>Bryan D. Dietrich's "Electra Woman"

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“Electra Woman,” The New Yorker October 13, 2008

            I don’t have a lot to say about Dietrich’s “Electra Woman.”  One reason is that it continually tells me what “you,” meaning me, the reader, are doing, and I don’t care for poems that tell me what to do, etc.  This, of course, has nothing to do with a poem’s craft.  It’s simply the way I’m built as a reader of poetry in terms of innate likes and innate dislikes.  That having been said, the poem is funny, unnerving, and somewhat too predictable.

            “Electra Woman” is a twenty-line, single-stanza piece whose longish lines swing someplace between ten and fourteen syllables.  The opening three lines are iambic, but much of what follows are lines with shifting stresses: “You come home to find Electra Woman / and Dyna Girl in bed.  You know they’ve been up / to something.  Freddie the Flute’s all sticky. / It is, you might say, disconcerting.  At least / one of them isn’t a witch, black skirts all akimbo . . .”  This is notable only because this brief pentameter sets up a formality and feel that the poem seems designed to break; it is a set up afterall, reflecting the poem’s contrast in content.  As for much of the prosody, it’s prosaic, particularly the middle of the piece wherein three back-to-back sentences begin with time-signal phrases: “Later . . . . At one point . . . . After the dust clears . . .”  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this; simply, the language sounds a lot like prose—that’s all.  The line breaks, which don’t appear to be used for rhythm and pacing, add to this prose-paragraph feel as they don’t, as a whole, create effects other than getting us from one line to the next.

            The poem’s allure is its contextual contrast: the “Electra Woman” of the title, as well as the names dropped throughout, are characters from the Krofft Supershow or Krofft Power Hour, live-action kids shows from the Seventies.  As references to these shows, they, on one hand, evoke nostalgia for the simpler times of childhood.  Even though I’ve never seen these programs, I feel it too: Saturday mornings, sugared cereal, toonies.  On the other hand, Dietrich’s use of them is sexual, which strips them of their innocence and playfulness (though the poem remains playful) by placing them in an adult context: “Electra Woman / and Dyna Girl [are] in bed . . . . Freddie the Flute’s all sticky . . . . you join / in . . .”  The innuendos are obvious, and they all lead directly to the poem’s predictable ending: “you used to wait for, want, them all . . . live girls . . .”  It turns the Power Hour into a twisted loss of innocence that was, for me, a known theme as early as line four, if not earlier.  As a result, for me, the poem doesn’t really go anywhere.  It ends where it begins with little added, other than plot and sexual play, by its middle.

            Nevertheless, I find the last line interesting: “You will feel like you’ve been puffing stuff.”  The Krofft creators claimed their shows and characters were without drug references, but much as it doesn’t take a pornographer to see the double-meanings in Dietrich’s piece, it doesn’t take a drug user to recognize them in the Power Hour either.  Intentional or not, the references are there.  So, the last line does bring in an extra element commenting on the Krofft shows in general.  Perhaps that’s what all the sexual gimmick is for: the poem isn’t about sex, it’s about denying it, about ignoring it, about convincing yourself it isn’t there.  Perhaps, precisely, that’s the joke.

>Rosanna Warren's "Romanesque"

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“Romanesque,” The New Yorker October 6, 2008

            What I find interesting about “Romanesque” is its pairing of food with religion, particularly the Pentecost.  There’s slight Apocalyptic reference in it, too, which could be a bearer of bad tidings.  But, in Warren’s poem, it seems almost wonderful, an irresistible, melt-in-your-mouth revelation.

            The first hint—foreshadowing, really, since at this point religious grandeur hasn’t entered the poem—of this culinary apocalypse occurs in line two: “Onions give up the ghost, flesh sizzles . . .”  This is very much reminiscent of a Raiders of the Lost Ark moment: ghost-like apparitions fly out of the Ark of the Convenant shortly after it’s opened, killing any and all whose eyes witness the Ark’s holy contents (there’s Biblical precedence for this Hollywood version . . .).  If your eyes were closed, you lived.  If they were open, God’s forces closed them for you, eternally.  And, so, though Warren is writing about food and never takes her imagery to such cinematic melodrama, the line is not without its religious connotation, albeit in hindsight.  She subtly emphasizes this by accumulating S sounds in those words—“. . . ghost, flesh sizzles . . .”—most important in this regard.  The entire line is lush with S, as are those above and below it, which snaps the ear to attention, but the acoustic climax is smack dab in the center of the poem:

Morning: smells of serious cooking float in the street.

Onions give up the ghost, flesh sizzles, a metal spoon

clinks on a dish.

            The next apocalyptic moment is prolonged and, therefore, becomes much more obvious.  Warren writes, “You saw light leak from my eyes . . . . Christ barely balances / in his almond chafing dish, Pentecostal fire / hurls out to the Apostles left and right, / they’re microwaved.”  You can feel God’s judgment in these lines, the utter destruction of the world, no exceptions, as both speaker and Apostles are effectively nuked.  Pentecostal fire does, obviously, reference the Pentecost, too.  This is the moment when the Holy Spirit zapped the Apostles—in a good way—filling them with well-deserved holiness after Christ’s post-Resurrection return to Heaven.  So, when the Apostles are microwaved in “Romanesque,” they are simultaneously reaching the end of their days and being rewarded by the commanding power of God (bear in mind, this is all coming about at a (farmers?) market, which must be one hell of a place).

            After recounting this gastronomical version of the Pentecost, Warren plainly writes, “In the market, I bought lettuces as frilled, / scalloped, unfurled, and rainbow-hued . . .”  The opening of the sentence echoes “On the tympanum, Christ barely balances,” two sentences previous, in that it is the only other to begin with a prepositional phrase.  However, the loaded language of the former is now removed.  Instead of talking about Christ, we’re talking about lettuce.  And we’re doing it in plain language that’s slowed down first by the prepositional phrase and second by the short list of lettuce descriptors frilled, scalloped, unfurled, and rainbow-hued.  This little juxtaposition of charged language with plain language runs throughout the poem, in effect keeping readers grounded in the market, not in the Apocalypse (or Pentecost), and thus in the revelatory grandeur of the market’s odors and tastes.  The metaphor enhances the immediate experience of the speaker—and reader—but never takes over.  We never actually enter Revelations; we never truly witness the Holy Spirit or Christ.  When Warren writes, “On the tympanum Christ barely balances / in his almond chafing dish,” which is a warming pan, Christ remains basically figurative.  True, he may physically be present in the sculpted scene of the tympanum, but he’s only literally an object here, a sculpted representation of Christ, not the Christ.  As Warren imposes that scene onto the chafing dish, he becomes figurative, still not really the Jesus Christ.  This allows Warren some spiritual energy without having to make the poem a religious poem, that is to say a Christian poem.  It uses Christian imagery but primarily to enhance our experience of this fantabulous cooking and produce at the market.  This is a spiritual experience for the speaker, but it is not a religious one.

            The poem ends with an interesting moment in that the lettuces, not the speaker, receive the glory of the Holy Spirit.  It seems to me the obvious, usual way to end this poem is to have the speaker receive the glory of God, but in “Romanesque,” it’s the lettuces who find themselves so lucky.  Warren writes, “the sun touched each sweet leaf / till it trembled and spoke in tongues.”  What I like about this ending is that it uses the Pentecost to generate some quality imagery—it’s weird for anyone, much less lettuce, to speak in tongues—but it’s preempted with the sun that did the touching, not the Holy Spirit.  This single image keeps the poem and its readers in the market.  We can witness the sun rising over a nearby awning or EZ-up and slamming into the lettuce leaves, turning their colors vibrant.  It would quite a bit too much if God really reached out and touched lettuce leaves, especially you believe you’re one of the Chosen.

            What this has to do with “Romanesque”?  Aside from the imagery of the church—from the demons to Christ to the Pentecost—very little.  The poem ain’t about architecture, but about spiritual glory.  The speaker bears witness to the hallelujah of the market similar to the way those Apostles received the hallelujah of the Holy Spirit.  It’s an amazing morning for her wherever she is, whatever farmer’s market she’s wandering through, dazed.

>Anne Carson's "Tag"

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“Tag,” The New Yorker October 6, 2008

            “Tag” is a relationship poem in two parts.  Part one, titled THIS, is a 17 line stanza followed by a one-liner; part two, titled YOUR, is one 11 line stanza built with a few particular oddities that distinctly separate it from the former.

            The overall gist is this: it’s the first full month of Spring, and the speaker (let’s say a woman though nothing in the poem necessarily indicates it) bears witness to the world in rejuvenation; however, she feels separated from it, unnatural in her feelings, which seem locked not in rebirth but in (re)loss.  The images of trees and their “red branches,” “green shoot areas,” and a “river, that one” are stand-ins for the new life of the new year.  Water’s flowing; flowers are blooming.  And these items of nature have fought hard for “their scraped-out place” in the world with an appetite for more than just survival.  Carson begins the poem (the THIS excepting) with “Insatiable April,” and the poem’s tone is set: the world of nature is taking over with a hunger that cannot be satisfied.  It’s impossible not to think of Eliot’s The Waste Land here: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.  Memory, desire, cruelty—these are things with which “Tag” will become concerned.

            Interestingly, Carson’s speaker would seem to share this hunger, this longing for new life budding out of the old, but her appetite is discreet from Spring’s.  She says, “I have longed for people before, I have loved people before” and “I walk and walk with cold hands . . . . [there is] nothing to carry longing away.”  The word longing bears with it a sense of loss that insatiable desire doesn’t; the former suggests a need for something the speaker never had, perhaps, or cannot regain, and the latter suggests a need that is being met, that is being regained…it’s just never enough.  In the poem, there’s never enough dirt and water for the world of Spring although it gobbles all it can.  The speaker, on the other hand, isn’t gobbling anything, her loss total.  A few details illustrate this difference, one being the speaker’s cold hands, a clear reference to the past since the poem is set in April.  She’s stuck in winter while the natural world turns red and green with Spring’s vitality.  She’s at odds with the world, with moving forward.  She says, “I surprised a goose and she hissed,” directly relating this conflict.  The bottom line is Carson’s speaker is an isolated woman.  Why?  She explains she has “loved people before,” but “[i]t was not like this. // Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”

            Carson’s lineation and phrasing adds to the drama a bit, too.  The odd, stand-alone tags THIS and YOUR don’t clearly reference their objects.  The stanzas themselves, particularly the first, are built with short fragments, sentences, and the occasional splice—a variety of incongruently phrased phrases.  As well, every line in the poem’s first half is endstopped, placing each on its own level whether or not it resonates with those immediately above and below it.  Most of these stops are periods: total.

            The poem’s second half begins sort of the same way and in places has the feel of fragmentation and incongruity—largely caused by the dashes, the opening parentheses, and brackets—but what follows is built as a long sentence with a few awkward enjambments and a few hard, dash-indicated endstops.  Lines and ideas flow into and out of each other here, and it’s difficult to tell how what pairs with what.  Grammatically, the “Feigned leap” that begins the long sentence describes the “I” that is the sentence’s grammatical subject, which is poetically strange and difficult to interpret, though a feigned leap does seem to fit the speaker who isn’t leaping into the river or Spring or anything else, who is stuck in the source of her loss.

            The teeny inklings of narrative in the first half of the poem have disappeared in part two, as well: no sense of setting, no sense of immediate action.  This is very much an internalized, thinking speaker we’re dealing with now.  The brackets demonstrate in real-time her loss for words, among other things: “river glimpsed through bare / [waiting] / [some noun] for how thought breaks up around you not here . . . “  The speaker seems literally to be waiting for inspiration, and readers get to fill in the missing pieces, as bracketed, when she comes up short.  Are these bare branches she’s looking through, an analogy to the winter of her heart and mind?  “Thought breaks up,” she says, “around you not here . . .”

            Thus, the signs of the day—“what Hölderlin calls die Tageszeichen”—are unhealable wounds, scars that cover up unrelinquishable pain from a loss so total the speaker’s no longer capable of recognizing what should be fully recognizable, her lover’s handwriting, a signature (pardon the pun) trait.  The real signs of the day—the nature imagery in the first half—are hidden to her.  As well, she doesn’t know to whom these mentioned addresses belong, which only adds to her loss.  Whoever they were, there were others . . . lovers, friends, who knows. 

In some ways, she’s become IT, so to speak, the loser.  She’s been tagged, labeled, and with her lover out of the picture, she has no one to touch.