Uncomfortable reading (12.21.20)

I mentioned in my previous post something about reading poetry that's outside your comfort zone, even if you don't especially like reading it.  For reading such poetry inevitably expands your understanding of poetry (not to mention other peoples' experiences, takes and cultural backgrounds).

Each week New York Times Magazine publishes one poem, squeezed between "The Thread" and "Talk" features, maybe as a kind of balancing measure, emotionally speaking.  The editor, always a poet of national reputation, changes from time to time--over the past year, Naomi Shihab Nye has done the selecting; before her I believe it was our new Laureate, Louise Gluck; and before her, Terrence Hayes--and this week's Magazine introduces Reginald Dwight Batts as the poetry editor.  He selected a poem by Afaa Michael Weaver, titled "American Income." 

In keeping with the editorial custom, Batts writes a short backgrounder on the poet along with a thumbnail analysis of the poem, partly to help the average NYT reader get a better handle on the material, partly I suppose, to justify his selection.  Here is the poem:

American Income

The survey says all groups can make more money

if they lose weight except black men . . . men of other colors

and women of all colors have more gold, but black men

are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales,

meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering

of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the

ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life

beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands

working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands

now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon

waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone

up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise

up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite

gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love

anymore, gone down inside Earth somewhere where

women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever

these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts

torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing

until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold

of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway

to Jerusalems, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling

keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.

There is no other piece of writing in the weekly Magazine that asks to be read and then re-read and possibly read yet again--which is why you won't see more than one poem in the Magazine each week, and why I am surprised (and slightly gratified) that the Times even bothers.  This poem is typical, for me.  It doesn't give itself up to a first reading, let alone a skim-over.  Its style and subject matter are well outside my comfort zone for poetry.  It is filled with allusions, turns of phrase, syntactical locutions, images, jump-cuts . . . all of which block my mind from the easy read it wants.  It calls upon me to slow down, reread, stop, ponder, wonder about, return, repeat.  It makes me ask, What are you talking about, Mr. Weaver?  and Who are you talking to?

In "American Income" I encounter a cultural point of view that is so not mine as to be opaque, obstinate in its refusal to be "read through" to some paraphrase that an aging white American male can formulate.  Which is why I've read the poem three times now, and typed it into this post as a kind of fourth reading, and why I will read it twice, three times more, I suppose.  Now that I'm invested in the language of the poem, I want to become equally invested in the voice, the situation of it, its "aboutness."  I want to paraphrase it to the extent that I can explain to somebody (me included) who might ask, What's it about?

Does that kill the poem?  Wrong question.  

The question should be, Does that rereading and paraphrasing help me understand a kind of poetry that I do not write, and likely cannot write?  Does it buy me some deeper insight into the possibilities of poetry, so that when I come to write my next poem, I'll write from a deeper understanding of what poetry is and what can be done with it (by me)?  So that I'll recognize more readily that the poem I just wrote is just good enough, and that that's not good enough?