Here we go, getting to Ellen Bass in the Feb 4th issue, her “What Did I Love” poem. Okay, it’s about killing chickens. Now I myself have known chickens. I have even killed a few in my day, back on the neighbor of a friend’s farm, and seen them run around after their heads were gone, and it’s a weird, unpleasant feeling, but let’s face it, the negative energy did not honestly derive from the joy of knowing chickens. So I am not so shocked by her beginning: “What did I love about killing the chickens?” It does thereby deliver the almost-standard-by-now shock/twist beginning, and then the really cool image right after: “as darkness / was sinking back into the earth.” And the feel of it all: “I didn’t look into those stone eyes. I didn’t ask forgiveness.” As for the question ‘do I think it’s like Kinnell,’ her poem seems more matter-of-fact than his general tone to some extent, or at least, less given to lyrical flight. It’s the grounded-in-the-specifics-like-concrete nature of this poem that drives its power, for me. Describing the physical, then her reaction to it: “When I tug the esophagus / down through the neck, I love the suck and release…” Boy, cleaning ducks, despite the gladness of having a duck to clean, is not so pleasurable as that. It’s almost as though she exaggerates, almost as though we don’t believe her, based on our own queasiness, and this disjunction between our visceral reaction and what she describes as hers is what gives the poem its juice. And the climax of the poem heightens this tension to its highest possible point: “I loved the truth. Even in just this one thing…” Is she telling the truth? Is there an ironic underbelly to this poem? Wow.
The other poem in the issue is “Medicinal,” by Gerald Stern, which invites us to put together from the clues he gives what happened to require a poem: “I gave thanks of a sort that there were waves…and I had time afterward / to put it together again…though I drove myself crazy / trying to figure out…if the flower I picked was medicinal…and could I have a life?” Obviously from all the elisions I am cutting bunches out to give a more straightforward sense of the poem, which probably isn’t fair to the poem. But even with the material added back in, and the second half of the poem, and ignoring (or not) the reasonably non-linear ending, I still didn’t pick up enough clues. Which left me ultimately frustrated and annoyed. Maybe that’s what editor and poet wanted. Well, nyah on them too.
I am much happier with the W.S. Merwin poem in the next issue of the New Yorker, Feb 11th & 18th combined, “To These Eyes.” He starts out “You only ones / I ever knew / you that have shown me…” and this seems to be a classic Merwin approach, making the reader stop and re-parse the beginning of the poem to try to determine a grammatical reading that will make sense. It being Merwin we know there will be one there. And if we take ‘only ones I never knew’ as an ablative absolute (to throw in a little analysis from my Latin days, sorry), that is, as a dependent clause modifying the first word ‘you’ (which still sounds so pedantic and technical, sorry again) we can come to an understanding of what the heck he’s trying to say here, and get that little satisfaction of solving a tiny puzzle, and off we go, now wary and ready to toss down a (virtual) comma wherever in the poem we think one might fit, and so gradually wrest a sense of this as a paean to his own eyes “that I have never seen / except nowhere in a mirror…” Why the word ‘nowhere’ there? Well, why not? We can mentally delete it if we have to, get a reasonable sense, and go on! Ending with a rise to the mystical at the very end of the poem, which would not be so affecting except for the work we’ve put in digging little truths out up to now. Yay.
That sense of mystery, of something deeper working behind the poem, of the poet reaching for a connection with something larger, seems to me more abbreviated in the Jane Hirshfield poem in the same issue, “I Wanted Only A Little.” This is another poem where we have to put together what she means, a bit, with the tricks of the modern American poet. We can’t have anything be too predictable in a top drawer poem, therefore we must be surprised by the twist in the phrase “The directions of silence: / north, west, south, past, future.” And the turn in the second half of the poem from a discussion of silence to the metaphor of a grazing horse does keep us reading. But does the center of the poem, “Grief shifts, / as a grazing horse does…” give us enough to go on? Is it satisfying? Again, maybe that very paucity is the point Hirshfield is trying to make. It seems a fiercely austere poem to me, at any rate.
The final poem in this week’s mag was a Philip Levine, “In Another Country.” “A man spreads out dried fruit / on an old blanket and lets the flies…” Another poem overwhelmingly anchored in the concrete. We’re getting more and more of a sense, putting these poems back to back, of what Muldoon likes as an editor. Concrete and surprise, austere, with jolting images. If there’s a spiritual sense, well, that’s okay, but it sure isn’t a requirement. If there’s no second, or deeper meaning readily available, well, that’s okay too. Maybe life has no deeper meaning. So render what you can, and we’ll take what we can get. Levine seems an ideal poet for his sensibilities. “There is no town, only / fields of long grass blowing in the wind…”
Peace in poetry,
P M F Johnson
My eBook of poems, Against The Night, a sweet, rueful look at love in a long marriage, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.
Related blog posts:
Blue Collar Review – Summer 17
Hummingbird 27.2
The Missouri Review – Fall, 2017
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