

So, the other day I was visiting my parents at the house where I grew up, and I happened to notice the name of a road near their house: “Crow Hill.”  This name has been common knowledge to me since I was a kid, but I never really thought about it as an image.  A hill.  With crows.  Yes, there really is a hill there.  The road goes up quite steeply.  I don’t know about the history of the crows, though.  Crows are fairly common birds, aren’t they?  Maybe they used to congregate there.  Maybe someone with the last name Crow used to live there.  Who knows.  My grandfather used to feed dog food to the crows near his house.

Whatever this history, though, I have this image jiggling in my head now.  A jumping-bean seed?  There’s a swirling of the words, my childhood, my grandfather, black birds, a road, harsh cries, landscape.

So perhaps a poem will come.  Perhaps it’s even now putting forth roots, underground where I can’t see it.

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.