Well, here's a poetry post, though certainly not the post I keep threatening to finish: go check out today's Poetry Daily selection (archive link), "A Shower of Rain," by Gerald Dawe. It's a truly lovely piece--compelling rhythm driving the line-by-line creation of a portrait at once private and inviting, insular yet familiar. The "steel grid" line alone makes me want to snatch up everything Dawe has ever written, on the chance I'll find more little tiny lightning bolts like that one elsewhere in his work.
I like it.
8 comments:
This is constipated commentary. It smacks so much of "trying too hard". No wonder you don't know what to think of poetry.
snarky: If expressing my honest admiration of a poem and providing some reason for said admiration can be considered "trying too hard," then consider me the hardest working blogger on the planet.
GAME OVER, PLAY AGAIN (Y/N)?
I think it is comments like "compelling rhythm" and "at once private and inviting, insular yet familiar" that invite criticism.
Why did you find the rhythm compelling? There are no reasons provided here, merely a statement of it being the case.
And these empty antagonisms, what do they actually say about the poem, putting aside the fact that they are so general as to apply to virtually anything? You've made one concrete reference to the poem, an attraction to the "steel grid" line:
the steel grid on the parlour door
Sure it's an interesting line in the poem as a whole, but why this alone would inspire you to purchase all of Dawe's work is baffling.
p.s. "little tiny"? Come on man, you're killing me.
Scott--
Thank you for your response.
To be honest, it wasn't my intent to write an essay about the poem and/or a detailed analysis of my reaction to it. Which is why the "trying too hard" response amused me, because, in fact, I was not really trying at all. Certainly I could have spent several hours on the subject, but that's not generally what I do on this blog. All I wanted to do was provide a brief piece of descriptive writing that might intrigue readers into checking out the poem for themselves.
That said, I'm happy to clarify, if I can, as it has been requested: when I said the rhythm was compelling, what I meant was that the structure of the poem, built on brief phrases, each beginning with "the" (which I believe you can call noun phrases, though to be honest my knowledge of grammatical terminology is a bit rusty), provided me with an aesthetic impetus to continue reading the poem. (This contrasts with, in my mind at least, a reason of narrative as to why a given novel/poem/essay might make me desire to continue reading it, once begun.) I may not have pointed this out in so many words because I felt that the rhythm/structure would be fairly self-evident to anybody who clicked through to read the poem for themselves. I thought the use of these brief phrases was the most immediate and distinctive element of the poem. Also, it was late, and I needed to go to bed.
The "empty antagonisms" were not meant at all in a negative fashion. I am sorry if that was unclear. By "private and inviting, insular yet familiar," I meant that there was a tension within the poem between a desire to communicate something to the reader--the "portrait" of which I spoke--and the desire to hold back information, or to communicate that portrait through images and figures that might mean more to the poem's narrator than to the reader. Which is to say: I might not know anything about the spinster, or the National school, or that parlour door--and yet, by the end of the poem, I feel as if I've seen something in this small town, or city, or house, that I find...I hate to repeat myself, but, I'll say "familiar" again, and hope that this additional context lends additional meaning to my original word choice. There's a sort of, not an economy of words, but an economy of description going on here, that I feel is put to an interesting artistic effect. (Compare how the poem would read if each phrase was immediately followed by a phrase that gave a precise reason why each specific image was important to the poem's narrator. That the spinster was the town witch, that the parlour door was the one his father smashed the narrator's face into, that the National school was where he hid from his father's drunken rages. Far more specific, far less private. Far less familiar or inviting, to my mind, in this specific case.)
Can this tension literally apply to almost anything? In some sense, I suppose, yes, it could. In the sense that writers will always possess more information about works they produce than they can possibly put into the works themselves. Matters of word choice or additional context about "real" figures or a more immediate, personal knowledge of what exactly it is they desire for a piece to do, what their goal for it is. And yet, I think there are poems far more insular and far less inviting than this. Likewise, others far more, and far more.
The steel grid line. I simply love that line. I loved it when I first read it, when it came to me as a complete surprise. I loved it when I sat there repeating it to myself several times after I first read the poem. I have loved it each time I've come to it during each subsequent reading of the poem. And I have loved it each of the twenty or thirty odd times I've said it to myself while writing this response. I've loved the visual image the line has generated in my mind, and the sound of the line to my ears, and the shapes of those words in that order on my tongue and in my mouth. I have had an artistic, sublime experience each time I've spoken those words or allowed them to form inside my head.
And yet, I can not explain it. Because, yes, art is baffling, and personal, and insular. Chances are there are lines that make you feel exactly the same way. At least, I hope there are. Perhaps there is someone else out there who has read the poem and who felt exactly the way I did when I read it. Were that person here, we'd look at each other, and we'd look at the line, and we'd each say, "I love that line," and there would be no explanation required. So when I said I loved that line, there was almost literally no desire to explain it. I was only sharing how I felt, not what I thought.
And so we have a little tiny lightning bolt, a rhetorical (and, yes, grammatically redundant) figure I stand by as being my attempt to illustrate exactly what that line felt like to me. You might call it the little tiny lightning bolt that caused me to "feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off." Certainly, there's room for the artistic discussion of artistic experiences?
Much better! Thanks for "working harder" and sharing some ideas of substance.
I wouldn't say it's "better," rather, I might say the two chunks of writing had different intentions.
If my original post caused people to become intrigued enough to click through and read the poem, then it was entirely successful, because that is what I wanted it to do: give people a reason to read the poem.
If my additional commentary provided the reader with additional information about what I may or may not look for in a poem, or what exactly about this poem intrigued me, or raised issues about the role of authorial revelation or intention regarding a poetic work, or caused the reader to think a bit more deeply about how their views and my views about poetry may align or differ--in short, if the additional comments generate deeper thought within the reader, or allow for further analysis and/or discussion of this specific poem or poetry in general--then my commentary was successful in achieving its own intentions.
I'll suggest that comparing the two is sort of like comparing a movie trailer to an extended film review in a newspaper. They're entirely different beasts.
Movie trailers should always give away the best moments. And spoilers. That way I don't even have to watch the movie.
(Found you through Metaxu. Really dig the blog and the music trailers you do for Arriviste.)
Hey Imani! Glad you like the blog and the reviews.
And yeah, there's probably quite a few movies I would have happily skipped had I known how they'd turn out...
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