Tangled Rope

Received this beauty in the mail yesterday…

It’s a postcard hinting at “A Painful Case”–perhaps my favorite story from Dubliners. Who is it from? “The Imitator”, apparently!

…the LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.
Genesis 2:17

By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.
Genesis 3:19

James Joyce’s short story “Clay” uses clay as an ironic representation of Maria’s faith in God, one that is specifically reflective on a belief immortality. The clay which Maria blindly must identify in the family saucer game recalls the Biblical origin–and end–of Man; his mortality. For Maria, this fearful eventuality should be solved by her Catholicism, which states Man may move beyond this dumb substance, into an infinite glory with God. Joyce, however, makes some subtle suggestions that Maria may be fooling herself, the most elegant of which comes in Maria’s reaction–and the others’ lack of response–to her touching of the clay:

She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage.

When I read this–already primed for the mortality symbolism of clay in “Little Cloud”–I imagined that Maria might face a similar surprise when, penultimately “blindfolded” in death, there is no one who can call out to her, and nothing for her to see!

If Joyce’s symbolism here isn’t an indictment of religious faith itself, at least it suggests cracks and quivering in Maria’s own faith. Such imperfections in one’s faith are not so remarkable, though in Maria’s case they are more troubling in light of her apparent dissatisfaction and disappointments in her own life, which she seems to willfully ignore, discount, or gloss over. This is poignantly illustrated when Maria sings the first verse of the song “I Dreamt that I Dwelt” twice. Whether consciously or unconsciously she obfuscates the second verse’s reference to eros–which Maria has not found–in favor of the first verse’s focus on agape–which Maria hopes to obtain.

I say this is troubling because it is one thing to hope for life after death as a remedy for dying, but quite another to hope for life after death as a remedy for living.

The first short story in James Joyce’s “Dubliners” (this month’s motleyread) is “The Sisters”, a slightly enigmatic story of an adolescent boy facing the death of his informal mentor, Father Flynn. Only half-way through the first page this sentence seized me:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis.

Of a number of themes and motifs in “The Sisters” the theme of paralysis intrigued me the most. Father Flynn’s strokes produce a literal paralysis, and his subsequent death itself represents a final paralysis (indeed, I sensed just a hint of fear of live burial–a terrible counterpart to a misdiagnosed paralysis–in the narrator’s viewing of Flynn’s body, implicit, perhaps, in the confusion that the narrator and the sisters seem to experience as they talk of Flynn as if he were still alive).

At a most basic level, paralysis is an inability to act for one’s self. I saw this as a psychological paralysis in the narrator, as he first wills himself to not speak of Flynn’s death before his uncle and Old Cotter, and then seems unable to speak at all in Flynn’s house. This paralysis in life appears in the actions of the women, too, who can’t quite seem to verbalize the reality of Flynn’s death. “Did he … peacefully?’” the aunt asks; the sisters, too, seem almost unable to complete their thoughts about Flynn, and speak of him in hypotheticals, in speculations, with halting self-consciousness:

She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house; and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice to his breast.

I’m not quite able to connect this as I should, but it seems this persistent theme of paralysis in life connects to another dominant theme: the ineffectualness of religion for Flynn and his neighbors. Religion here seems unable to sustain the living or confront and explain death. By not providing these desired comforts, religion does nothing to alleviate the feeling of paralysis the living may feel when confronted with death; indeed, it may, by controlling actions and speech invoke it’s own partial paralysis on its followers (I marked a couple almost involuntary superstitious actions in the story). For the dead, we wonder if it provides escape from the paralysis of death. As if hoping for some sort of happy peace for the dead Flynn, the narrator fancied “that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin.”

“But no”, the narrator realizes, perhaps beginning to settle into an understanding of Flynn’s ineptitude. This is reinforced by Flynn’s own inability to literally grasp the chalice (alive or dead), the strangeness that both Old Cotter and the narrator seem differently aware of, and his improper laughing (possibly weeping?) alone in the confessional.

Wide awake and laughing-like to himself…. So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him…

So the story ends, halting in its explanation in the same way that the women stop themselves from speaking the reality of Flynn’s dying. In this case there is some ambiguity in the ending ellipses, as either Eliza is unable to complete the story, or the narrator himself is unwilling to face the conclusion symbolized by “an idle chalice on his [Flynn's] breast.”

I’ll attempt to take advantage of Chris Lott’s invitation to join the Motley Readers this month as they work through James Joyce’s “Dubliners”. I say “attempt” not because I may be too motley for this crew (though that thought may surely cross some minds–especially after that pun), but to be realistic: I have once again taken on too large a pile for my limited abilities this semester, and so the pleasures of literature will be postponed as required.

In addition to a number of digital media for sharing reflections on our reading, one group member suggested physical post cards, mailed to any members of the group. Though I also intend to make a few meatier blog posts here, post cards grant a fine chance for me to send a little mail to friends, near strangers, and complete unknowns. When I do send post cards I think I will focus on darkest or brightest observation(s) in a given story, and may indulge my latent interest in art to sketch part of a story. I’m less excited to have my postcards be received than I am to see my postcards as part of a larger collection that Chris intends to compile.

Regardless of how much I share during the month, I do plan to read all 15 stories, which means I need to tackle 4 a week, like this:

1. “The Sisters”, “An Encounter”, “Araby”, “Eveline”
2. “After the Race”, “Two Gallants”, “The Boarding House”, “A Little Cloud”
3. “Counterparts”, “Clay”, “A Painful Case”
4. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, “A Mother”, “Grace, “The Dead”

P.S. I was inclined to own the Norton Critical Edition of “Dubliners”, but opted for an edition that is hardbound, a little more compact and, for now, less intellectually overpowering. I just received my generally clean (though imprecisely described) Modern Library edition (1954 reprint) for the same price off of ABE Books:

Not to get too far afield, but I like the economy of older Modern Library editions in general. In the case of “Dubliners” there are several printings. The first is a bit hard to find–indeed, I couldn’t find a copy that was intact, in good condition, not price-clipped, that was worth buying. The dust jacket on these early printings is more elegant than the 1954 printing which I settled for. There’s apparently an intermediate Modern Library edition printing bound in green (brown?) leatherette, but I couldn’t find an acceptable copy of that, either.

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…

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?

The first poem from The Best American Poetry 2009 that I’ve chosen to discuss this December is Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone”, a rough sonnet which presents a curious phenomenon connected with a massacre at a university, likely a Virginia Tech-style incident. The focus of the poem—the tingling of pop music ringtones emanating from dead students’ pockets as they are wheeled away—is inventive and unsettling, a new perspective on a type of tragedy that is now too familiar in the US.

Ringtone

As they loaded the dead onto the gurneys
to wheel them from the university halls,
who could have predicted the startled chirping
in those pockets, the invisible bells
and tiny metal music of the phones,
in each the cheer of a voiceless song.
Pop mostly, Timberlake, Shakira, tunes
never more various now, more young,
shibboleths of what a student hears,
what chimes in the doorway to the parent
on the line. Who could have answered there
in proxy for the dead, received the panic
with grace, however artless, a live bird
gone still at the meeting of the strangers.

More disturbing than the fact that the phones go off in the students’ pockets after they are dead, they go off in many pockets simultaneously, as if an orchestrated practical joke. Considering the tragedy, we must conclude that the calls are from worried friends or relatives, who heard about the event too late, probably from the news, and are calling to see if everything’s alright.

The reader knows everything’s not alright, and that gives tough irony and a helpless sense to the reader. “Who could have answered there / in proxy for the dead, received the panic / with grace…” The undetected fear, concern, and predictive sorrow that those calls might carry casts greater irony on the fact that the calls are signaled by “Pop mostly, Timberlake, Shakira, tunes / never more various now…” This variety is defined by the clashing of the ringtones going off simultaneously, and reminds us that though the students are identified as little more than “they” by the narrator, each was individual, took pleasure in music, and defined one part of themselves through that music by the act of choosing it as a personal ringtone.

Finally, these “invisible bells” suggest a death toll, one which the students carry with them, indeed might always have carried with them, though that the ringtones may be so portentous would never have occurred to them.

Now that’s what I’ve found to be clearly in the poem. But I thought I sensed something more, that the pop music ringtones are a more cynical indicator of the students’ transience, and perhaps their failure to distinguish themselves by anything more than the tastes they adopt. The narrator doesn’t give us much more than a general category for these students—indeed, doesn’t even define that they are students (an implication I made from “university” and “Pop mostly”). Neither does the narrator look at them beyond their ringtones—I admit this may be due to the constraints of the form, or a desire to keep a tighter focus on the items I’ve mentioned above, or even simply because the identity of the students is uninteresting or unimportant to the poet’s purpose (indeed this may say something about how we the public view victims of a tragedy: “not us, them“).

Yet there’s a pretty significant contrast in the nameless, faceless, inanimate students carrying a lively set of pop tunes by artists who, though surely doomed to be victims of changing pop tastes and, inevitably, their own dying, are named by the poet, creating at least a glimmer of their survival beyond death. The students themselves have contributed to the artists’ defiance of time and death, carried beyond the students’ lives even as they are literally carried by the students. And that’s all we know of the students; indeed, and at risk of sounding callous, that may be all they’ve left behind.

Form

I suggested that “Ringtone” is a rough sonnet, and I’m sticking to that. Composed of 14 lines that more often than not have 5 feet, though rarely iambs, the most convincing evidence that the form is sonnet is the slant, assonant, and other near rhymes. Surprisingly, it was the musicality of the slant rhymes that tipped me off (certainly not the rhythm, which I had a very hard time scanning), which means it works. It is an English sonnet, with the scheme abab cdcd efef gg. In the “a” you must find the “ur–ee” in “gurneys” and “chirping”; in “b” its slant rhyme of “halls” and “bells”; and so on. The final rhymed pair is perhaps the most disparate of the poem: the “ur” in “bird” and “strangers”. Does this signal the poet’s understanding that the poem, like the vent described, can not be neatly concluded with any of the finality and import that sonnets usually bring in that final rhyming pair?

Continuing my commentary on certain essays from Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry I turn to the next essay in the collection, “When the Search Succeeds” by editor and poet Richard Foerster.

Foerster observes, “Literary editing … is at best a balance between disinterested judgment and an indulgence of personal tastes”, and most satisfying when it enables him to share “personal enthusiasms with others through the printed page”.

As an example, he offers Jane Flanders’s Pushcart Prize winning poem, “The House That Fear Built: Warsaw, 1943″. Foester first encountered this poem read aloud by poet herself. Foerster remarks on its sound and sound effects, and reminding us of Pope’s argument that “The sound must seem an echo to the sense”, and adding, “I wanted to see this poem after I heard it.”

The “sense” of the poem is deepened by use of “double-edged words”, chosen with care by the poet. But more remarkable is how this poem literally repeats itself (with a variation in point of view) each stanza, building meaning to a whole by adding new lines. Foerster remarks on this “unfolding of meaning”, explaining how the poem moves “from a close-up to a panorama”–this is, I think, how many good poems are effective, focusing on a specific part to relate a larger whole, perhaps directly through the poem, or by moving the reader to understand the world differently.