Thursday, August 24, 2006
This week - poetry.
It seems to be the week for poetry; first I pull a volume off the shelf in the vast library at school – it’s a thin volume shelved near a play I’m searching for – and the title is so strange I have to have a look. Congreve’s Balsamic Elixir, Poems by Frederick Jones. They turn out to be rather iffy except for a couple, and one which blazes like a star on the night of my mind.
Next, during coffee, the hermit mentions Wallace Stevens. Complete ignorance on my part. At least, nothing that I remember. The hermit suggests a title that I’ve never heard – "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". I track down the Collected Poems of Stevens and find them like digging in very stony ground. Perhaps it’s my mind which is the blunt shovel, but there’s no happy fit with any of the poems and my head. I don’t think that the Blackbird poem is very good – but perhaps I was misled by the title and am concentrating on seeking something that matches or speaks to my experience with Redwing Blackbirds. Just one of the poem’s sections begins to approach my heart:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
A couple of days later I have coffee with Risa; that stretches into lunch and then through much of the afternoon; it’s my last day of freedom before the semester begins. She steers me to Stevens' "The Snow Man" and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", but claims to not know what they mean. I puzzle over them and we talk, she prodding me to think and my brain dredging up meanings suggested by the strings of words. It’s not easy. I don’t know if the fact that it’s a struggle means that I’m dense, or significantly less intelligent than the poet, or if, despite our seemingly common language and heritage, we are much, much further apart than I assumed. Opaque. I find the poems opaque.
Risa is very patient, and kind. She gently urges me to see bigger themes and expect less literalness. (My words, not hers.)
If a poem records the geography of another’s interior mindscape, how much should I expect to understand?
And is the poem a series of prompts? A series of images that are a series of nudges that may or may not get you to where he may or may not have intended to send you?
I come back to the Jones poem; I try saying it for Risa, and I can’t remember all of it word-perfectly, but I do the last bit, and she gasps and laughs with understanding. It gives her a real sensation; I hold my hands out in front of me, as if they are holding some invisible but very real offering. “That’s marvelous,” she says. “That’s wonderful.” Not me; the poem.
Japanese Restaurant
When you’re young you think loneliness
is just something that happens to you, say,
if you don’t get any letters for a while
or no-one asks you out. It isn’t;
its part of the basic design concept
of the human heart – like Tartini’s
Abandoned Dido. Me and the violin.
The girl at the next table wipes
her chopsticks and puts her hair up
with them. My teacher says I should brighten
the tone. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says,
‘the dark will still shine through.’
- Frederick Jones
Next, during coffee, the hermit mentions Wallace Stevens. Complete ignorance on my part. At least, nothing that I remember. The hermit suggests a title that I’ve never heard – "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". I track down the Collected Poems of Stevens and find them like digging in very stony ground. Perhaps it’s my mind which is the blunt shovel, but there’s no happy fit with any of the poems and my head. I don’t think that the Blackbird poem is very good – but perhaps I was misled by the title and am concentrating on seeking something that matches or speaks to my experience with Redwing Blackbirds. Just one of the poem’s sections begins to approach my heart:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
A couple of days later I have coffee with Risa; that stretches into lunch and then through much of the afternoon; it’s my last day of freedom before the semester begins. She steers me to Stevens' "The Snow Man" and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", but claims to not know what they mean. I puzzle over them and we talk, she prodding me to think and my brain dredging up meanings suggested by the strings of words. It’s not easy. I don’t know if the fact that it’s a struggle means that I’m dense, or significantly less intelligent than the poet, or if, despite our seemingly common language and heritage, we are much, much further apart than I assumed. Opaque. I find the poems opaque.
Risa is very patient, and kind. She gently urges me to see bigger themes and expect less literalness. (My words, not hers.)
If a poem records the geography of another’s interior mindscape, how much should I expect to understand?
And is the poem a series of prompts? A series of images that are a series of nudges that may or may not get you to where he may or may not have intended to send you?
I come back to the Jones poem; I try saying it for Risa, and I can’t remember all of it word-perfectly, but I do the last bit, and she gasps and laughs with understanding. It gives her a real sensation; I hold my hands out in front of me, as if they are holding some invisible but very real offering. “That’s marvelous,” she says. “That’s wonderful.” Not me; the poem.
Japanese Restaurant
When you’re young you think loneliness
is just something that happens to you, say,
if you don’t get any letters for a while
or no-one asks you out. It isn’t;
its part of the basic design concept
of the human heart – like Tartini’s
Abandoned Dido. Me and the violin.
The girl at the next table wipes
her chopsticks and puts her hair up
with them. My teacher says I should brighten
the tone. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says,
‘the dark will still shine through.’
- Frederick Jones
