I’ve been thinking about Janet’s request (plea?) for
examples of poems built from, or upon one or more questions. We may be
tilling fresh soil here, or at least a rarely tilled field. Many contemporary poems—and I believe this is a legacy of Modernism—are declarative, assertive to the extreme that asking a question in a poem seems like it has gone the way of the exclamation point: out of fashion. No self-respecting poet writing today asks too many questions. The poet's job is to provide answers!
Just leafing through a few books taken at random from my own shelves . . . Mark Strand, in his short, elegant book, Man and Camel, asks only five questions among the twenty-three poems incorporated there, one of which is a quote from the Cross in the poem "Poem after the Last Seven Words." Brad Leithauser puts eleven questions somewhere in the twenty-three poems and seventy-one pages of The Mail From Anywhere, a few of which are tossed off, rhetorical. John Ashbery is comparatively interrogative-crazy in Where Shall I Wander, asking four dozen questions (many of which are atmospheric, tonal, rhetorical, prosy, and experienced as if you're overhearing a conversation at the next table or someone mumbling into the hearth). That's 48 discounting the un-punctuated title of the book.
In An Almost Pure Empty Walking, Tryfon Tolides (Penguin Books, 2006) posits fewer than a dozen questions, several of them toss-offs in dialog, until the poem "Questions for My Dead Aunt in the Village," which is a thorough-going Question Poem:
Is there a ring around the moon? Has the weather spoiled?
Have the trains begun? Did you stop gathering wood
as the mountains became dark and the sky opened up?
Have chimneys begun to breathe? Is the church quieter?
Is it cold there Sundays? Do the windows fog?
When it snows, will you still go? Will you sit by the fire?
Have you lifted and secured the latch? Do you hear
the dogs in the dark, as you lie under think wool blankets?
What of the yards, the houses, when spring comes?
Are the neighborhoods alive? Does anyone tell stories late
into the night? Were there mushrooms this year? Who went?
When a poem is made entirely of questions, all answers must be provisional, imagined, and provided by anyone who happens across them because there is no one to answer them for us. “The Tyger,” of course, is a famous
example of questions asked but no answers provided. In the case above, the aunt is not available in multiple ways: she is dead literally, and she is dead textually and therefore our desire for answers goes unfulfilled. Which is the point of the poem, right? We must accept that there can be no other answers than the ones we supply. Meaning what? That the asking of a series of unanswerable questions in a poem is a supremely rhetorical move. How current that feels!
The Tradition: ask and answer.
The Modern: don't ask.
Post-Modern: ask, don't expect (reliable) answers.
Examples
And when I dug deeper into my shelves, further back in time, for this project I found more poems that are built upon one or two or more crucial questions. But more often, they are built on a rhetorical frame of question and answer: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" It's a good (if not entirely true) world in which to live where every question is given its answer.
The Girl I Call Alma
─ Linda Gregg
(1975)
The
girl I call Alma who is so white
is
good, isn’t she? Even though she does not speak
you
can tell by her distress that she is
just
like the beach and the sea, isn’t she?
And
she is disappearing, isn’t that good?
And
the white curtains and the secret smile
Are
just her way with lies, aren’t they?
And
that we are not alone, ever.
And
that everything is backward,
otherwise.
And
that inside the no is the yes. Isn’t it?
Isn’t
it? And that she is the god who perishes:
the
food we eat, the body we fuck,
the
looseness we throw out that gathers her.
Fish!
Fish! White sun! Tell me that we are one
and
that it’s the others who scar me
not
you.
Sonnet 18
─ William
Shakespeare (ca. 1595-8?)
Shall
I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou
art more lovely, and more temperate.
Rough
winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And
summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime,
too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And
often is his gold complexion dimmed.
And
every fair from fair sometime declines,
By
chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d.
But
they eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor
lose possession of that fair though owest.
Nor
shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade
When,
in eternal lines to time, thou growest.
So long as men
do breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives
this, and this gives life to thee.
How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43)
─ Elizabeth
Barret Browning (ca. 1850)
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
What Inn Is This (#
19)
─
Emily Dickinson (ca. 1859)
What Inn is this
Where for the night
Peculiar Traveller comes?
Who is the Landlord?
Where the maids?
Behold, what curious rooms!
No ruddy fires on the hearth ─
No brimming Tankards flow ─
Necromancer! Landlord!
Who are these below?
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