Tangled Rope

The NYT featured an interesting op-ed by poet and critic David Orr on the restrictions of copyright law and the well-known fogginess of Fair Use when quoting poetry (“When Quoting Verse, One Must Be Terse”, Sept 8, 2011). Orr rightly points out that the unofficial standard used by poetry critics is often to include the entire text of a poem; however, legally speaking, this practice oversteps Fair Use.
“As things stand, poets and critics are at the mercy of an incoherent system,” Orr writes. As we in higher ed are too well aware, one could easily replace “critic” with teacher.

Personally, I have no shame about having shared entire poems here, on this blog–in part this is because one can hardly talk about a poem without having access to the poem, but also because I believe that poets, along with many other classes of artists, benefit from open sharing of their work.

I enjoyed posting on select poems from The Best American Poetry 2009 last December, and planned to do the same this year. We’re clearly a week into December with no posts or poems, which says a lot about how I follow-through with Good Ideas. Chris mentioned he might record selected poems from BAP 2010 and post them with commentary; I think that’s a great way to reinvest myself in podcasting literature, personalize this year’s BAP reading, and save myself the trouble of retyping the poem accurately.

Before I begin (or, really, because I haven’t begun) I want to share my first-pass shortlist of dog-eared poems from BAP 2010:

Todd Boss – My Dog Has No Nose
Anne Carson – Wildly Constant
> David Clewell – This Poem Had Better Be about the World We Actually Live In
> Billy Collins – Grave
Peter Davis – Four “Addresses”
Lynn Emanuel – Dear Final Journey,
> Vievee Francis – Smoke under the Bale
Sonia Greenfield – Passing the Barnyard Graveyard
Corinne Lee – Six from “Birds of Self-Knowledge”
> Hailey Leithauser – The Old Woman Gets Drunk with the Moon
> Jeffrey McDaniel – The Grudge
W.S. Merwin – Identity
> James Richardson – Vectors 2.3: 50 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
Charles Simic -Carrying on like a Crow
David Trinidad – Black Telephone
Derek Walcott – 21
> Catherine Wing – The Darker Sooner
Mark Wunderlich – Coyote, with Mange

> Indicates a poem that was also on Chris’s first-pass list.

There’s not a chance that I’ll cover all of these poems this month–I’ll be lucky to hit my five favorites. But for one reason or another I found these poems noteworthy enough to take a second or third look at, and it is likely from this pool that I’ll release some totally unauthorized audio recordings.

This narrative poem, sent to me via an e-mail, deserves attention and dissemination.

Of the Parrat and Other Birds that Can Speake

Nick Lantz, We Don't Know We Don't Know.  Graywolf Press, 2010.

It is for certain knowne that they have died
for very anger and griefe that they could not
learn to pronounce some hard words.
—Pliny the Elder


When you buy the bird for your mother
you hope it will talk to her. But weeks pass
before it does anything except pluck the bars
with its beak. Then one day it says, “infect.”

 Your mother tells you this on the phone,
and you drive over, find the frozen meals
you bought for her last week sweating
on the countertop. “In fact,” she says

in answer to your question, “I have been
eating,” and it’s as you point to the empty
trash can, the spotless dishes, that you
realize the bird is only saying, “in fact,”

that this is now the preamble to all
of your mother’s lies. “In fact,” she says,
“I have been paying the bills,” and you
believe her until you find a cache

of unopened envelopes in the freezer.
More things are showing up where
they shouldn’t. Looking out the back
window one evening you see craters

in her yard. While she’s watching TV,
you go out with a trowel and excavate
picture frames, flatware that looks like
the silver bones of some exquisite

animal. You worry when you arrive
one day and see the open, empty cage
that you will find the bird dead, stuffed
in an oven mitt and left in a drawer,

but you find it sitting on her shoulder
in the kitchen. “In fact,” she says,
“he learned to open the cage himself.”
The bird learns new words. You learn

which lies you can ignore. The stroke
that kills her gives no warning, not—
the doctor assures you—that anyone
can predict such things. When you

drive home that night with the cage
belted into the passenger seat, the bird
makes a sound that is not a word
but that you immediately recognize

as the sound of your mother’s phone
ringing, and you know it is the sound
of you calling her again and again,
the sound of her not answering.

Poem in my pocket is printed manuscript copy of Whitman’s “Live Oak, with Moss”:

I like short poems best, probably because I’m lazy or rushed, but possibly because their succinctness requires that the poem maximizes the language, and that impresses me. It also may be that in their brevity are easily digested, and in a single, whole chunk they can be stored in memory. Though his explanation is often oversimplified or misunderstood, Poe does a better job of targeting the effectiveness of short bursts of poetry in “The Philosophy of Composition” wherein he argues:

What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones—that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.

Poe’s definition of a “brief” poem is longer than mine–for Poe the effect of a poem derived from a “unity of impression” that he believed was disrupted by breaking off from and returning to a poem. So “long” to him, though relative, was defined by the need for multiple sittings. I count a short poem as one half-a-page or less, and blame a short attention span for this preference. I do enjoy long poems, but I wonder at the pleasure I derive from short poems (sually when I’m reading a long poem and my mind wanders, or I wonder if I didn’t pay close enough attention to a stanza that I should have, and if either of these will prevent me from being astonished in the end).

This brings me to “Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry”, a fine anthology of contemporary poems based on Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 project. Though I had “finished” with this book some time ago, I added this book to my Sunday stack because I couldn’t remember more than a couple poems from the anthology, and wanted to review it and consider why more poem’s didn’t stick. It turned out not to be any fault with the anthology, which I found still awfully strong, but rather a failure of my own brain, for even with the book closed I saw dozens of dog-eared pages gaping at me, like a playful pop waiting for me to return. As I worked through these marked poems, it was instantly obvious that most were what I’ve termed “short”. Here are three that quite pierced me, that I would have no excuse for not remembering again:

"White Towels"
Richard Jones

I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer.
I carry them through the house
as though they were my children
asleep in my arms.

"Only One of My Deaths"
Dean Young

Because it seems the only way to save the roses
is to pluck the Japanese beetles out of
their convoluted paradise
and kill them, I think for a moment,
instead of crushing them in the driveway,
of impaling them on the thorns.
Perhaps they'd prefer that.

"Sentimental Moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?"
Robert Hershon

Don't fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
DId you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn't know
is that when we're walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand

I could include more short poems from this anthology, though now I’m more curious to open up other anthologies and check my dog-eared poems’ lengths. I don’t recall ever studying the length of poems in school, but I’m sure there’s good stuff written on the subject which I’ll probably never get around to uncovering. The best thing I can say about my own preference to short poems that doesn’t indict myself is that short poems are harder than long poems, elegant, compact, imbued, necessary. A poet can take as long as s/he wants to explain the point, to tell the story. But how much can you cut away? Rather, how much can be more efficiently substituted without sacrificing aesthetic?

P. S. In customizable card games, as in many subjects, one is always aiming for the shortest, most efficient route to success. Because every turn allows only limited actions, advantage is held by the player who can maximize those actions, and much of that maximization comes from the design of one’s deck. Last night, after several games of Lord of the Rings with my friend Gavin, I immersed my mind in possibilities for a new deck, considering card choices by recognizing in each the balance between cost, effect, permanence, and reusability, and looking for whatever relative advantage might be hidden in each. As I did so my mind turned to poetry, and I was pleased to find a real aesthetic satisfaction in the design and construction of a deck of cards, though less intense, lasting, and meaningful than that I find in poetry.

I don’t quite have it in me this month to spend the hours necessary writing a review of one last poem from Best American Poetry 2009. I thought I would, and pushed my intention two weeks into the new year, but one has to let somethings go. There are books to read, letters to write, poems to finish, fiction to thresh, teaching to do, presentations to plan, children to play with, a house to keep up, films to watch, panic to wrestle with, sleep to catch up on, friends to visit, cards to organize, etc., etc.

But I will list a handful of notable poems from BAP 09 that I either thought about or planned to review before the year was out (from top to bottom):

1. J. D. McClatchey, “Lingering Doubts” (p 84). Incredibly dense and curious. I’m still several readings from comprehending this one, but I want to.
2. Pattiann Rogers, “A Blind Astronomer in the Age of Stars” (p 108). A moving, human poem that uses language to explore, in and out, as well as describe.
3. P. Hurshell, “In Winter” (p 60). Because it is winter, and beacuse it cuts so sharply from image to image while maintaining its theme.
4. Jeanne Murray Walker, “Holding Action” (p 137). It may be sentimental, simplistic, or just another metapoem, but I liked the collection of imagery all tied to the potential of letters (ambiguity intended, I think) to preserve that which we love.
5. Christine Marshall, “Sweat” (p 80). Because unlike the man in the introductory quote, I’m OK (and more) with a sweating girl.
6. Phillis Levin, “Open Field” (p 70). I didn’t have enough time to decipher it, but I still like it.
7. Mitch Sisskind, “Like a Monkey” (p 117). After too many mediocre Adam/Eve/Eden poems I rashly dismissed this amusing and poignant postmodern love poem on first read.
8. Sarah Lindsay, “Tell the Bees” (p 74). Leads an intimate, enigmatic path through a local environment that is both alien and familiar.
9. Albert Goldbarth, “Zones” (p 31). Bizarre and memorable imagery.
10. Denise Duhamel, “How It Will End” (p 24). I didn’t want it to, but this poem stuck with me for weeks.

There may be a couple on this list that I’d cut on another reading, but there are probably a couple from BAP 09 that I missed, either from failed memory or misunderstanding. Until BAP10 in December…

December is over, and I’ve done my best in the time I’ve had to highlight just a few favorite poems from The Best American Poetry 2009. I hope to review a couple more even though the new year has begun, starting with Kevin Prufer‘s “war” poem “On Mercy” (originally printed in Field):

Knowing he was soon to be executed
the condemned man asked if first he might
					please
have something to drink, if first he might
be drunk.
	So the soldiers brought him a drink
and because there was no hurry, another,
and one for each of them, to.
				Soon they were all
very drunk, and this was merciful
because the man probably didn't understand
when they put him to the wall
				and shot him.

+

I'll marry the man who can prove this happened,
the dying leaves said
			in their descent.

I'll marry the man who looks through that window,
the waiting grasstips said.

But the sun went on with its golden rays
like a zealous child

and the camera-eyed bees jittered mercifully
in the distant branches

+

The man slept on the floor
and the little mouse in his head also slept.

The soldiers didn't know who would drag him away
or where they should hide him
so they laughed nervously and one
offered the body a drink, Ha ha,
					a toast!

then left him by the rich lady's liquor cabinet
where she'd find him when she returned from the hills.

+

I'll marry the girl who kisses the lips
and brings a breath to them,
the starving horses said from their fields.

I'll marry the man who pounds the chest
and starts the heart,
			the caved-in houses said.

And the window let the light in
until the sun failed in the branches
and, like mercy,
		darkness smothered the town.

+

Later in the story, her grown son wrapped him
in a parachute
		and dumped him in a neighbor's yard.

Later, that neighbor, who understood bad luck,
dragged the man to another's lawn.

And so he traveled, yard-to-yard,
				to the edge of town
where at last he slept by a little-traveled road
in a merciful ditch

while bombers unzipped the sky.

And when the town burned, he missed it,
and when the treetops bloomed and charred, he missed it.

I'll marry the man,
the grasstips said in the hot wind,

I'll marry the girl,
the horses said, running from their burning barn, aflame,

their bodies glowing bluely in the dusk.

+

And no one proved it happened,
which was merciful for us all,

the road forgotten, the man gone to root and weed,
to marrow and tooth.

+

And if it had--
		Who would find his jawbone in the loam?
Who would pick out his bullet shells and fillings,
like glitter in the new wood?

And if a man should string them
like words on a golden chain

and make from them a charm,
			and give them to his wife,
wouldn't that be mercy, too?

I’ve seen just enough of Prufer’s poems to recognize the broken lines, such as one would see in dramatic dialogue persisting a meter; these force a slightly longer pause, giving a different body to the shape of the poem. The poem itself is regulated by an undertone of Nature’s incanted whisperings as a man is executed, and his body dumped from one location to another, until the town itself is destroyed by fire bombing.

What really caught me in this poem was its quick narrative style and sharp language. Prufer’s simple, accurate phrasing of descriptions smacks of realism without getting tangled in useless details. The diction walks the line between useful recognition and cliche, or even empathy and sentimentality. Many of his descriptions are personifying: the grasstips wait, the sun is “like a zealous child”, there are “camera-eyed bees”, houses and horses alike speak, “bombers unzipped the sky”.

The most remarkable anthropomorphizing is the reference to the corpse as “the man”, where most would use “body” or at least add the adjective “dead”. This drew my attention to usage of nouns to describe the dead, and I thought of how friends and family of the dead refer to them as if they were still alive, by title (“dad”) or by name (“Nate”), and often in the present tense. We rarely grant this privilege to strangers, using nouns as far removed from the person as possible, like “police found the girl’s body” or “we’ll take a tendon from a cadaver”, etc.

By using “the man” rather than “the body”, “the corpse”, or “the man’s body” the poet is being conscientiously compassionate to the man, and this is a kind of mercy. In general, the poem’s personification of various limbs of Nature would be uncomfortable if not for their contrast with the humans’ actions, which seem less thoughtful and only merciful by accident. The soldiers, probably out of duty more than mercy, grant the condemned man’s last request and give him alcohol. This is as much a chance for them to get drunk themselves as it is born of any mercy for the condemned. They did so “because there was no hurry”, then:

...another,
and one for each of them, to.
				Soon they were all
very drunk, and this was merciful
because the man probably didn't understand
when they put him to the wall
				and shot him.

The soldiers’ drunkenness spares them from terrible anticipation of and guilty conscience after their act, but like Cain realizing what they have done must hide the body, and thus dump it in a civilian’s house. The “rich lady’s” son:

wrapped him
in a parachute
	and dumped him in a neighbor's yard.
Later, that neighbor, who understood bad luck,
dragged the man to another's lawn.

And so he traveled, yard-to-yard,

None of this passing of the corpse is done with any intention of mercy; rather, it is the method by which each household passes responsibility for or connection to the dead away from themselves. In context of war, if the town itself was occupied by the enemy, the condemned man was likely one of their own, but discovered and captured and therefore not to be associated with for fear of reprisal by the occupiers. If the town is in a defensive position, we can guess the man was an enemy, or, perhaps worse, a traitor.

The passing of the body is a fascinating action, however, one that forces each to at least look upon, even touch the man’s body. Though they take no responsibility for the man, the townsfolk are sharing the news of his death from house to house, like gossip. The passing of the body inadvertently requires each household to share in the burden of disposing the corpse, and for a moment I wonder if the people might not fulfill nature’s first requests: “I’ll marry the man who can prove this happened”. Yet to no avail, for the bombers soon come and wipe out the town, and the man is forgotten.

What of the man’s “bullet shells and fillings” strung “like words on a golden chain”, given as “a charm” for “his wife”? It’s difficult for me to guess what the poet intends here, and I range from a abdication of human intention based on love, to an accusation of human ignorance to the past. This closing asks the read “wouldn’t that be mercy, too?”, suggesting the idea that the poet–and the reader–is not certain of what mercy means. I have defined “mercy” implicitly here to mean a kind of conscious compassion, a leniency linked to a degree of forgiveness for one who has done wrong, and this is supported by the poem. But there’s more to it, and I think the poet composed the images and actions with the intent of disrupting some of our assumptions about the meaning of mercy. We believe that humans are capable of mercy; animals are not, primarily because mercy’s core distinguishing feature is defined by positions of power–one can not be merciful if one has no power to enact a change in condition.

The theme of “mercy”, then, becomes confusing in light of Prufer’s personifications of the dumb plants and animals as yearning for compassion and order, and the portrayals of humans as callous and entrapped in themselves. This personification was difficult for me, but I’ve concluded that this may be Prufer’s way of saying that sometimes mercy comes without conscious thought or overt action (as with the soldiers’ drinking), through the functioning of Nature (the alcohol’s effect, the whisperings of the natural observers), or as the unintended consequences of an act of love (the man’s stringing together of fillings and shells for his wife). It’s hard to accept that these are the only ways mercy can be accomplished, and indeed the bargaining whispers and urgings of the plants and animals claim that there is a more active mercy that can be achieved. But why do none act on it in the poem?

I don’t believe this sort of active mercy is so rare as to be unrepresentable in the poem; rather it didn’t fit the poet’s narrative intent, or by making it elusive the poet teaches us to regret inaction, and anticipate opportunities to act for mercy in the future.

This is why the final stanza begins with “And if it had–”. Curious! This question suggests the entire poem is supposition, not history. This confounded me at first: why “if”? What good does “if” for the meaning of the poem, except disturb the narrative? I think Prufer gives us “if” only to propose to the reader that these things have happened, yes, just as the poet has described them, but it’s not just history; it’s also the future, and we can speculate as to what we might do when faced with either the dead man’s body, or the ruins of the town.

I still have many questions about “On Mercy”, not the least of which is the persistent offering to “marry” the merciful actor, yet the poem is satisfying, and the nagging of these questions will likely keep the poem in my mind after I’ve closed BAP 09, and return my thoughts to not only the theme of the poem, but something of this poet’s craft, too.

P. S. Another mild curiosity, the pluses (+) provide an addition to the stanza breaks, like the whisperings, urging “more” — this rings familiar, as I know Prufer has used somewhat unusual characters in the past to separate stanzas, but I also wonder what other poets, if any, have used specifically the +?

W. S. Merwin‘s “The Silence of the Mine Canaries” is one of my favorite poems from “The Best American Poetry 2009″ so far. I love the mystery that it carries through its elegant, unpunctuated lines, in part because its single stanza form perpetuates the reader’s anticipation. Take a look:

The bats have not flowered
for years now in the crevice
of the tower wall when the long twilight
of spring has seeped across it
as the west light brought back
the colors of parting
the furred buds have not hung there
waking among their dark petals
before sailing out blind along their own echoes
whose high, infallible cadenzas only
they could hear completely and could ride
to take over at that hour
from the swallows gliding
ever since daybreak over the garden
from their nests under the eaves
skimming above the house and the hillside pastures
their voices glittering in their exalted tongue
who knows how long since they have been seen
and the robins have gone from the barn
where the cows spent the summer days
though they stayed long after the cows were gone
the flocks of five kinds of tits have not come again
the blue tits that nested each year
in the wall where their young
could be heard deep in the stones by the window
calling Here Here have not returned
the marks of their feet are still there on the stone
of their doorsill that does not know
what it is missing
the cuckoo has not been heard
again this May
nor for many a year the nightjar
nor the mistle thrush song thrush whitethroat
the blackcap that instructed Mendelssohn
I have seen them
I have stood and listened
I was young
they were singing of youth
not knowing that they were singing for us

There is much to discuss in this poem. I start by commenting on the precise yet inventive descriptions. The first line, “The bats have not flowered” is almost a poem in and of itself. Merwin manages to carry that metaphoric imagery with similar surprising accuracy for the bats: “furred buds”, “dark petals” “sailing blind along their own echoes”. I’ve long suspected that good poetry echoes the images that one’s mind might automatically conjure in response to a word, and articulates those images clearly and succinctly. In this respect a good poem confirms what we subconsciously know. This is a very individual experience, often subjective, still, I found this holding true throughout the poem: with the bats, of course, and especially in description of the swallows:

ever since daybreak over the garden
from their nests under the eaves
skimming above the house and the hillside pastures

I know Merwin generally writes free of punctuation, but this poem in particular is a clear example of how lack of punctuation can support both music and meaning. The run-on rhythm—uninterrupted but by natural caesuras and line breaks that halt one’s breath–stretches one’s attention. And as expected the line breaks makes ambiguous certain key meanings.

…
whose high infallible cadenzas only
they could hear completely and could ride
to take over at that hour
from the swallows gliding
ever since daybreak
…

This ambiguousness helps condense meaning in the words, increasing their efficiency. And yet the ambiguousness can confuse at times. In this case, where the poem is substantiated by the mystery of the missing birds, I conclude the confusion is intentional. So what of the missing birds? We know that “The bats have not flowered / for years now”; “swallows … who knows how long since they have been seen”; other birds are “missing”, “not for many a year”; etc. No explanation is given, but at the end of the poem the narrator declares, “I have seen them”, and for a moment we think the narrator has the answer. But this is a ruse: “I was young”, and the poem proceeds to end without solving the mystery, and even introduces a new conundrum in the closing lines:

they were singing of youth
not knowing that they were singing for us

Who are “us”?

To answer this I return to the title, which seems to explain much, if not everything: “The Silence of the Mine Canaries”. Of course canaries sing most of the time, and their metabolism is such that they were prone to die quickly in the presence of toxic subterranean gases such as methane. Their “silence”, therefore, suggests they are dead. Do we take this literally and presume that the “us” are miners, who work far from the idyllic, pastoral locations where the bats and birds once roamed?

I found that the poem offered me the most unadulterated poetry in a literal interpretation, and I found compelling reasons to think the narrator, and the “us” for whom the birds once sang, are dead miners, perhaps unrecovered from a caved-in mine. The clues for this include the “silence of the Mine Canaries” in the title, the fact that the birds may be gone only for the narrator, and have been gone for some time, and that the poem itself seems out of time. I say this because presenting the poem as one long sentence suggests a simultaneousness. Further, taken as more than the poet’s style, the narrator’s lack of punctuation suggests s/he is free from such inventions, claiming a simplicity not available to most of us–a simplicity and freedom found in death?

More clues that the narrator (and “us”) is literally in a mine begin with Merwin’s first subject: the bat; not a bird, almost song-less in a poem full of songbirds, the bat evokes the image of the cave. the bat is a natural inhabitant of the mine, not the canary, not the implied miners. Indeed, both miners and canaries are quite absent from the poem itself, emphasizing that they are not here except through implication; that they are phantoms.

Not only are the bats and birds missing, they are missing from their homes: bats from the crevice, swallows from their nests, robins from the barn, tits in the wall, etc. The implied miners, too, are gone from their homes, and this accentuates the sense of loss felt by those who might go looking for them. Merwin may have inserted an exact metaphor to this end:

in the wall where their young
could be heard deep in the stones by the window
calling Here Here have not returned

If the “us” are these lost, perhaps dead miners, this analogy to the missing blue tits resonates with the poem’s ending lines, which state that the birds “were singing of youth / not knowing they were singing of us”. Either by death, by aging (natural or accelerated by the mines), or merely by assuming the responsibilities of adults, the miners have lost their youth, have even forgotten their youth, and have not known that the birds, singing of youth, sang for them.

There are more possible interpretations beyond the extensive and literal mystery I’ve supposed here. The poem emphasizes lost youth at the end, and so the silence of the mine canary may be merely a warning against that loss. I find the mine canary is generally an overused cliché in public discourse, but following this thread extends the poem to more figurative interpretations, such as a call for conservationism, both with respect to the collection and use of fossil fuels from the coal mine (canary as a warning against pollution), and as an homage to flying friends driven or killed off—though probably unintentionally—by man.In such an interpretation “us” becomes the true “us”, the “us” of all humanity.

I prefer the mystery of the miners, its ambiguity and mournfulness aligned with the lost beauty of the missing birds.

“Homage to the dead bird I found” by Hoong Wei Long. CC By-NC-SA

P. S.
So precise is the catalog of animals (bats, swallows, robins, 5 kind of tits including blue, cuckoo, nightjar, mistle thrush, song thrush, whitethroat, blackcap) that I’m tempted to research each and tie the poem down to a specific location. I do know that the blue tit is not a bird of the Americas; its habitat is firmly in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The blackcap is also a European bird, and so I’m inclined to think either the poet has purposely set this poem in Europe (perhaps England), or used the birds indiscriminately.

P. P. S.
I do not know how the blackcap “instructed Mendelssohn”, though the allusion conjured Olivier Messiaen, a composer who studied and transcribed bird songs. If you know, please tell me.

The second poem in The Best American Poetry 2009 is Caleb Barber’s “Beasts and Violins” (Caleb’s forthcoming book is titled the same, likely for the prominence of this poem in the anthology). I tried to leave this poem alone as I read through BAP09, but kept coming back for another look. Here’s the poem:

Beasts and Violins

I wandered the house looking for a blank notebook
today, until I found one of the small spiral ones
I prefer. It had tacky shots of mountain climbers
on the cover, and read "Dig In!" with bright letters.
I don't prefer the styling, but appreciate the portability.
And though it was in my house, the notebook
wasn't mine, and wasn't empty.

Inside it had lists. Lists of bands, places, problems
--with notes detailing why my ex-girlfriend was unhappy.
My name appeared on most pages. It was hers,
left on a bookshelf for over one year.
She always kept lists, as if her life could be categorized
into columns of good and bad, written repeatedly
like an incantation, banishment spell, or scale.

There was a section detailing which albums
were best of the year, another with her all-time favorite
movies. One more with the pros and cons
of her parents, and a paragraph on how
I was controlling and didn't care. There was a travelogue
of notable locations in the desert Southwest,
filled out with names of people we had known
in a little town. I even found some suggestions
that, by now, she was only with me for the dogs.

Still, it was only a quarter full of this shit,
and I wanted the notebook. So I ripped out her pages,
stuck them in the winter fire. It made me
happy. Filled me up, like I was drunk
in a train-car lounge, and every time I checked my wallet,
I would find another twenty. Maybe there
would be weeper country music playing
and I'd be hoping the fiddle would take the melody,
and in the last thirty seconds, it would.
The suspense would be all worth it. The heartache
would become transcendent. I'd jump
off my stool and dance right there on the train.
The snow would be too high for the wolves
to give chase. Their eyes would cut tree limbs
as they raised their heads to howl.

I actually disliked this poem on the first reading. But I left it confused, thanks to those wonderful closing lines, and came back to it within the hour. I’ve re-read it several times since, each time wondering if what I like about the poem is stronger than what I dislike, or if what I dislike is only what the poet intends for me to dislike in the narrator, or if perhaps what I like is only that image of the wolves.

(You may have noticed I’m often indecisive about a poem.)

The poem is written in a casual, narrative style, and without much of the musicality or rhythm that I prefer in a poem. The poetics are instead concentrated in the poet’s emphasis on lines, which serve the poem’s story. The story itself is irritating. The narrator is a writer, who, searching for a notebook, finds his ex-girlfriend’s journals composed of a series of lists. The narrator reads many of the entries, finds himself accused in them, burns the offending pages, then imagines how that feeling has set him free.

Though the reading of the journal goes on a bit long, it does provide insight into the ex-girlfriend’s world views and desires in order to contrast this perspective with the narrator’s later on. This perspective is summarized by, “She always kept lists, as if her life could be categorized”, explaining a stubbornness to cling to past events and force at least a superficial order on a resistant world. There are also complaints about the narrator, “–with notes detailing why my ex-girlfriend was unhappy. /
My name appeared on most pages.” It may be the accusatory nature of notes, but I think it is also the simple attention to the past that disgusts the narrator, and he sees the notebook as a kind of emotional baggage. Indeed, the “portability” of the notebook emphasizes that the ex carried all of these things of the past around with her.

In contrast to his ex, the narrator seems to focus on the future, not the past, and does not interested in cataloging the good and the bad of his life. Instead, he liberates himself even of the ex’s lists by burning the pages, and imagining himself somewhere else. The narrator also appreciates that aspect of portability because it allows him to be on the move. The imagined train-car near the end of the poem reinforces this desire for mobility, and is a nice contrast with the ex’s “travelogue”. For the narrator, the train is a vehicle for the realization of his immediate desires, a manifestation of escape, trundling on the scene just as he liberates himself from the lists and their exposure of the past.

Whereas the ex valued the notebook for its collection of remembrances, it appears the narrator values the notebook for it’s potential, it’s blankness. After reading the compiled complaints, he doesn’t destroy the notebook:

Still, it was only a quarter full of this shit,
and I wanted the notebook. So I ripped out her pages,
stuck them in the winter fire.

He keeps the notebook for his own writing–a canvas for his artistic powers. This desire for aesthetic potential is revisited at the end of the poem, when the narrator anticipates the climax of the “weeper country” song, a projection not unlike how the poet sometimes magically projects an aesthetic desire through a poem onto a blank page.

This inclination to project into the future describes the narrator as a character of hope. Commenting on the conclusion of the song on the train:

The suspense would be all worth it. The heartache
would become transcendent

This is interesting, because its an imagined song on an imagined train, and the narrator imagines that he predicts–rather, controls its ending.

I’d be hoping the fiddle would take the melody,
and in the last thirty seconds, it would.

And yet this projective desire echoes the ex’s complaint, “I was controlling and didn’t care.” Does he care? No. He doesn’t care to reflect, any way. He doesn’t care about his ex-girlfriend’s honest perspective, or about his own personal flaws (“this shit”, he calls the lists in the notebook), nor the notebook itself as her personal property (“I wanted the notebook. So I ripped out her pages”). The narrator’s obliviousness to these character failings contributed heavily to the voice of the poem in my reading, and it was this voice that annoyed me almost to the point of abandoning the poem.

I’m glad I did not, however, for as I finished the poem I speculated as to the fictitiousness of the poem. I couldn’t imagine that the narrator reflected the poet absolutely, for we are self-conscious, and rarely present ourselves in a bad light. This poem, in my mind, sets the narrator as a fairly unlikeable, oblivious character, and so I watched closely for some evidence that this portrait was intentional by the poet. Cut, then, to the bar on the train, where the narrator imagines himself alone, happy, anticipating nothing but good fortune, leaving behind his ex, her burned pages and the evidence they may have spoken against him. Then the ending lines:

The snow would be too high for the wolves
to give chase. Their eyes would cut tree limbs
as they raised their heads to howl.

This piercing image of the chasing wolves is almost too lovely for me to comment on. As far as the narrative goes, it does suggest one of two things: either the narrator believes he is hounded for simply being who he is (prey to hungry wolves), or he is fleeing from those who might rightly hunt and seek revenge upon him. If the latter, the narrator finally reveals what I at least insisted on throughout the poem: the narrator is imperfect, indeed, has done wrong, and there is a kind of karmic justice that he must elude. “Their eyes would cut tree limbs” I take to be an equivalent of the expression “go pound sand”, and so, with the pages burnt and the train barreling along the track to some far off land, the narrator is free–for now. That he celebrates this escape in drunkenness, transcending “heartache” to dance a jig, seems to befit his character, one who chooses ignorance for the sake of personal pleasure. The theme of personal liberation is the capstone of the poem, and it shines with a delightful image. But the tempered, or at least complicated, by what dim view of the imperfect narrator one may take from the preceding narrative.

Enjambment

I noticed that this poem’s poetics were concentrated on the line, and this is apparent especially through the poet’s use of enjambment. “My name appeared on most pages. It was hers,”. “It” refers to the notebook, but is made ambiguous because of the line break, thus pointing to “My name”. If the contents of the notebook is any indication, his name does belong to her. She has made it hers in part by writing it onto the pages, in lists, “written repeatedly / like an incantation, banishment spell, or scale.”

Enjambment also serves to emphasize how the narrator is made free: after he’s had too much of her lists, “I ripped out her pages, / stuck them in the winter fire. It made me” The end of this sentence, on the next line, is “happy.” But I think the act also defines him, so in a way it does make (or remake) him.

Speculation on the title

Anytime I encounter the phrase “___ and violins” I think of the Talking Heads song, “Sax and Violins” composed for the excellent soundtrack to Wim Wender’s film “Until the End of the World”. “Sax and Violins” is, of course, a play on the phrase “sex and violence”, a strange pairing of topics meant to suggest a certain morality. From there it’s not too far of a leap to connect “beasts” with carnality, and thus sex. This connection is made stronger by an understanding of the ex-girlfriend associated with the wolves that chase the narrator–the only literal beasts in the poem. Strangely, a conversion of “sex” to “beasts” (and their association with the guilt and displeasure from his ex) defeats much of the allure of the noun, and performs a useful reversal from the narrator’s point of view, where the ex-girlfriend is no longer an object of desire, but rather one of passive vindictiveness. In the poem the violins become the “fiddle”, the instrument that plays a triumphant, climactic, physically loosed ending to the “weeper country song”. “Violins” is thus released or ameliorated from the paired word “violence”, signaling escape and beauty. If I’m not reading too much into the title, it’s a curious reversal in a poem that is carved out of contrasts and reversals.

It’s the end of a long week, and the beginning of the end of a long semester. But I’m committed to packing in a couple reviews of poems from this year’s Best American Poetry anthology before the week is over. I’ve been finding few of the poems easy, fewer poems really difficult, which leaves most of the poems somewhere in the middle. Over half-way through the anthology (with some skipping around) I’ve found just a dozen that I’ve liked enough to read more than twice, and only a 3 or 4 that I might want to keep.

One of those is Michael Johnson’s poem “How to Be Eaten by a Lion”. Even before I read the poem I thought I knew it by title (it’s possible I’ve read it before, thought I don’t recall ever picking up a copy of The Mid-American Review). As you’ll see hereit’s difficult for me to say exactly what it means beyond the surface, but the poem stuck. I may have been entrapped solely by the clear, rich imagery; or by the interweaving of a darkly humorous didacticism of its voyeuristic narrator (“Try not to scream”, he quietly suggests, “for it devalues you.”). Or it may be the significance I sense but can not quite see, like a large object in a dark room.

The imagery really stands on its own; everything described is made sharp, not too dense, fresh, but never completely alien or overly verbose–much like the crystal clear flashbulb-type memories we might store as cortisol shocks our body into recognizing, remembering the details of a stressful event.

As delightful as the imagery and the music of Johnson’s language is, I’ve spent more time on the meaning of the poem.The poem is framed by the hypothetical, if but proceeds through the events step-by-step, by a calm, certain narrator who’s helpful instructions may mean the difference between dying ignobly at the paws of a wild beast, and … dying memorably at the paws of a wild beast. The black humor of the narration moves from precise, even wondrous description toward points ridiculous. For example,

It may seem soft, barely a blow,
more like a falling, an exquisite giving
of yourself to the ground

Yet the narrator’s sincerity gives some veracity to the meaning, and indeed I felt I remembered being thus assaulted by a lion, so my mind was willing to suspend its disbelief, and even connect real, if generalized, memories with Johnson’s strong descriptions. When was I last felled by a lion, or something lion-like? I find myself asking.

Not too long ago, if we extrapolate the lion to represent nature, or fate, or death, or even the daily challengers that sometimes lurk and sometimes pounce. So though the hypothetical nature may be the poets way of saying, of course we know this is not happening, especially to sheltered Americans like us. But it’s the narrator’s aloof, seriousness instruction that prompts me to ask, what if it were? What could we learn? To this end the poem makes two primary impressions: 1. dying in the mouth of nature is elegant, even noble; 2. death/defeat is inevitable, so pay attention to the good stuff while you can.

It could be something more, or something less. It could be a critique of objectivity, illustrated through the passionless voyeur narrator. It could be merely a concern with callousness toward violence, ignorance of real violence, and even the visual representation of violence. And there’s certainly room for a strong feminist critique of this work.

I’d like to think there is something more than this. By pushing the reader into the role of the victim, the poem lets us forget that we humans are also great hunters, devourers of flesh, and destroyers of life; that is our role in nature. It reminds us also that we have beasts within, beasts which may destroy. The lion has no choice, and is not to be questioned, let alone thwarted; the narrator makes this clear enough. But what do we do with our primal nature? How do we direct our killer instincts, our blind hungers, our conquering desires? Do we ignore them, pretend they do not exist? Are we as helpless as both the victim and the observer in this poem seem to be, do we keep counsel on how to die nobly, but not how to fight?