Tangled Rope

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

At the risk of sounding like Billy Bob Thornton rambling towards an obscure pittance of irony, I want to start by mentioning that I test-drove a truck yesterday. I’ve never owned a truck, and am not the sort of guy you’d expect would want to own a truck. That’s another story.

This truck was on the discount lot of my local repair shop, and it looked as if it would smell thoroughly of cigarettes, for I could see through the locked door windows that the upholstery was marred and speckled with black ash burns. Once I got the key from the owner, I found it smelled like dog. In fact, it smelled like my dog, Deckard (RIP 2008). Deckard suffered from a skin disease the last few years of his life, and it caused him to reek. The smell of this truck cab was of a similar tone, and every bit as nauseating; it was somewhere between a sinus infection and drowned earthworms, with that unmistakable canine bouquet. Part of me wanted to roll the windows down. Part of me wanted to remember. By the time I got on the highway, the practical part of me left the windows up so I could better listen to the workings of the car.

On the surface this has almost nothing to do with Stephen Dunn’s poem “Dog Weather”. And I admit Mr. Dunn is not a favorite poet of mine, though I find his works extremely accessible, and the general mood of many of his poems matches my own. Perhaps too closely. Perhaps that is why he is not a favorite poet of mine.

Dog Weather
by Stephen Dunn
From Different Ones, 2000

Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up.
The paper boy's papers came apart
in the wind.

Now, nothing human moving.
Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart
in The Caine Mutiny.

My breath chalks the window
gives me away to myself.

I like the intelligibility of old songs
I prefer yesterday.

Cars pass, the asphalt's on its back
smudged with skid. It's potholed
and cracked: it's no damn good.

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog
should be handcuffed
and searched for loneliness.

My hair is thinning.
I feel like tossing the wind a stick.

The promised snow has arrived,
heavy, wet.
I remember the blizzard of...
People I don't want to be
speak like that.

I close my eyes and one
of my many unborn sons
makes a snowball
and lofts it at an unborn friend.

They've sent me an AARP card.
I'm on their list.

I can be discounted now almost anywhere.

So this poem is cleanly written, fairly clever, though perhaps a bit shallow, a little oto confessional for some readers taste. Yes, the form and style is the sort of “denatured” prose-as-poetry that Joan Houlihan complains about, and the punch line is no great epiphany (Growing Old Is Universal, No Good).

But I thought of this poem when I sat in the cab of that old, foul-smelling truck, perhaps merely through a simple association of the title with dog. It was buoyed in my mind as I struggled with the truck’s broken parking brake lever and I remembered doing the same to my grandfather’s old truck when I lived and worked with him in California as an adolescent. This took me to another summer job I held, working at a video rental shop that specialized in classic American cinema, which took me full circle to The Caine Mutiny, a film that I took home from the sane video shop eighteen years ago. This is a movie that revealed a very different Bogey from the two-dimensional hero of Casablanca, and was one of the first films I watched that summer that tindered my persistent obsession with classic American cinema.

“Dog Weather”, or rather, this occurrence, forced me to conclude that though my reasoning mind may refute a poem’s quality based on philosophy or a theory of aesthetics, I will allow–no, I will not deny that a significant testimonial for a poem’s success is retention in the reader’s mind. In this case I’d read Dunn’s “Dog Weather” just once, and probably years ago. I may have been amused by it, but it had not struck me as a poetic treasure, and so I imagine it sinking even then deep into the sucking gumbo swamp of my memory. But to have it rise up, washed in the rain of nostalgia, glinting somewhat in the sunshine of a much later, much different day gave me something like hope in being alive, and something like faith in reading poetry.

Watch Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny

“I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.”
–Franz Kafka, Diary

Last week I deleted my old blog (partially an accident) so I can’t recall if I actually began to write about poetry as parables or not. Perhaps that was in response to Chris Lott’s blog. No matter. I continue anyway.

Here are a couple of favorite poems by former US poet laureate Mark Strand (1934 – ). Not only do these poems delight me, fulfill my own criteria of poetic excellence, these illustrate a newness and continuance of parable, an allegorical narrative from which instructive meaning may be l gleaned. I use this term “parable” out of convenience, and because I believe it deserves a renaissance, but perhaps I should use apologue instead, for these two poems are more akin to Kafka’s tricky and sometimes paradoxical aphorisms than to the Biblical allegories to which many of us are most familiar.

That is to say these poems are not religiously didactic; instead, these poem-parables cling to the hope of being instructive, if only internally. Indeed, we may be living in an age of such reason–conflicted with exposure to a diversity of sometimes confoundingly disparate cultural norms–that nothing can be genuinely instructive, though we hope at least to end up turned in the right direction.

Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyes roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

This poem delights me with its rhythm, its meteoric imagery, and it’s subject and meaning (no surprise to anyone who knows me. The prescriptive subtext here might be that the poem-reader is a loner, an unknown element delighting slavishly in pleasures that are nearly as incomprehensible to the readers as they are to others (insert W. G. Sebald quote here, if I could find it). Further, strand shows the poem-reader–engorged by the consumption–is unpredictable, his antics incomprehensible even to the library who make her home amongst the empowering words.

Because the poem-reader is a loner, the poem-reader can not, despite his joy, expect or demand that others appreciate the joy s/he finds in the poem. It reminds me, no, it assures me that even as antisocial as poem-reading may be, it is still a immeasurable value. Good poetry can rejuvenate. It can transform.

What better theme for us to dwell on as we pass through Easter, spring, and a reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

Nostalgia
by Mark Strand

The professors of English have taken their gowns
to the laundry, have taken themselves to the fields.
Dreams of motion circle the Persian rug in a room you were in.
On the beach the sadness of gramophones
deepens the ocean's folding and falling.
It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.

The parable nature here is less obvious. In fact, if I were writing an argument, not a blog post, I would not use this as an example. So I will not stretch the limits of the poem by imbuing it with my own subjective interpretation; instead let me point out how this poem reaches into a recent history, in fact, just a sliver of history familiar to only a few, but made concrete by Strand’s imagery. When Strand summons the image of the Persian rug and the gramophone I am propelled backwards into a place of being which I tasted, yearned for, but could never have. “It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.” Strand explains in a final, sighing refrain.

Is it? Or is that merely where our minds insist to dwell?