Nance Van Winckel in Agni

Photo by psd via flickr/CC





Thin Ice

I was walking on it,
the it I gave no thought to
and which my father got the gist of
and had to scold me about. It
was creaking. Newly hatched,
the jewel-toned fish swam
beneath: cold vault of readied
kisses. I went slowly on it--young lady--trying to be leaf-like,
to be zip, zero, zilch,
while the old man's voice
lifted--Who?!--from a shore
forty years off--just who do you think you are?

Agni 68 p. 189

The speaker in this poem seems to be a young girl--a young lady--on the verge of growing up. Puberty and the whole process of discovering one's sexuality can feel risky and even out of control. the speaker "was walking on it," the "thin ice" that she doesn't even notice, but her father--the adult who can see what's coming and is scared by it--reprimands her.

The "jewel-toned fish" swam in a "cold vault of readied kisses," illustrating the sensual adventures that await her but as yet remain cold and out-of-reach. That ice is thin, though, and creaking. It's ready to break, and the frightened "old man" father, unwilling yet to give up the child to puberty, asks "just who do you think you are?" It's as if he doesn't recognize her, as he begins to see the woman she will become. Even forty years later, his voice--the sound of his fear and anger and questioning--still rings in her mind.

Nance Van Winckel in Agni

David Lee Garrison in Rattle

Bach in the D.C. Subway

As an experiment,
the Washington Post
asked a concert violinist--
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap--
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sung to the station
about why we should bother
to live.

A thousand people
streamed by. Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.

David Lee Garrison
Rattle 14:2 p. 40

Consider reading this poem again while listening to the Partita. You can listen to Itzhak Perlman playing the Allemande here, and find videos of the other movements.

The poem uses the metaphor of an ocean to express the flow of Bach's music. The Partita "called out to commuters / like an ocean to waves." Waves move toward shore in an apparent attempt to escape, but are always pulled back toward the sea, their origin and home. The music is the ocean, and the commuters, as waves, are being called to that which is their origin.

Human beings are viewed in the poem as a part of the music, almost as if they are created by it and being called back home. A few commuters recognize this instinctively: the seven who stop to listen, the café hostess, and especially the children. I'm listening to the Partita as I write this, and I can tell you it is difficult not to stop and just be lulled into the music. Like the children, I could easily lose all sense of time and place and be tranced into a beautiful Bach state.


Photo by Aidan Jones via flickr/CC

David Lee Garrison in Rattle

Stephen Dunn in Vallum

Waiting for the Bus

Just let the world happen to you,
a Buddhist friend once advised.
I told him it was not my style.

Now here comes a punky boy
with spiked hair
amping his music into my life

and the newspaper I'm trying
to hide behind tells us the man
who can't read the iffy world

has once again rolled the dice.
"I'm so tired of being starved,"
a woman says to another woman,

loud enough to be overheard.
Some of us wait for the bus.
Others turn to her and nod.

Stephen Dunn
Vallum 6:1 p. 16

The speaker in this poem lives in a contradiction. "It was not my style," the speaker says, to "let the world happen," yet the speaker hides behind a newspaper, not engaged with the world. In fact, the speaker seems to be purposely disengaged with it, attempting to place a barrier between self and the world. Perhaps this prevents the world from happening to him or her, but it also prevents the speaker from affecting the world.

The newspaper/barrier is an illusion, however, and the speaker can't escape the "punky" boy's music, the woman's lament of being "starved," or the bad news in the paper itself. The woman's statement--"I'm so tired of being starved"--expresses both her lack of connection with the world and her desire for it. She says this "loud enough to be overheard," wanting to be known and understood. In the crowd, some continue to "wait for the bus" while some "turn to her and nod."

The world is happening to these people whether they acknowledge it or not. The speaker attempts to hide; the woman reaches out for connection; some ignore what is happening and wait for something better. There is a palpable sense of alienation that comes through the poem, and it strikes me that the answer is not how the world does or doesn't happen--it will no matter how we respond--but how we connect with others and maintian the quality of our relationships. Hiding doesn't work. Waiting doesn't work. I find myself hoping this woman finds sustenance in the company of others.


Photo by eschipul via flickr/CC

Stephen Dunn in Vallum

Archive of Poetry, Poetry Analysis, and Insightful Commentary

Hello! This blog is on hiatus, but feel free to peruse the many poetry critiques I wrote over a two-year period. If you are looking for good poems and some intelligent, thoughtful analysis--both in the essays and in the comments--this is a good place to be. I still use the blog myself as a reference for current essay writing.

You can find me now in the world of The Tenacious Writer: http://thetenaciouswriter.blogspot.com

Thanks for visiting, and enjoy!

Amy

Archive of Poetry, Poetry Analysis, and Insightful Commentary

Martha Rhodes

This week at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, I am in a workshop with the poet Martha Rhodes, who is the author of Mother Quiet, Perfect Disappearance, and At the Gate. She is encouraging us to experiment with the way we revise our poetry by playing with tenses, structure, line breaks, and sequencing.

According to Rhodes, there are four aspects that feed into the creation of a poem: music, imagination, narrative, and structure. They are not mutually exclusive, but it is helpful to know which, as a poet, is one's dominant way into a poem, or way of reading a poem. It is clear to me, after working with Vijay Seshadri and now with Rhodes, how much my poetry is informed by my musical ear.

This poem by Rhodes is posted online at AGNI Magazine:


The Hose

A hose ran through our house, used
to wash our windows down; to keep
us teenagers in line; to dilute Father’s
martoonis; “to make life a little more
exciting,” Mother said.

When Mother turned 70 and renamed us
“Enormous One,” and
“One Who Walks Bare on Rug,”
and “One Who Hideously Shares My Bed,”
and “Which One”

we hosed her into the corner of her dressing room—
Strong Medicine.
Clean out the cobwebs.
Cold showers are a cure-all.
Shock therapy.

Mother would giggle herself silly when we’d towel her dry,
dust her with powder, pull the bedrails up.

Martha Rhodes

The mother in this poem, although claiming that the hose makes life "a little more / exciting," actually uses the hose to control her family: it keeps the windows clean, monitors the kids' behavior, and prevents the father from getting drunk. Her family has learned this; so when illness leaves their mother in a frenetic, uncontrolled state, they hose her "into the corner of her dressing room" to regain order. Even then, she "giggles" when washed with cold water, and rails are needed to pen her in.

This is a very sad and powerful poem, and what I admire about it is how an extensive, emotional story is compacted into 17 lines. We get a sense of the entire family dynamic very quickly (nobody says martoonis unless they drink a lot of them), and the inevitable fall of the mother into an uncontrolled state, despite her attempts to always control her environment. Maybe that is the unltimate conflict here: that she could gain control over her environment, but not over her internal self.

Martha Rhodes

Jean Valentine

The artist Danny Sillada and I have been discussing short poems and what is uniquely challenging about writing a poem that is complete in its language and emotional arc, but brief in its number of lines. Yesterday, the poet Vijay Seshadri suggested I look up the poet Jean Valentine, who is a writer of short poems. I found this poem on her site:


Once

Once there was a woodcutter,
when he asked me to marry him
the woman in the grocery store said
You look like you lost your last friend.
First love!
When we broke up
it was as if the last egg in the house
got dropped on the broken floor.
This world is everywhere! The woman said,
You won’t go unsampled!

Jean Valentine

This poem is replete with the energy of love and despair and, finally, hope. The interaction between the two women--one young and dealing with the loss of her first love, and one older and wiser and knowledgable in the world--is sweet and totally believable. My favorite lines are the last two: "This world is everywhere! The woman said, / You won't go unsampled!" She assures the young woman, in the most joyful, encouraging, way, that "there are more fish in the sea," and that, like the morsels of food in her grcoery store, the young women will surely be "tasted" by others.

I cannot escape, however, the older woman's characterization of the younger woman as object in the sentence, that she will "be sampled" by others rather than "sample" others herself. It is a complicated ending to me, as I'm not sure that the young woman has gained any power through her experience. I would prefer that she go out and discover the "everywhere-ness" of the world and taste it through her own will; but perhaps that ending would be too easy. Perhaps there is a prescience in the grocer's words about the younger woman's fate.

Jean Valentine

Kay Ryan

In my workshop this week, there are a few of us who tend to fashion shorter, more compact poems. Someone brought up the poet Kay Ryan as a wonderful model to study for short, powerful poems, so I took some time to look her up. I found this poem by her on the site for Blue Flower Arts:


Atlas

Extreme exertion
isolates a person
from help,
discovered Atlas.
Once a certain
shoulder-to-burden
ratio collapses,
there is so little
others can do:
they can't
lend a hand
with Brazil
and not stand
on Peru.

Kay Ryan


Ryan catches our attention with what appears to be a simple assertion; but the "discovered Atlas" grounds this found knowledge in a particular character. Atlas supporting the earth is an effective image here, because we can all identify with the feeling of burden; how cares can pile up on us until we reach a breaking point. The speaker implies that taking all of our burdens on ourselves actually alienates us from those who might offer relief; to wait too long is to risk collapsing into a crisis, when it may be too late for help.

Kay Ryan