Imaginary Toads, Real Gardens

Since I've been writing mostly prose for the last few months, it's a pleasure to have a few poems appear recently in the journals cant and The Potomac--the former a cool, slimline journal to which I was introduced last year and the latter a terrific web mag I’ve been reading for several year’s due to its keen sense of attitude. My poems in these journals' current issues (thanks again, editors!) are out of my Aphrodite's Son MS, which I hope to place here someday, pending the never ending series of revisions it undergoes--a process of intense scrutiny followed by weeks of looking away, looking away. I feel like wind slowly eroding a stone. Hopefully there’s something left when I’m all finished.

Be that as it may, it's been fun to be a prose writer for awhile, specifically a fiction writer, which is not my natural inclination. The thing about a story is that one typically has to pay attention to a certain physical reality in order to write it. That is to say, one must create through the legerdemain of language the illusion of a physical reality--you know, setting and stuff. Plot takes time, and time requires that things (characters) move through a physical space. So right there you've got the rudiments of fiction: plot, setting, character. A story isn't often as simple as that, but generally speaking each of these pieces has a role to play. It's sort of like building a house: the studs and insulation aren't what it's all about, but they are nevertheless important for holding the thing together with any kind of efficiency.

In a poem, however, at least as I write one, such components have very little to do with anything. While a story requires that aforementioned physical reality, a poem does not--much too lofty for such pedestrian items. It really could care less about time and space and the laws of physics. Those laws are irrelevant in poetry. Poems are spaceless, timeless aliens that place reality forcibly in the realm of the imagination. As Marianne Moore famously put it, they drop real toads into imaginary gardens. It is this contradictory, paradoxical nature that can make a good poem click--assuming, that is, the reader is willing to leap into such a vacuum.

Fiction seems to me to work in the opposite manner, placing imaginary toads in very real gardens. This is the trick that allows readers to identify with fictional characters (imaginary toads) and to imagine themselves in whatever environments through which the action moves, be it NYC or the Starship Enterprise, which flies according to the laws of physics, not the imagination. That sense of grounding is important. Not only does it allow readers to invest in characters, it allows characters to do unbelievable things readers notwithstandingly will find believeable via their suspension of disbelief. It's quite a remarkable achievement when you think about it.

On the other hand, because poetry's setting is the imagination, readers are left to connect the pieces on their own. Real toads, yes. We all know what a toad is, how it feels, how it's shaped, the fact it's likely to pee in your palm if you pick it up. But where to put the thing? It's your imagination, after all, as well as the poet's. The poet just gives you some odds and ends bought at a garage sale and asks that you, the reader, ultimately organize the poetic diorama.

I don’t really know where this is going save to say it’s nice to be thinking poetry in these times of fiction. Check out the above journals—they are, regardless of my work's inclusion in them, worth the read.

Bicycle Riding, Teaching Poetry, and David Ignatow's "The Bagel"

I've been helping my 5 year old daughter learn how to ride a bike over the past two days. Each time I've become--as she has become--overwhelmed with the sheer joy of bike riding, that distinct pleasure that is so . . . unadulterated, the wind in her face, lips peeled back in that smile of pure freedom that comes when one learns to do something on her own for the first time. In a matter of an hour or so, she went from hardly being able to pedal with training wheels (they hobbled the bike despite my adjustments) to biking unaided down the street and around the cul-de-sac. On her pink Disney Princesses bike, she's a (My Little) racing pony with "the power of speed, the power of balance," so she shouts from her glittery white seat. And away she goes.

And I thought there must be a poem I can post about this joy of bicycling. What came to mind instead was David Ignatow's "The Bagel,"perhaps the most joyful poem of all time.

And I intended to share it here and not say too much else about it. Problem is--one of the first links I tabbed in Safari turned out to be a brief analysis of Ignatow's poem at Elite Skills, a "Poetry and Writing Workshop" website. What I read so irked me--I no longer found myself capable of just dropping a link. I don't believe the text is copyright sensitive, so here it is:

Recently in our English class, we deciphered David Ignatow's The Bagel. We discovered deeper meaning and found that the bagel was a metaphor for the man's childhood. At first the man thinks childhood is something he wants to give away and get rid of but then realizes that he needs it. When chasing the "bagel" down the street he turns into a "bagel" himself, meaning while chasing down his childhood he relives some of the fun of his childhood that he initially wanted to give away.

While the analysis is not exactly off, it reeks of a high school English class (egad! this could be a college course...) whose coaching on the matter does little service to poetry and its pleasures at large. In fact, it does a grave disservice. Of course, I am making some assumptions here, which is a bit unfair, but--I doubt the writer of this little blob came up with the explanation on his own.

More likely, based on my experience as a former poetry-hating high school student and my conversations with many other former and current poetry-hating high school students, the writer was told, with a bit of pseudo-prompting common to the poor teaching of poetry, what the poem was about. Words like "deciphered" and "deeper meaning" lead me to this conclusion, as does the notion that "the bagel was a metaphor for the man's childhood." I mean--really? The bagel equals childhood? So then, in the poem's penultimate line, we can insert "childhood" for "bagel" such that the speaker rolls "one complete somersault / after another like a childhood / and strangely happy with [him]self"? I don't think so, Bub. That would elevate the bagel to the level of symbol, and the symbol is dead. Why must teachers of English (they hardly teach poetry . . . or English for that matter) revert to the symbol? Why must this always stand for that? I avoided what I thought was poetry for a long time due to such a pedagogical stance and ingraining. As for Ignatow, "The Bagel," and Elite Skills, the bagel does not stand for childhood in any way, shape, or form.

However, this moment, this wonderful, magical moment when the speaker turns into the bagel, somersault by somersault, is certainly child-like, so I can see where such a leap could be erroneously made. But it's this moment that evokes childhood, not the bagel. It's the pleasure of turning lemons into lemonade by surprise--an unforeseen joy--that takes the speaker, the poem, and its readers into the fun of being a kid. Who else could turn into a bagel and roll down the street? Certainly not the old man who wrote the poem (Ignatow was born in 1914). So, yes. There is some truth to that analysis when it says the speaker does relive "some of the fun of his childhood," but in no way is he chasing it down. In no way does he want "to give [it] away . . . then realizes that he needs it." Nothing in the poem leads readers to such "deeper meaning" conclusions. In fact, those ideas are just wrong. I mean--the speaker says directly he was "annoyed with [him]self / for having dropped it." He didn't give anything away.

So, yes, deeper meaning. It seems to me that poems that work offer everything--or just about everything--a reader needs right on the surface. It's all right there in direct view, open sunlight. The problem is that we are trained in our early years to believe that poetry is a code, that it is a mystery that must be figured out, that its words are clues to some vast, hidden agenda that lies deep below the surface of the poem, and so we learn to look past the surface into some abyss where answers apparently lie. I am not arguing that good poems don't work in layers. They do. I'm simply saying "the answer" isn't there. There is no answer. There is no code to break--generally speaking--and there is no hidden mystery. If there was, then what's all that stuff at the surface if not a cover-up? The poetry becomes a mechanism for hiding meaning and truth--the true meaning of a poem--instead of a mechanism for revealing such matters. To say there is a hidden meaning--a deeper meaning, whatever--altogether negates the purpose of writing poems, which is to express and reveal, not to hide and conceal. There are always exceptions to the norm, of course, but Ignatow's "The Bagel" is not one of them.

Really, my beef with all this is that when teachers teach poems in this manner of deciphering and such, they really mistreat the art of poetry. They relegate it to the role of legerdemain and bypass all the quality craft-stuff that makes a worthwhile poem worthwhile. An additional detriment, by treating a poem like a Rubik's cube, teachers tell students that once it's been figured out, it's done. It's over. It's--solved. And then students don't see the poem as an experience; they see it as a trick to be mastered, a question to be answered, when in fact that's hardly ever the case. Consider it's the journey, as "The Bagel" suggests, not the goal.

 

Anyway, I think my daughter has had a few bagel-like experiences these past few days, and I with her. Pure, unadulterated joy. And there's no mystery in that.

Chris Abani's "In the Middle of Dinner"

I must admit--what first struck me about Chris Abani's poem "In the Middle of Dinner," recently poem of the day at the Poetry Foundation, was its resemblance to my own poem "Houseguest," first published in the North American Review and included in my first book, Exchanging Lives. Both pieces utilize the family dinner and its images, such as knife and fork, and both sort of leave their characters--and readers--hanging. Whatever conflict arises remains so, seemingly only partially resolved.

And I think that works well for Abani's "In the Middle of Dinner" (I'll let others make their own decisions about my piece...). The poem's loose ends don't make it feel incomplete but mysterious, and there's plenty of info in the piece for readers to make an educated conjecture about what just happened. We don't need to know the whole story to know what's going on.

The narrative to the poem is this: the speaker and his mother are in the middle of dinner--prime rib--when she stops eating, moves her wedding band from ring to middle finger, says a few words regarding her absent husband (absent at least five years), then returns to matters at hand--the prime rib. The moment is over and done with in less time than it takes to chew a piece of meat. The mother's comment about her husband, which is set-up to be important, becomes nearly off-hand. Thus, the poem ends a bit confusingly: say what? What?

Structurally, though, Abani does a few things to help us keep hold of the poem, which is cool: we're grasping for meaning through how the poem is made, not (solely) by what it says. For starters, he uses dinner imagery to encapsulate the poem's moment spatially as well as temporally. He opens  with the title, which acts as the first line--"In the Middle of Dinner"--then, "my mother put down her knife and fork." And, he ends with "This / prime rib is really tender, isn't it? she asked." These are the only lines that have anything to do with eating dinner, with the literal physical space of the narrative. Because they are bookends, they work well as signals into the poem and out, effectively containing the poem's true meat and potatoes within a nice, little box. Readers more or less finish where they started although a great deal has changed.

As well, though the action between that opening and ending line--literally in the middle of dinner--seems relatively quick, time in the poem slows down there. The action, wrapped up with the mother's revelation, becomes gradual, drawn-out. Those dinner-imagery bookends, however, keep the poem in place and ultimately at normal speed. They don't necessarily do this by increasing the pace but by acting as cues to readers that we are back from wherever we went with mother and son, with absent husband. It's as though we've stepped out of time and place and have returned. I like this because--to me--this is the experience of poetry at large. To write a poem is to definitely step outside time and place. I say this because I've lost track of both when engaged by the muse and know what it's like--as I'm certain many if not most poets do--to be someplace else even though I'm at the desk. My wife calls this being in my head. But, to be frank--I'm hardly there.

Reading a poem is not all that different. Often to enjoy a piece one has to enter the poem's time and place. That is part of the reading-poetry experience, and though it is not always required by a poem, I find most poems are better enjoyed when I can do this. They are microcosms with their own weather patterns. I won't experience their rain and snow and sunshine if I don't go there, so to speak. You won't either. In fact--I'd be willing to bet most people at large have no idea about this. Thus, they opt for pulp instead of poetry and have disdain for poems because they don't "understand" them.

But that's another blog probably, so--

What I was saying was--I like how Abani encapsulate's the poem with dinner imagery, the last line working as an echo of the first, thereby focusing reader attention in that moment that matters most. He uses repetition/echo in a few other places, too. In the very middle line--line 6 of 11--he writes of the mother, "Five years, she said, five years, once a week," explaining how often and for how long she wrote to her absent husband. This is echoed in the antepenultimate line with "Not one letter back, not a single note." I liken these lines to call and response although they are not so cut and dried as that. They help fill in the narrative---the backstory--and give readers the chance to think back in the poem. That's one of the effects of repetition is that it makes us think of what we've already read, of what's being repeated, in this case by the syntactic repetition of the lines--not their words or images per se.

The other repetition of note is the word tender, located in line 5 to describe the way the mother moves her wedding band from ring finger to middle finger--an interesting act in and of itself. Abani writes, "So natural was the move, / so tender, I almost didn't notice." In the last line he again uses tender. The mother says, "This / prime rib is really tender, isn't it?" Obviously tender is being used in two very different contexts here, but I can't help but sense the connection. Words are too precious to waste for most poets, so a repetition like this within such a small, short space has got to be for something. It could be repetition used to kick readers back into the poem, similar to how I discussed the earlier example, but I doubt it because that is the nature of repetition anyway. Abani wouldn't be getting much work out of the one word tender if that's the sole case here. I think he does it for two other reasons.

First, it helps demonstrate the mother's change, her epiphany or whatever she's had, through the ritual of moving the ring from finger to finger. There is something very tender about that moment, that exchange between mother and son, about the revelation of her feelings to him (and to herself), but there is nothing tender in that last line except the word itself. A simple comparison of rhythm and pace demonstrates this. You can't read "So natural was the move, / so tender, I almost didn't notice" glibly in the poem; and, you can't read "This / prime rib is really tender, isn't it?" with terrific ardor. It just ain't right that way. The effect is that the mother is now seen in a new light--and in fact she may be living in a new light, having passed through the loss of her husband, having more fully processed her grief--signified by that ring ritual--than she had done so before.

Second, and related to the above, that prime rib tender helps snap the poem out of the timeless space in the middle of dinner. We went on this brief sojourn with the mother, but--we're back, so to speak. That second use of tender does kick readers back up into the earlier language of the poem, but it doesn't kick us into that earlier portion's time and space. Instead, distance is created here. If the earlier repetition--that of the syntactic structure of those two lines--is used to tie together, this instance is used to separate.

Other aspects of Abani's piece? I like the image the mother uses to explain her lingering hope of her husband's return, that she "waited / until time was like ash on my tongue." It's a strange but effective image in that ash is the end of things--ashes to ashes, and so on--but, therefore, also the beginning. As a literal image, it would certainly provide a foul taste and texture, so it's apropos for the mother who seems to have waited and waited until she was sick of waiting, until it--perhaps finally--left a bad taste in her mouth. And, because the tongue is involved, it's an echo of eating. Consequently, it continues to pull the poem together and to allow other connections to be made between lines, between the poem's times and places that seem to be disparate and homogeneous simultaneously. Ash, too, may give readers a clue as to the husband's whereabouts. Perhaps he's passed on? Maybe he's just finally dead to me now, in the voice of the mother, but that seems far too trite a read.

Lastly, the poem sort of wears the guise of a sonnet. It's more or less a box of uniform lines--roughly 4 non-metrical beats per line for 11 lines--opens with an early end rhyme that made me think of a possible Shakespearean sonnet twist, and it is a love poem of sorts. Although I would not call "In the Middle of Dinner" a sonnet, I think considering the piece in the light of one does provide a worthwhile entry into it. This is a poem where the facts are open to possibility, and I think that's the case not just in terms of the narrative but in the poetry used to tell it.

"Watching Fog Roll Off The Shack At Toad Hall Pond"

Watching Fog Roll Off The Shack At Toad Hall Pond


This white-picket life once was dangerous:
snow caves in winter, quicksand in summer.
Nothing in this world was sacred.
 

I ran away through backwoods, through nettles
and poison oak, scrabbled over barbed wire.
This American life once was dangerous;
 

it took my every immunity to rush the Brahman
in the field. Now I walk as though on clover.
Nothing in this world can be sacred.
 

Each of my children is a dandelion clock.
I foreknow their sail over this river in the sky.
This white-picket life once was dangerous
 

before such letting go, such letting slip
the cordage that bound me to any of my beloved.
Nothing in this world could be sacred,
 

not spring, not fall, the rouge of any Roman dusk.
This white-picket life once was dangerous
although it was a gross, disintegrating menagerie.
Nothing in this life is sacred.

e.e. cummings' [love is more thicker than forget]

Yesterday's Poem of the Day at the Poetry Foundation was a great little cummings poem entitled "[love is more thicker than forget]," which originally appeared in Poetry magazine in 1939.  It's a very typical cummings piece with lots of wordplay, syntax play, and some breaking of the rules, so to speak, but it is equally typical that for all that entertainment, it's also meaningful: love ain't got no rhyme or reason and, when rightly felt, easily subsumes us.

The poem is composed of 4 quatrains written in an ABAB common verse, a ballad form used by many poets of the past (and of the present and future?) including Dickinson (who used a true ballad stanza of ABCB and to whom I will return to later).  This easy, consistent meter and rhyme scheme gives the poem a sing-song like quality, which adds to its fun--at least to this contemporary ear--and keeps the stanzas in neat little digestible packages.  cummings also employs a significant amount of alliteration, sometimes stretching the device across two lines, as he does with the "TH" sound in the poem's opening--"love is more thicker than forget/ more thinner than recall"--and sometimes squeezing it into a single line as he does here with "M"--"love is more mad and moonly."  In brief, soundPLAY is throughout.

But for all the play, there's some meat to the poem, too.  For all those comparisons--love is more than, love is less than, etc.--cummings' descriptions of love are unique and not at all inaccurate.  We all feel it, but who can describe it precisely? It's an irrational, gut feeling that cannot be precisely compartmentalized and explained; nevertheless, we all know it when we feel it--lust/love confusions aside.  Burn's "O my Luve's like a red, red rose" is nice but quaint.  I think I prefer the euphoric silliness of cummings' descriptions.

I prefer two of his descriptions most of all, and they are contained in the second and fourth stanzas respectively:

it is more mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky

A few cool things happen here.  Although every stanza is an echo of every other because of the demands of the form, these two are more exact, which gives the last stanza punch and the poem closure.  "Moonly" (female) and "sunly" (male) are a nice pair, given the poem's theme, and of course the repetition of "only" helps bind the stanzas together.  It's interesting, too, each of those instances state how one thing and only one thing is more or less than itself: only the sea is deeper than the sea, and only the sky is higher than the sky. Is there a better metaphor for describing love at its largest ineffability?

But what I most enjoy about this poem is its reference in these stanzas to Emily Dickinson's "The Brain—is wider than the sky—". In this piece, Dickinson writes about the powers of the imagination, using both sky and sea in the way--more or less--that cummings does to describe love.  Substitute love for the brain in the Dickinson poem, and it still makes perfect sense (although the brain is much more Dickinson...). As to the power of either, both poets more or less have the same to say, illustrating how closely linked these two pieces are, though they were written maybe...80 years apart.

So, for all his unique cleverness, cummings' is a pilferer. Who was it who said "mediocre writers borrow, great writers steal"?  Eliot? Yet again that adage rings true.

Ellen Bass' "Gate C22"

I've been reading the New Poets of the American West anthology (Many Voices Press, 2010) lately and ran across "Gate C22" by Ellen Bass. The poem, which describes a most tremendous kiss shared by two middle-agers at the Portland aiport, is killer good, a testimony to what the imagination can do in a single moment when moved by sudden, arresting circumstances. In this case, the speaker, the "passengers waiting for the delayed flight / to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots, / the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling / sunglasses" are all subsumed by the couple's kiss.

But I'm less concerned with the kiss and its voyeurs than I am with the simile in the poem's second stanza. Bass writes the lovers "kissed lavish / kisses like the ocean in the early morning." At first I was like — that's so dull, a missed opportunity, an okay image that falls flat because a kiss is nothing like an ocean and the simile does nothing to change that perception—has done nothing yet, that is.

I should say that I also found the poem neither here nor there at this point: strong imagery, strong verbs, but nothing that sucked me in the way that kiss sucked in its onlookers. The first stanza was fine, and the second began in a dull mode, using two short, flat sentences in a single line to start an "unattractive" description of the couple:

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,

Of course, those opening lines are a setup. Rather than stop that simile after a single line, Bass continues to work the metaphor, describing how the kiss/ocean "gathers and swells, sucking / each rock under, swallowing it / again and again. Drawing that comparison out over a few lines is extraordinary, allowing it a chance not just to be a comparison but a synthesis of the two disparate images. The verbs gather, swells, sucking, swallowing apply as well to the tide as they do to the embrace. It's a great example of why poets should be careful not to stop their metaphors short, but to work them out. They can always be pared back if that's what the poem desires.

The other thing I like about this kiss/ocean is that the simile really becomes the poem's center, even more so than the kiss. The kiss is the audience's central image, but not the poetry's. What I mean by this is that the description of the ocean not only sensualizes the kiss by being sensual itself but acts as something of a scaffold for the workings of the rest of the poem. Imagistically, it is the most sensual part of the piece—the literal descriptions of the kissers and their kiss don't come close.  More importantly, the movement of the poem from stanza to stanza follows the movements of a tide, rushing in and easing out, extending at times with great velocity, others with a benign steadiness. This can be seen in Bass' use of mini-catalogues: each stanza begins with some scene-setting narrative, then dives into these brief but very imaginative lists, which, for me, is where the poem most succeeds. Bass' kiss/ocean, placed in the middle of the poem, seems to be the fulcrum on which this back-and-forth occurs.  It becomes the center of the poetry and, for me, the imagination of the poem even though the kiss remains the center of attention.

I find the ocean a good central metaphor for "Gate C22" for another reason, too.  The shoreline with its rising and falling tide is a place of gatherings and departures—the flotsam washes onto shore, the beach junk washes out.  In and out, coming and going, landings and departures—it's an airport.  How perfect!

I think the first person to really drive home to me the point of expanding a metaphor (remembering it can also be pared back) was Steve Orlen.  We were reviewing some poems of mine when he commented that I had taken a just-okay image and turned it into something special by working it out over the course of several lines.  I had been oblivious to this fact, but since then have made a point of looking to see how I and others use metaphor in our poems.  For Orlen—at least in our conversations—it was often a matter of rhythm, growing an image in order for the language to keep up its music.  But, as it does in Bass' poem, expanding the analogy can also give the imagination room to grow, infiltrating and invigorating the rest of the poem.

 

Turning a Poem onto its Head

Yesterday's writing episode began with me flipping through my notebook for the odds and ends of poems I'd jotted down recently but hadn't worked with yet.  I had a couple of starter-pieces in there, and my hope was to find something worth continuing on a fresh page, thus allowing me to X it out of the old, already sweated-over pages of my notebook.

What I ran across was the start of a poem that centered on the star jasmine growing in front of my house.  For whatever reason, I'd wanted to write about that thing for weeks -- probably since it had fully burst into bloom -- and seeing my first go-at-it there on the page reminded me that I had yet to properly work up the idea.  The problem was my opening lines stunk:

With its white cluster of tiny trumpet
bells, this jasmine lingers on the sleeve
I brushed against it, unknowingly
at first. . .

Now I liked (and have kept, at least for now) the image of the trumpet bells, the words linger and sleeve, but I disliked that ignorant word unknowingly and that flat, opening preposition With. I didn't care for the line breaks either.  Creating no desirable effect of their own, they put the pace of the lines in too much conflict with the natural rhythm of the language. And none of the words received pause or attention because the rhythm was gangly instead of musical -- all of which I blamed on the line breaks, right or wrong.

The ensuing lines and few stanzas suffered the consequences of that sad opening and aren't worth discussing further. I liked a few of the sentiments that had turned up, however, a few of the jumps the poem made as it strove for new images and content. So, I made the decision to salvage what I could.  The question was, how?

And the answer was to turn the poem onto its head, effectively starting where that initial string of ideas (it hasn't been accurate, really, to call them a poem) had ended -- the last line.  Actually, the last line was "and they bloom, the silent speak." So, I restarted with the penultimate line, which I broke: "Drought pushes these loveliest of flowers / to the edge" and so on, working my way backward through the piece by every two lines or so, keeping what worked, dumping what didn't.  Old connections were cut; a new logic formed. Even better -- whatever original emotional attachments I had to the jasmine and, thus, to the poem became severed by this new arrangement, allowing me to explore emotions and ideas that wouldn't have otherwise arrived in the poem's original form.

Sure, restarting a poem with the end is a bit arbitrary, but its effect -- the poem opens itself in a new way -- is not.  Often that's the trick: to see the usual as unusual, the familiar as strange.  As a writer and reader of poetry, I prefer not to know a poem's ending before I arrive at it -- the experience isn't surprising that way. But as the poet-in-process, I particularly enjoy not knowing how the poem is about to begin.

Paula Bohince's "Nostalgic"

Paula Bohince's "Nostalgic" first appeared in Southwest Review, but I picked it up a few days ago at Verse Daily.  I've never read Bohince before, and I must say I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to understanding "Nostalgic."  According to the title, we're dealing with the past, with loss.  According to the language of the poem, we're working with birds, place, and love.

"Nostalgic" is a short, 3-stanza poem with lines that range from the short to the very short -- the clipped -- the briefest of which is the one-word last line of the poem, "cloud-headed," and the longest of which is the third line of the poem, "cloistered homage to a decade of geese."  It is a lyric piece although I'm not entirely sure it doesn't tell a story of a leaving...from what I'm unsure.  This could be a love (forlorn love) poem, as there is a "we" in it that definitely doesn't include me, and uses language like "kiss" and "departure" and "In the end," which taken together can suggest love gone awry.  But I also wonder of environmental loss: the "robin's / blurred departure," the "homage to a decade of geese," "the marsh / where cattails remained when all else / left."  The question is -- are these images meant to be read literally or metaphorically?  Or both?

Bohince's clipped lines help create this sense of discontinuity.  No pattern of consistent length emerges: some lines stick out, some don't.  As well, many of the lines are so short they disrupt meaning.  Whereas a poet like Billy Collins generally has a complete phrase or thought per line, Bohince breaks her thoughts up across lines in this poem such that rhythmic and cognitive flow are disrupted.  Consider the last stanza:

In the end, we were landmark,
compass, same as the lingered-over
pond, the marsh
where cattails remained when all else
left.  Ragged in salt,
cloud-headed.

All but two lines are enjambed in a way that disrupts immediate meaning-making, though in gestalt they do work together to create sense.  Plus, Bohince has a few nice effects due to her enjambments.  The way "lingered-over" hangs on the stanza's second line does make me linger a moment over the "pond" of the ensuing line.  The tough enjambment at ". . . all else" slams an emphasis on "left," supporting the read that loss/departure are prime components to the story and theme of this poem.

And, the discontinuity of the lines adds to the poem's overall sense of melancholy, darkness.  This mood, of course, is more obviously driven by some of Bohince's choice words: "haunting," "departure," "ragged," "cloud-headed."  I would include "Un-find" in this list as well since it is such a weirdly formed word.  "Un-find" makes me feel so uncomfortable.  I mean -- that's an impossible task.  Once something is found, can it be un-found?  It can be lost, but can it be...ignored?  Sort of like finding Waldo: once you know he's there, it's pretty well impossible to un-know his location, to un-find him on that page of the hidden picture book.

Perhaps this notion of impossibility is at the crux of the poem.  There's this clear sense of letting go, of being ordered to let go, as evidenced by the commands in the second stanza, yet to feel nostalgic is generally an acceptable way to feel.  It is bittersweetly pleasant.  It is a remembrance and longing for a happiness that has been but is no longer.  Perhaps the speaker here has been unable to move forward.  Perhaps she feels fettered by those emotions and their connection to past events necessary to the poem but hidden from its readers.  And if that's the case, then the poem actually struggles against it's title: the speaker does not want to feel this way.

So then, who is being spoken to?  In the first stanza, there is no clear speaker and audience, but the two commands "Un-find" and "kiss" of the second stanza clearly separate the poem into the speaker and the spoken-to.  The third stanza combines them into the we who "were landmark, / compass . . ." Running forward with the relationship read of "Nostalgia," I'm going to say we have a lover who located her place in life according to this past relationship, to a "we" of which she is no longer part.  When the relationship ended, that sense of place vanished with it, as it often does in the world after a seemingly steadfast (to use Bohince's own language) relationship.

While "Nostalgic" isn't my favorite poem in recent months, I do appreciate its tight, constricted lines.  It feels crafted. It controls how I read it down the page, forcing me to wonder about the "right" words and lines...I think.

Billy Collins' "Grave"

Neal Conan interviewed Billy Collins on Talk of the Nation last week for Collins' new book of poems, Horoscopes for the Dead.  As always, Collins gave a great interview, like or dislike what he had to say.  Collins has a very smooth, quiet demeanor, and he knows how to answer questions as well as read poems.  Nothing worse than a good on-the-page poet whose performance skill is sub-par.  And, its hard not to appreciate Collins' ideas on poetry at large, that it should be accessible to everyone, not just to poets.  His own work certainly demonstrates he practices what he preaches.

But its precisely for this reason that I've never fallen in love with his poetry.  One of my buddies in grad school said his work was "suburban," that he may be one of America's first "suburban" poets, neither highfalutin and removed nor gritty and involved -- but comfortable, easy, and well, I'm not exactly sure what.  Whether suburban is an accurate description of his work or not, I don't really know.  I've just never been grabbed by his language or his risk taking, which for the longest time I saw as missing altogether.

However, while thinking about what makes Collins a suburban poet, I came to realize his lack of what I consider risk in a poem is one of his risks.  There is a common misbelief that (good) poetry must not only be insightful but difficult.  Much of Collins' work flies in the face of the second half of that notion.  He's wildly popular as a result, at least partially I would argue.  Very few of his poems meander lyrically, are esoteric, require a particularly erudite reader, and pose few literal and metaphorical leaps.  Rather they are often very-heavily narrative (thus easy to follow), prosy (thus easy to read), and full of common language and images he provides in a realistic, as opposed to a surrealistic, fashion (thus easy to understand).

Talk of the Nation provides 4 poems from Collins' new book, Horoscopes for the Dead, on the webpage for the April 6 interview's accompanying article.  I'm taking a look at "Grave" for no other reason than it is the first poem of the batch.  In a nutshell, the speaker in "Grave" is visiting the graves of his dead parents.  He lays down beside them, so to speak, and describes the conversation they have about his new glasses by way of discussing the various "one hundred kinds of silence / according to the Chinese belief."  The mode of this poem is pretty standard for Collins: short narrative, readable language, no difficult metaphorical leaps.  The only undisguised metaphor is the lovely simile in the last line, which compares the "Silence of the Lotus" to "petals."

First, I'm going to consider this poem's pace in its relationship to the poem's ease and readability, its prosiness and its tension.  After all, this poem -- and many of Collins' poems -- may be prosy, but it is not sloppy.  There is a consistency of line that makes the language work and the piece be successful.

"Grave" is composed of three sentences.  The first stretches across four tercets, the last across five, and the middle across one and an extra line.  Each line contains roughly 4 accented beats and is about the same length as every other, last line excepting.  Barely half of these (16) are enjambed and none of them ruthlessly.  In fact, every line maintains an integrity of idea and/or picture, creating a comfortable read for pretty well any reader. While there is no distinct rhythm created by an arrangement of syllables, no meters and ghost meters, the consistent line lengths and their integrity of thought creates a rhythm of its own, thereby controlling pace.  That shortish, middle sentence helps with this, too.  The preceding and ensuing sentences are long, the first a double-complex sentence (I guess you could call it) and the last the same, both made of 2-3 independent clauses and a number subordinate clauses, some of which interrupt the sentence-flow but do so only for the duration of a line.  Consider the third stanza.  The speaker is describing his mother's initial answer to his question, "What do you think of my new glasses", which is silence:

one of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief
each one distinct from the others,

Collins' two long sentences in "Grave" ramble on a bit, but they are easily readable.  They are conversational, which I also think makes them comfortable.  Because of their construction, their air seems familiar.  And that's no easy feat, considering poetry is about compression and music and prosy poems can too easily become prosaic and dull.  But Collins is a strict task-master of his line; none escape his control.  The only line in "Grave" that sort of breaks this construction is the last line, and that's not because Collins has lost his grip on it.  Simply put, that line sticks out, literally.  But it's the last line of the poem and is designed, I'm sure, to resonate with  readers.  So Collins literally gives it more weight.

The other thing "Grave" has going for it is its use of the inner and outer worlds.  Often I find that prosaic poems get lost in action -- they become a list of actions -- in order to keep themselves going: this happens, then this happens, then this, that, the other, etc.  "Grave" uses action to set the scene, then it moves internally, and we get the speaker's thoughts and reflections.  This keeps the poem in timeless space so much good poetry resides in, keeps it in that place distinctly poetry and not prose.  Thus, "forward" progress akin to plot never occurs.  Instead the poem moves inward, which is where its reward is.

And, as he did with his consistent line, Collins works into and out of his speaker with a clear control.  The basic, straightforward cores of his sentences contain the poem's basic narrative, and if I pull them out, we'll get the basic story: "What do you think of my new glasses / I asked as I stood under a shade tree / before the joined grave of my parents, // and what followed was a long silence / that descended on the rows of the dead / and on the fields and the woods beyond // .... They make you look very scholarly, / I heard my mother say / once I lay down on the ground // and pressed an ear into the soft grass. / Then I rolled over and pressed / my other ear to the ground, // the ear my father likes to speak into, / but he would say nothing, / ..."  That's 14 lines worth of outer world, roughly half of the poem, and it flows perfectly well when put together.  The other 16 lines of the poem are comprised of inner-world data, of info about the different kinds of silence, "according to the Chinese belief," and they are the tacked-on pieces to the sentences.  The result is that the poem is very well balanced between these two worlds, and Collins creates this balance with a consistent construction that is easy to follow: outer-world core sentence, inner-world add-on; outer-world complete, short sentence; outer-world core sentence, inner-world add-on.  The lyric is first grounded in narrative.  Even the least adroit readers will know where things stand.

So a consistency of line and of content, of that shifting from outer experience to inner world, makes "Grave" click.  I haven't read much Billy Collins in a long time, but my recollection of his poems is that they are typically written in a similar way.  Certainly those accompanying Grave per NPR fit the mold.  As a result, they are easy to read and follow whether you are a poet or not, whether you are a reader of poems or not.  You know how to breathe each line, where to pause, where the inflections go, and a dictionary isn't necessary.  Is all this a bad thing?  I personally know some poets who hate this sort of thing in poetry.  But I say accessible, if done well, is successful.

Erin Murphy's "Dear Fringe"

I haven't been overly impressed with the poems at Verse Daily lately, but Erin Murphy's "Dear Fringe" caught me, really for the simple pleasures of its imagery.  My favorite of the lot may be the poem's 4th couplet:

Ropy belly fur
on a river-loving dog.

"Ropy" just seems like the right way to describe that kind of semi-matted, soaked fur found on a long-haired pooch.  I picture a retriever...maybe something in the Benji breed.  I like, too, how "Ropy" acts as both a tactile and visual descriptor, that the rope I see is twine-like and, thus, the color of the dog -- at least in my version of the poem.

Murphy has nice imagery throughout with little extra to mess up the quaint little room "Dear Fringe" occupies.  Every couplet centers on a visual, some of them small-world like "Jangle on a flapper / girl's dress" and "marginal doodles" on a sheet of paper, others large-world like the non-descript, uniform "Grass in the pasture" and "The receiving line."  It's a nice mix of pictures that keeps the eye roving about the poem's landscape, for a brief moment zooming in, then looking away at a greater vista -- and vice versa.  Focus never lingers in any one spot for too long.  This is echoed through Murphy's use of the couplet, which she writes short and sweet, and her clipped phrases, none of which are complete sentences.  They're fragments, as though witnessed out of the corner of the eye but with greater clarity.

The poem utilizes sound well, too.  It begins heavy in the short A, as in "Jangle on a flapper . . . . bangs and lashes," and in S, "girl's dress, yes, but also // her bangs and lashes. / Grass in the pasture // not yet grazed . . ."  Acoustic texture such as this adds layers to the poem and makes it a pleasure to read without necessarily banging me over the head with its craft.  Other lines are more obvious, such as line 6: "Shop talk, small talk."  The double-spondee, the direct repetition of "talk," and the caesura midway through the four-syllable line all draw reader attention.  You can't miss that line.  The poem's last stanza does a similar thing.

In terms of content, I like that this poem pays attention to, well, the fringe -- to things that exist on the cusp of our awareness although they may do so with great, unobserved ubiquity.  I like Murphy's inclusion of the receiving line, too, which for me is a game changer. Until then, I find no common thread for the images -- which is fine but no more.  However, at "The receiving line: // handshake, handshake, / handshake, kiss. . ." I suddenly read a turn in the lyric toward narrative.  Am I at a funeral?  Has the grandmother in stanza 6 passed on?  Could be, could be.  Having been at a number of funerals, some for the closest of family, I know that fringe...of stepping out of your life for awhile at the loss of a loved one, that feeling of holding onto something so small it's held suddenly with a different urgency, a different tightness than before.  Could the previous images be fleeting memories?  Details from photographs?  Simply the mental flotsam of a wandering mind during a trying time?

I don't know for sure.  And that's fine.  I don't need to know the story in order for Murphy's poem to work.  I simply like the fact that the poem's turn makes me wonder about what I've just read.  It doesn't remain just a list of images for me to enjoy, then click past.