How to talk about a poem: a poem by Bob Cumming (9.30.22)

We had a rewarding discussion of a few poems at this week's Wednesdays@One. I say this because we got through only five of the eleven on tap. This happens often enough because of our approach to talking about the poems: we tend to dwell on how a poem works, the decisions the writer made in composing, as well as decisions the writer either failed to make or declined to make. And a poem is always a record of choices made and options chosen or not. 

I especially valued the discussion of this short poem by Bob Cumming:

Directions for the Day of My Death

Something swimming in the lake.

Kids shouting.

My close people in a circle

swopping lies.

Wind still roughing up the trees.

We looked at it from several angles. Its use of verbs in the present participle form, for instance. And how the speaker draws your attention (literally, what you see and hear) to the far and the near, the high and the low.  We talked quite a bit about that enigmatic first line: what's swimming in the lake? Does it matter that we aren't told anything specific? What would be the effect on the poem if the poem were more specific--a duck, maybe, or a person, or a fish? 

We didn't talk about planes. This idea occurred to me later on. By planes, I mean images of surfaces and depths. There is the lake and whatever is swimming "in" it, which offers an image of what can be seen on the surface and what swims beneath it, out of sight. There's also the image of the circle, closed, we can assume, to outsiders, where lies are being told. What kind of lies? Well, family stories, perhaps. But more likely, given the nature of this poem, interiors that are threatened with exposure and vulnerable. So, the kinds of family myth that, in a time of loss and mourning, might shield the family members--the family itself--from scrutiny. And finally, there is the visual plane of wind in the trees. The wind seen only in its effect on the trees, a roughing up, like the effect of an event or a change in fortune on a psyche.

So we have in these five brief, almost terse lines, a series of images of surface and depth, admittance and exclusion, interior and exterior lives, and the invisible accessible only through its effects.  

Bob acknowledged that this poem was composed in response to a seminar on Jung and poetry. Which leads me to what is probably the main plane: that separating the living and the dead, as the title suggests and as the present participle form of the verbs confirms. In the event of my death, life goes on.

Quite a poem!

How to talk about a poem: a Charles Simic poem (9.26.22)

Another installment in the series, "How to talk about a poem." 

Let's say that the poet Charles Simic visits our Wednesdays@One salon with a poem to share and discuss. Simic has published some 25 books of poems, starting with 1967's What the Grass Says. He's published at a 2-4 year clip, so, a pretty steady output of single volumes, collected editions, and has won the Pulitzer Prize. 

The poem he's brought along today is from his latest book, Come Closer and Listen, published by Ecco. You can be sure that, to Simic, this poem is "last year's cold," as the poet Anne Sexton used to say of her published work. That is, he's over it. Any advice we're likely to give him about improving this poem will fall upon deaf ears.

Still, he's brought the poem along for discussion, so the least we can do is to discuss it.  Here is the poem:

Some Birds Chirp

Others have nothing to say.

You see them pace back and forth,

Nodding their heads as they do.

It must be something huge

That's driving them nuts--

Life in general, being a bird.

Too much for one little brain

To figure out on its own.

Still, no harm trying, I guess,

Even with all the racket

Made by its neighbors,

Darting and bickering nonstop.

Where to begin a conversation about this little poem? Do we talk about it in technical terms? Or maybe in terms of style? Or perhaps even more literary terms, as in how the poem arises from/shows an understanding of literary history? Maybe we should talk about it as art, that is, as a "making" made from words that moves from a beginning through a middle to an end? That would be the conversation Aristotle might encourage! Or maybe we could talk about this poem as a social construct; you know, taking into account the race, gender, politics, religion or creed implied in the speaker, of the author and/or the reader (i.e., you, in particular).

Each of these is an "approach" to the poem that lies on the page before us or reverberates into the air around us as it is spoken aloud, twice, through the voices of two readers, as we do at W@1.

What we won't do is to talk idly about the poem. We won't let ourselves rest on statements like:

I really like this poem!

I've seen birds behave just like this in my own yard!

I can relate to this poem!

This poem has nice page real estate!

Spare!

Every word contributes, and not a word out of place!

Funny!

But WHY do you like this poem? So WHAT, you've seen birds behave this way? HOW do you relate? What do you MEAN by "nice"? WHY is "spare" important? HOW does the word "with" contribute to the poem? What MAKES the poem funny?

What I mean is, we should talk about the poem not through vague impressions of "like" or "dislike," but in terms of its parts, how it works, its literary lineage, the figures it deploys, its "voicings," its plot (or, if you prefer, not THAT it moves, but HOW it moves from beginning to end).

Suppose we begin our discussion with the poem's figures and how they are deployed throughout, for this is a poem of figures of speech, as many of Simic's poems are. In fact, somebody in our group, who has read many of Simic's books and maybe an essay or two about his writing, might contribute that Simic is not American by birth, that English is his second language, that, like Nabokov before him, Simic has gone to great lengths to Americanize his speech and vocabulary, even if he still speaks with a distinctively Serbian accent (he was born in Belgrade). As you will no doubt hear when our visitor reads his poem aloud. So much is his commitment to language, all language, as a poet. And given this personal history, it won't be a great leap to infer (and so much of our discussion of any poem will depend on the quality of the inferences we make!) that Simic is attracted to American speech patterns, colloquialisms, sayings, ways of speaking, and often builds these into his poems in the form of figures of speech.

The birds of this poem "pace," nodding their heads as they do. Something's driving them nuts. Maybe it's life in general. Whatever it is, it is probably too much for one little brain. Still, no harm in trying, I guess. The speaker watches the silent birds "try" even with all the racket made by the birds that do sing (or bicker). 

Each of these phrases/words derives from common American speech. Even translated into Serbian, they will not ring with the same flatness that they have in common speech or this poem. They come across, in their flatness of tone, as idle chatter. And so there you have it, a poem built of the idle chatter (thoughts) of somebody observing birds "trudge" about before him on the ground. You have to admire expressions like "life in general" and "I guess" as Simic uses them in this poem. Outside of the construct of the poem, these are expressions that any one of us will use at any point in any conversation in which we are not particularly invested, are unwilling to devote much thought to, haven't the time or the energy or the interest to think more deeply about.

And yet. In this poem these markers of idle chatter carry the artistic load! Idle thoughts about birds that chirp and birds that don't. Now who would write a poem about that? Charles Simic, that's who. He is a poet of the idle, workaday consciousness beneath which lurks comedy and terror and a very deep unease. Simic is a Surrealist. His poems acknowledge that we live on two planes: a quotidian and a dream world, a world of logic and a world of disconnection, and they find irony, humor, tragedy . . . humanity . . . in that dual existence.

So now we have talked about one part of Simic's poem, its figures. We could dive in another direction or go deeper. We could talk about the poem's metaphorical structure: how the birds are like people, described in terms of people we've all seen and heard (or not heard, ha-ha) at one time or another. No doubt, some of us have already made this connection between pacing people and birds walking around on the ground while other birds sing in the trees. And no doubt at least some of us have noted that there seem to be two kinds of people in the world, those who trudge around with heads down and those who seem to celebrate, lifting their voices.

We could go on and talk about point of view as a key element of the art of this poem. Who is seeing all this drama unfold among the chattering and silent birds? From what vantage point is the seeing done? A park bench? A window? And, given that the speaker dwells on the subject especially of the birds that (seem to) pace, might we infer (there we go again!) that the speaker identifies with these birds that "have nothing to say"? That the speaker's thoughts are fulfilled through such idle chatter suggests so. Ironic!

And there you have it. An hour and a half nearly used up talking substantively about Charles Simic's poem. And we haven't even talked yet about how "good" the poem is, or whether it might be improved, or how it reveals a certain style of writing, thinking and feeling.  

That's for another ninety minutes.

Marvell's Upon Appleton House (9.8.22)

Today, during a discussion of surreal or hyper-real or just plain heightened imagery in one of the poems shared (thanks, Shoshana, for your wonderful poem!), I mentioned this famous poem by Andrew Marvell. I confused its title and subject with a poem in the same sub-genre (the country-house poem) by Ben Jonson, "To Penshurst."  

Marvell's poem, "Upon Appleton House," is a marvelous piece of work. He wrote it in 1651, a couple of generations after the Jonson poem, but in the same vein or sub-genre of complimenting a person, perhaps a benefactor or potential benefactor, i.e., somebody in position to do a writer some good at court or among the publishers, i.e., somebody with money, connections and, of course, an estate, complimenting a person through a glowing description of his or her digs in the country.

You can read the Wikipedia entry on Marvell's poem, but I recommend that you go and read the poem.  It'll go slow in the beginning, due to the 500-year old English, but it's worth the time and effort. 

What made me think of this poem were the lines in Shoshana's poem about the fish tattoo and the fish imagery in general.  (If you don't have the time or the patience to read the whole poem, go to stanza 60, where the fish imagery comes in. But you should know that the passage is best read in context of the developing argument of the poem.) The imagery is so striking, "arresting" was the word that I used this afternoon, as to be, as I say above, hyper-real.  Realer than real.  Air-brush real.  Too-bright-for-the-light-of-day real. In other words, surreal. For in Marvell's poem, you'll find a wonderfully hyper-real description of fish swimming in air, seemingly. The estate had endured a serious flood just before Marvell visited, or perhaps as he visited, as I recall from the poem. So, a fish swimming across a field seemingly through the air would of course had been a fish in a flooded field.

I remember first reading that image and thinking how perfectly Apollinaire of Marvell!

Talking about poems , Part 3: we come to it as art (9.4.22)

If we mean to talk about a poem, we have to come to it as art, not as statement. And if we mean to come to a poem as art, we have lots of tools and frameworks at our disposal for talking about it.  Part 2 covered one of those tools, the most foundational of them: language as both the medium and the material of the art.  Others, which I'll develop in following blog posts, include figures of speech, syntax, rhyme and meter, repetition; voice and persona and their close cousin, tone; style, both personal and historical; intention; appreciation and its close relative, reception.

One way to talk about the art of a poem we're reading is to ask ourselves not What is it saying? but What is it saying to me? Which can also be put this way: What is this poem's effect on me? Which, when we come down to it, we're asking . . .

How am I responding to this poem?

For when we talk about art, we don't talk just about the art object, which is a merely technical discussion or description, but about our experience with the art object. We always include ourselves when we talk about a work of art.

Now this doesn't mean that we can get away with statements like "I liked it very much!" upon reading a poem. Or "It moves me." Or "Oft thought but ne'er so well expressed!" These are impressions, but hardly discussions of a work of art.  Nor can we "read" ourselves, our opinions, our prejudices "into" a poem, if we mean to talk about it as a work of art: "This passage reminds me of the time when I . . ." You know what I mean.

When I ask myself how I am responding to a poem (as a work of art), I am interested in how my mind and my emotions engage with it, are focused, aroused, suspended, engaged, confounded, titillated, confirmed, denied as I read phrase by phrase, line by line, stanza by stanza down the page of text (or, even more interestingly, as it's uttered into my hearing). Has the poem led me to expect the next image or line or figure of speech or rhymed ending? Has it teased with an expectation only to deliver something else? Has the poem violated everything I've learned to expect about a poem and how it works? If I am surprised by a poem - its language, images, structure, cadences, beginning or ending - why am I surprised. What was I expecting that didn't happen?

You see where I'm headed with this. One way to talk about a poem as a work of art is to examine my own assumptions about what a poem is and to measure the success of the poem against those expectations, on the one hand, and the appropriateness or adequacy of those expectations against the poem, on the other.

When I come to a poem as art, I come to myself as a Reader of Poetry and not of an opinion piece, a letter to the editor, an expository essay, a story (merely), a piece of reportage, a speech (especially!), an instruction, a proposal. 

Art engages and moves us in deep ways. To the extent that it is presented to us in the form of words, our interest remains: What is our engagement, precisely, and toward what are we moved? How does that engagement or movement begin, develop, and fulfill itself in the poem as we read, image by image, line by line, stanza by stanza, beginning, middle and end?

The less we talk about what we think a poem "means" or "what it's about," or at least the longer we hold that interest at bay, and the more we try to talk about our own engagement with the poem, the better we talk about a poem.

------------

Here's an interesting reading exercise. Choose a poem you've never encountered before, so you don't know what to expect as you read from line to line. Have a notebook and a pen handy as you read. 

Jot down in the notebook your impressions as you go through the text phrase by phrase if you like, or image by image, line by line and so on.  Try to note where you are surprised by the text, where your expectations for what comes next are fulfilled, how you react emotionally, even physically, and intellectually.  How much head-scratching are you doing in one portion of the text compared to another? What parts of the poem do you tend to skim, and what parts force you to reread the text? 

Then reread it. Does the text of the poem remind you of any other poems you've read in the past? Is the poem completely new to you? How does the poem begin and end? Does the poem "speak" with a voice? Whose voice is it? Whose voice could it be? Does the look of the text on the page (assuming you're reading and not listening) seem to have anything to do with how the poem affects you as you read?

In doing the above, you are approaching the poem as art. Why? Because you are interested not (yet) in what the poem "says" but in your own engagement with it, how you absorb new information, how the text encourages you to absorb new information, when and how you get bogged down, read more slowly or rapidly, and so on.