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!