Replies

Hi Michael,
Thank you for your comments about the Ghiselin poem and for rereading it to find some of what is bothering you in the poem. There are, of course, different poems of different poets who move us singularly, because we are the constellations we are. A particular poem might be one that is simply not valuable to oneself, because it doesn’t add to possibilities of how to become somehow deeper or more intensely attentive.

I too find this poem to have syntactic awkwardness, particularly the last line of the second stanza. I needed to read it several times to understand why the poet uses the syntax he does. This is definitely a poem that is not a “one hearing” poem.

Understanding that I am not trying to convince you of anything, I do have a different reading of some of the lines concerning you.

The simile within the simile in the first stanza is, I think, a way to insure the reader isn’t taking literally any definition of meaning. As for the slowing down, I think you are right on, the syntax does do that. I would bet it’s purposeful. I often use syntax to speed up or slow down a reader, and it is a pretty common tool. As for the dew, it rises when it evaporates in the early day, and the “clear sayings of the unsystematized” don’t have to do with the poem or the speaker’s claims, but with the world experience, the ways existence exceeds our theories of it. In my mind, I see the tiny drops of dew that so clearly hold the world around them, but that is just what I bring to the poem. I am pretty confident that the speaker is not talking about the sayings being words but the cries of birds and the drops of dew he has just opened.

You’re also right on about the clichés beginning the second stanza. We talked about that in class last week, how they are purposeful rearrangements of crystal clear and plain as day, in order to suggest the world is both clearer and plainer than the ways we systematize it or put it into language. It is not sloppy work but extremely careful. It is just really concentrated, so things like “dream and empire” hold a great deal: humanity’s effects on the natural world and each other, the motion from hopes and pure dreams into andthe living out and into the excesses of those dreams that have become empires, about control. The being blown away like cities could be a nuclear demolition, you’re right. For me, it compresses human history, the many different civilizations of humans, each with its systems of thought and its cities, that are completely gone now, maybe a few ruins buried under desert sand. I think he is gathering a huge vision of human history. and claiming that we never have managed for our systemizations to stay life-giving. That is a claim that, from your comment here, it sounds like you don’t agree with the speaker.

There is a breath between the 2nd and 3rd stanzas, because the former is end-stopped. The enjambment we talked about a little, being used to unsettle the reader a little, does that in the first two lines of the third stanza, so it is “this untamed belief that takes the whole for its housing.” It is a theological question, open to go in many directions, whether or how established doctrines are or aren’t capacious enough to contain “heaven and earth and breath… the undivided sphere.” Whitehead, whose concept of misplaced concreteness asserts that abstract formulations can never hold the relational dynamics of actuality coming into existence, clearly holds that doctrines are not capacious enough to do that. In other writing, he suggests that doctrine can become almost violent, when it demands a narrowing of the width of experience.

We can talk a bit about Whitehead and theology if you like. He was very clearly a philosopher or metaphysicist and not a theologian. Process theology is a later development that draws on his work. This short class is attending more to Whitehead’s work than to process theology per se.

I hope you like today’s poems!

Christina

Beth,
The second line is still so strong. It is a slight jiggling of the grammar, and it establishes the tone of the poem with that lack of punctuation. I like the changes. The love in the poem is very beautiful. And that NO! in the middle keeps it from being somehow too sentimental. It is such a hinge. And…. the complex notion that love is his enjoyment of you rather than something deliberately given, the way we often think of love, is so right on.

CHristina

Hi Mary Elizabeth,
This slow poke commenter is here. I read the original awhile ago and it stuck with me. Lindsey’s word “poignant” is fitting. Especially those white sheets waving.

I’m going to comment on the edited version. I think moving the young child up close to the beginning is a great move, and then you have three stanzas of three different kinds of time. The only thing that is lost is the being a disappointment, the adult reflective question, and that is quite large, since the emotion of the poem turns around it. Also that word “keen” gives a certain kind of intensity to the speaker’s current state. And the question is one of the drivers of the poem with its yearning. I do love the change of the title to a question, and then the echoing questions of the stanzas. The move to questions instead of statements works well. I wonder if there is a way to put the disappointed line” (s) back in? So, I just love the clothesline, and I get the feeling of being a child among the billowing sheets. The “I still see the little me” is tricky. On one hand it keeps us in the adult speaker’s voice and lets the speaker project back into the child feelings. On the other, it lessens a little the power of the image, of letting it hang after “thick Louisiana air.” You can trust your reader to know that that was little you, Perhaps a place for a question? Or for something more specific, more imagistic that conveys that warmth of feeling. You will know what works for you. I’m rambling, so ignore whatever does not feel like something you want to try.

Overall, the poem has a sense of healing to me. The last stanza seems a setting aside of the pain/separation of the relationship to reclaim that warmth. It is a generous move of the speaker and generous to share it with the reader.

The title has me right away. And then the mountain ridge immediately becomes a kind of set of bones, like the bones under the skin of a hand or a backbone, and I love thinking of those huge entities as delicate. I don’t know whether you intended that, but one way you could take the poem that would be quite different, would be to pull out just a little more the “hidden” images of hands/bones in the poem, the child’s bones gripping the playground wheel, the blade a shoulder blade (that might be a stretch! 🙂 ) That would be a different poem than what you have here. It works really well as it is, Lindsey, the wheel returned to as the turning shadow/sunset, and with the repetitions of blues. If you keep the blues at the conclusion you could foreshadow the color very lightly with the mountains and/or the smoke or something, so when it enters fully it has a sense of thumping home. Like subtly weaving blues in without much noticing but letting the poem use the color cumulatively to build tension. The questions in the middle of the poem work well. They open out the poem and the relationship, both. It might be that one of the statements elsewhere can also be a question? As it is, they make a kind of fulcrum, which you may or may not want.
Sometimes, as I know you know, under multiple images there is something(s) tying them loosely together. Emphasizing that with a very light hand can unify even a very diversely leaping poem without the reader even knowing how. Thanks for this. And ignore whatever doesn’t feel like you here.

This poem is itself a kind of hurricane, spiraling widely and wildly out from a center that is/isn’t there, moving, too. I think those fulsome questions at the beginning are wonderful. Questions can really drive a poem. I wonder if there are places later in the poem where statements lend themselves to being more alive as questions. The first 12 lines work really well together, and then there is a leap in style and content. I wonder if leaping in both ways is too much? I don’t know. I think the lines with particularity arestrong, sparring rabbits, hiking boots. Some of the lines with abstract or general thoughts, like “awake, alive, alive” or “the onslaught of acceptance/rush of inclusion. The places where sound play enters, like “queen of the reeds” are strong in a different way. The music carries them. The poem seems to drive toward the sing a self in hiking boots/ this is not about me. After that, I experienced a drop in energy. I might consider increasing the “I” in the poem, paradoxically, as a way of giving it more to the reader’s experience. Thanks for it. In this and other comments, take what is useful to you and ignore the rest or anything that doesn’t feel right to you.

Hi Lindsey,
The quatrains are working really well, especially the enjambment between stanzas, where there both is and isn’t a shift of some kind. And the sky trope that moves through the whole thing works well as something you can spin any direction and still connect through the image. I esp like “blue mosaic–one of sky’s good moods,” “quicksilver sky” and “kicking gears into vivid sunset.” The latter has such strong mouthfeel, sort of rugged in sound, like the beard is to touch,” as does “bull-thistles snag their coats.” If you want to revise it further, you might up the roughness of the diction elsewhere. Or not. The contrast with the smoother sounds works, too. Ziploc is great. Both the mundane of it for something sacred and the sound. It might be interesting to condense the first three stanzas into two. THe poem picks up a different energy when John comes in. Also, “And I still eye the sky” portrays a kind of repetition of some sameness. You might think about if that is the direction. If, for instance, your said something like “Now I eye the sky…” there is space for an open ended future that begins in the repetition but departs from it into the new. Those are two very different motions that the poem can make and claim. Then there is the move, that “you” entering at the end and so strongly and so surprisingly. THe “yes, you” allows that late second person entrance to feel not accidental or too late, more like the speaker has been waiting to make that address. The last line turns it to a completely different poem than I expected. It is like an aperture that opens from the pair intimacy and individual grief, outward. One question, it wasn’t clear to me how the singular “friend” works with the plural “travelers.”

I trust you will just ignore whatever I’ve responded that seems off track or unhelpful for you! It’s a poem that covers a lot of ground.

Christina

Hi Beth,
This poem makes a small packet of itself, like an Emily Dickinson poem. I especially like the stanza that begins “beamed by his actions…” and the general love of a child, the self corrective, so emphatic in the poem. It pumps energy into the poem, but it also helps me trust the speaker, that act of the speaker correcting, making more exacting, the claim. , The mirroring image it opens with carries through. I wonder if you might play with line order in the grade school stanza, so the stanza ends with “gone in one moment,” then a sort of drop off of whitespace before the last stanza. I also very much like the image of being mirrored, and I wonder if there might be a way to bring it back in some very succinct way in the last stanza? If any of my comments don’t appeal to you, just ignore them. You are always the one who knows best what is emerging from your poem.
CHristina