Strand: The Perks of Being White and Male

Lest anybody be offended by the title of this post, let me explain. I read through Mark Strand's Selected Poems and something struck me about halfway through. Strand writes poems about normal pictures and gives those poems normal titles; but normal may be a dangerous word to use, so let's call them simple and ordinary. This is quite a change from the poetry of Forche and Rich. I'm not sure I once considered anything political while reading Strand, which was a relief at first but something I eventually questioned. Why does he, a contemporary of other very political poets, choose to depict the scenes that he does--pretty unaffecting, unless, of course, you're moved by a man dancing to invisible music--instead of the politically charged atmosphere of the 60s and 70s? Is it just too easy to get caught up in world events and argue for or against them? too hard? I asked these questions between each turn of the page. And then, when I got to the end of the book, I looked at the back cover of my edition. There rested a black and white photograph of a man slightly resembling my grandfather--he's an aging Caucasian gentleman. While I would not normally give writer demographics much consideration, I think I may have used this photograph to answer my aforementioned questions. Mark Strand is a member of the human category long known as the ruling class in most of the world: white men. Perhaps it was just my mood when I read his poems, but I'm not sure it was. I think that he can write poems about issues rarely bigger than himself and his immediate world simply because he can. Poets like Rich and Forche are the "have-nots" in a writing community controlled by white men, although, thank God, I think it may be starting to change. Strand's only a minority in the American literary world because he's originally Canadian, but that's not such a big deal. He can write about nursing-home-porch-sitters and tell stories of his life and consider the passage of time over a slab of meat. I think that writing about this content may be more difficult for poets like Rich and Forche because, as females, it may be necessary to approach writing as a member of the non-ruling class.
In hindsight, I can't stop thinking that maybe minority poets, minority being anything but white and male, have to write poems about the un-ordinary in order to demand respect. Perhaps it's like getting a driver's license: anybody can drive without it, but it's illegal in this culture to do so. Anybody can write poetry and write it well, but until they get the old white head-nod, the work is unaccepted.
Disclaimer #1: Please notice the "may be"--this is all conjecture and if it's offensive or just plain wrong I'm pleading poetic ignorance.
Disclaimer #2: I do realize, as well, that what I've proposed is by no means a truism for both genders of poets. I understand that there are female poets who use the same content as Strand and that there are male poets who are very political. This was just something interesting that struck me.
P.S. In no way am I trying to slight Strand; I think his poetry is very very good, and he does tricks with language that I can only dream about. He just happens to be white and male.

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F, S, and A

Altieri's framing of the problem of contemporary poetry as being the difficulty of skillfully navigating the distances between public language and private experience, the private evoking the broadly shared public, is sort of amazing. She articulates almost exactly what I feel are both strongest and weakest points of Strand's work, the former being when he's addressing the largest of issues in a language and point of view that seems especially private, evoking, for me, Beckett (The Remains), and on the other hand when that private language seems to be perhaps too private and borders on melodrama because of Strand's insistence on rendering the matter and its significance on an almost purely private matter (Shooting Whales), or rendering a feeling as being so public that it loses its particularity by way of generalities (The Long Sad Party). Strand seems within our reading to fall in with Forche on this point, where the problem is one of lyric closure, but because his subject seems so much more particular or enclosed/and so broader in terms of its subject (less viable as a political movement or political history), his closure seems to run less risks in terms of self-satisfaction coming at loggerheads with political or emotional efficacy (by which I mean only that his kind of closure is more easily digested since it makes fewer claims as to the truthfullness or efficacy of its witness, whereas Forche, I think, would have us believe that her poetry is a kind of activism). It's an odd thing to say that because Strand's work stresses its historical particularity less and rides instead on the persona of an individual dealing with private losses that it seems to risk less, but when successful the treat is in the poem's seeming universality. If Forche seems self-satisfied she risks aestheticizing the violence that she writes against; if Strand does the same he risks only being self-satisfied with his persona or with himself, and we can easily, when this occurs, relegate the poem back to the scene of its private matters rather than have it stand at the pulpit of the public, whereas with Forche if we condemn her poems as too private, the setting and their subjects demand that the reader take Forche to task for pretending to witness while talking only about herself.

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Strand, Knox, and few poetic questions

I wasn't sure if we were supposed to post on anything in particular (or if we were even supposed to post), so I've just written about a few points that struck me.

I am interested in the way Strand uses language--he seems fairly spare with it, yet the content of many of his poems is strange, sometimes surreal. It is interesting that he is able to give us this material in a sort of straightforward, plainspoken way. Strand doesn't put the reader into a dreamlike scene with lush, verbose descriptions or extensive imagery, and I think it is for this very reason that the weird images he does give us stand out so much. That is, because we don't feel like we are in a dream sequence, because it seems like Strand is being plainly conversational, the weird stuff becomes more striking--we see (or at least I see it) more as a slight delusion or the speakers slip from reality than an imaginative scene. I think what I'm getting at is that Strand seems like a more "reliable" speaker, a speaker existing in the real world, so that when he gives us something that seems outside of this, we don't necessarily view it as the speaker's imaginative branching out. Rather, we are left with the impression that the speaker actually believes he has "been eating poetry." And this, I think, makes us view the speaker in an interesting way--we see him as reliable but perhaps a little delusional.

It's also interesting to me that Strand is able to create these odd scenes without extensive imagery. Rather than painting a picture for us, his poems seem to operate on a more psychological level; their effect seems to be more on the brain rather than the senses. I'm interested in comparing Knox and Strand because I think they both might be working using language in this similar way--i.e. their poems engage the mind more than the emotions. I think though that Knox is toying with language a bit more than Strand. I'm not suggesting that Strand is less skilled with language; rather, I think his poems have a different goal than Knox's do, and thus manage language in a particular way in order to achieve an end. Knox, I think, doesn't really pick one way of using language; part of her project, it seems to me, is exploring and manipulating the language itself.

The Mao article, it seems to me, looks at the various theories, arguments, etc. addressing the question of whether or not poetry should be considered within a historical context or as a separate entity. This was informative for me because I was only loosely familiar with these different schools of thinking. I'm interested in the question raised on page 10 in relation to how the critic is to consider the poet's intentionality. I guess I'm also interested in the question of how the critic decides what a "good" poem is. It seems like this is something variable and subjective that depends upon what criteria the critic uses as the basis for his judgment and, ultimately, his particular poetic tastes. I think that there are certain guides or methods for judging poetry that are more objective, but it seems there is an inherent element of subjectivity, of opinion.

In the Altieri article, I'm intrigued by the idea that the sincere self "is one poets are tempted to posit as always beyond language" (22). I wonder if in crafting a poem a level of sincerity is inevitably always lost--that the writer inherently must "create" a speaker and that this act of creation is something contrived, something that can't ever be entirely sincere (even if the speaker is not meant to be a character but to represent the writer himself).

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Forche/Knox Comparison

I’m interested in a comparison of Knox and Forche.

Knox’s poetry seems to be consistently self-conscious. In several poems, she actually tells the reader “Hey! This is a poem,” although obviously not in those words. For instance, in “Rose Poem,” Knox writes “give the I-narrator your dominant/impression, oh platitude”(8). And then in “Tonka” she recalls “the young Mac met/back in stanza I.” Not all of the poems call attention to the “art” of poetry quite so conspicuously, but she still seems to be concerned with the idea. I think maybe her focus, at least for the majority of the poems in the first two sections, is the form of art, poetry being her concentration. This is most apparent to me in “Sofonisba Anguissola” in which we, as readers, are walked through the process of creation. In “A Beaker,” the title poem, we’re introduced to a technique that Knox employs with her use of the colon. “Question:/What did your godparents then for you at this time?/Answer: Silver cup, plate, and spoon.).” This is quite rigid on the page and unbending in the mouth: Question? Answer. In this way, Knox may be clinging to form, unwilling to abandon it completely.

I think Knox is also concerned with place in her poems. Instead of just painting the picture, she tells the reader “Hey, we’re in the picture.” At the end of Stanza 1 in “Famous Dog,” she writes “We are outside.” “Here” is an issue in most of Knox’s poems; she starts with the description of the “here” in “Chicago 1985.” Because of this description of “here,” the narrator, maybe even Knox in some instances, is always in the poem. She also accomplishes her inclusion with the use of “we” in her poems.

Now, as promised: the comparison. While Knox’s poetry is very meta-poetic, (I guess that’s the poetry version of meta-fictional), Forche’s concentrates on showing the picture without mentioning the process of painting it. In poem VII of “Part II” in The Angel of History, Forche writes “His grave is strewn with slipper flowers in a coppice of loss./ The girl whose uncle was a violin, Borovska./ Years taken from them: birch light, his breath in her mouth, what do we have to forget?” In this instance, the poet just presents the picture instead of telling the reader that it is a picture that has been created by human hands. In this poem there is the colon, but it’s very un-Knoxish; the question/answer combo in this colon is not so clear-cut.

Forche, like Knox, is obviously concerned with place. But, while Knox’s place was “here,” Forche’s place is “there.” The narrator in much of Forche’s poetry at least begins looking on from a distance. There may be inclusion at some points, but not to the extent that Knox uses it. At the start of poem V of “Part II” of The Angel of History, there is a description of the Nazi-like geese. The narrator/Forche is not in this picture at all. It/she is simply the lens through which we see the picture. However, the line in the middle of the poem is “I am not sure what the photograph has to do with what happened.” That “I” transforms the onlooker to an actor in the poem. Still, unlike Knox, Forche leaves her narrator and herself mostly behind the scenes.

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What We (I) Want and When We (I) Want It

Forche writes in The Angel of History, “If you ask them anything they go on telling you the same thing forever./ Not what happened, but what may happen./ Death understood as death./ The world in its worlding./ Our hope put into question./ Figures dead and alive/ whispering not truth but a need for truth when one word is many things” (51). Rich, I believe, says something quite similar, though the context is very different, and what Rich hopes for, or rather laments, is that there is no reader that might not misunderstand her because words mean many things. Rich, I hope, is being ironic, while Forche here works to underscore what feels like a sense of frustration tied to Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s (both on different sides of the Nazi question) understanding of history, where the world itself is a thing to which we must bow and that encompasses within its bounds all particular actions and movements, guaranteeing the repetition of things within the rules and nature of the world, and where Benjamin’s understanding seems fatalistically similar, though he maintains some hope in Marx and the iteration of remembrance as a tool that might finally lead to synthesis (crudely: “if we don’t remember the past: doomed to repeat it” or “history repeats, first as tragedy, second as farce,” farce being the better but still more tragic of the two since it arrives out of a failure to prohibit the reoccurrence of particular expressions of power (sorry for all this exposition!). Where Rich’s impulse, even if ironic, tends to want to be able to be clear, to be able to say the thing and have it be recognized as such by all, without miscomprehension, I feel like Forche is far more cognizant of the privileges/dangers of difference, that difference might both be the thing that guarantees a wealth of expression and that dictates the very failures of understanding and desire that might be said to have caused the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century. Difference then is something to be celebrated and reviled (see Forche’s compendium of quotes, references, all quite beautiful vs. the signs of the world’s particular failure: Shukkei-en; Theresienstadt, the life of Ellie), since it is primarily this want or need for truth that binds together the sublime with the horrific.

Odd then, for me at least, that Forche in Blue Hour seems to have gone the route of the mystic in some ways, attempting to catalogue, or maybe even to write, the book that Valery says, “contains everything that you could possibly wish to know” and that melts “until it could no longer be distinguished from this world that is about us” (AoH, 77 my emphasis). Where Rich continues to strive toward clarity and toward recognizing personal pain as a direct link to the experience of the world, thereby asking that we come to recognize or even privilege similarity in order to mobilize a broad range of resources (from food to simple empathy) in order to tackle larger goals, Forche seems to insist on the privilege of the private and its difference/similarity to the larger things of the world, tying all together as participants in a kind of history that privileges truth as truth, as the larger things, the larger movements that obliterate the personal and the individual (which brings to mind a quote by J. Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one”).

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Rich, Forche and the Political Message

With her poems, I have the sense that Rich is fighting tooth and nail in a battle that has no seeable end. I think this is because she feels that women's struggle to overcome oppression is ongoing and has no clear endpoint. Yet, I find something very pessimistic in these poems that I didn't see quite much in Rich's earlier work. It's as though she doesn't believe the struggle can ever be overcome, yet, at the same time, feels compelled to wage this un-winnable war. I guess I just keep looking for her to reach some kind of acceptance about the fact that it will be a continuous struggle or to recognize the progress that women have made. But Rich really doesn't seem to do either of these things, or at least, only for brief moments. In the poem "Tattered Kaddish" (249-50) Rich "praises" life but always qualifies this with a negative statement. "Twenty-One Love Poems" (143-54) is one of the few places where Rich seems a little more content. In poem VIII she writes: "The woman who cherished / her suffering is dead...I want to go on from here with you / fighting the temptation to make a career of pain" (147). Yet, I don't really get the sense that Rich does go on from here; rather, it seems that her career is very much engrossed in suffering and struggle. I think, in some ways, Rich sees this as a necessary step in clearing a way for women.

While Forche's poems seem to have a sense of despair or bleakness about them, I don't really have the sense of struggle that I do with Rich. Forche, I think, wants us to see what she sees and while this vision is often stark and sad, I think it contains a little more hope (or at least acceptance) than Rich's. Forche doesn't seem angry or to be trying to effect some kind of action--at least not in an immediate sense. Instead, I think she is trying to create an awareness, to make us know and feel the things she shows us. I have the sense that she wants to inform the oblivious, ignorant American.

Perhaps this is a good time to enter into the discussion of vision and image since Forche's poems seem to rely heavily on image. I think Forche wants to create for the reader what she see in El Salvador. She wants the reader to become a witness as she herself is. For Forche, then, visual image is extremely important because she wants to actually place the reader in the scene. Forche doesn't want to merely tell us that things in El Salvador are pretty crappy because this would mean we must take her word for it--we would not experience the devastation ourselves. But, I am probably biased in this view as I tend to like image-based poetry over metered or rhymed poetry (although I realize they are not mutually exclusive). I don't rule out the possibility that meter/rhyme could have a different persuasive effect that I don't readily see.

I see Rich's poems as being less reliant on image. Rich seems to tell us more directly what her argument is while Forche just give us a picture of the situation. Of course, the picture that Forche gives us is not unbiased, as she presents the picture in a way that reveals something specific about the situation. Rich's agenda is, perhaps, only more transparent. Yet, Rich certainly does incorporate image into whatever it is she is telling us and often uses extended metaphors to convey her message.

As to whether or not both poets are truly un-metered, I think it could be argued that Rich and, perhaps, to a greater degree, Forche, have an attention to sound and rhythm that is not unlike meter. Also, I think the way that some of Rich's poems use spacing could be seen as a variation of meter.

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The Political Poetry of Rich and Forche

I think that a lot of poetry, not just political poetry, is un-metered and image based. Modernism and the powerful influence of cinema have made these qualities predominant. Nevertheless, I agree that there is “something about . . . the visual image . . . that is somehow more appropriate to this kind of political poetry.” And yet, I am not sure what that “something” is exactly.
The political poetry we are reading resembles, and perhaps may be connected to, the confessional poetry written by people like Lowell and Plath. Lowell’s confessional poetry, in particular, seems devoted to visually documenting his past. I think of a poem like “Father’s Bedroom,” in which he describes in detail the contents of the bedroom in order to provide a glimpse of his father’s life. The documentary mode used in this poem is similar to the “particular rhetorical mode . . . [of] ‘witnessing’ or ‘testimony’” that Helle finds in the elegiac poems of Forche and Rich. Witnessing and testifying obviously have much to do with documenting people and events. So it is not surprising that such a mode could exist in contemporary poetry, nor is it surprising that a journalist like Forche would be attracted to it.
I am also not surprised that, in this age of visual media, the witnessing and testifying would be very visual. The first section of Forche’s The Country Between Us contains elegiac poems about the “afflicted body” of El Salvador, to borrow a phrase from Helle. When I was in high school I saw a video about the atrocities in El Salvador. Those images remain in my head: Archbishop Oscar Romero, to whom Forche dedicates the first section of The Country Between Us, lying dead of a chest wound; soldiers firing on the people who attended his funeral; the bodies of murdered nuns being dragged out of pits. Although not an elegy in the strict sense, “The Visitor” is a poem in which Forche gives witness to political persecution, and thus mourns for the “afflicted body” of both the prisoner and El Salvador. I would have to say that the sensory images in the first stanza are as memorable as the video I saw so long ago. In this case, the aural images are emphasized in the quiet aspirate endings of words like “Spanish,” “left,” and “breath.” It is interesting that Forche uses an occasional internal slant rhyme or slant end rhyme to emphasize the sensory. This kind of rhyme is not for music, but for remembering and experiencing Francisco’s pain and isolation. You could also say that Forche uses “visual rhyme” in “The Memory of Elena,” in which the meat and seafood in a paella resembles human body parts: “camarones, fingers and shells, / the lips of those whose lips / have been removed, mussels / the soft blue of a leg socket.” Rhyme and sound, it seems, become important tools when they can heighten sensory experience.
Rich uses visual images to show the afflictions that she feels are hidden or ignored. She is interested in “’Naming and mourning damage, keeping pain vocal so it cannot become normalized and acceptable’” (qtd. in Helle 63). A clear instance of this effort occurs in the first stanza of “A Woman Dead in Her Forties,” in which Rich describes the results of the mastectomy that her friend underwent. In the poem, she rues her and her friend’s failure to discuss cancer and its effects on the body. I suppose Rich is also trying to revise the convention of the “beautiful dead woman.” According to this convention, the woman’s dead body becomes an aesthetic object, as in a poem like “The Lady of Shallot.” Perhaps another advantage of the brutal and vivid documentary image is that the poet can avoid aestheticizing affliction.

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"Listening" to Rich

I began reading Rich determined to focus on visual imagery. I soon found, however, a thread of auditory imagery, especially in the poems from The Dream of a Common Language. In all of these poems Rich discusses communication; in "Cartographies of Silence," the topic of choice is the conversation. So, while I recognize the significance of visual imagery such as "ice-floe" and "granite flank laid bare," I also immediately begin to "listen" to, and not look at the poem. If I have any image in mind at this point, it is that of two people talking. But instead of watching them talk, I listen. Once I listen--and since listening is dependent on production of sound, I actually read the poem aloud--I begin to uncover some semblance of form within the freedom of the un-metered and un-rhymed poem. Later in the poem Rich writes "Silence can be a plan/ rigorously executed." I think that this is how she feels about form--lack of form can be a plan, too. I'm still not quite sure what that plan is, but I'm working on it.
Now, to the always delightful topic of politics. I'm not sure that the visual can be more appropriate than the traditional aspects of verse for political poems such as these. First, I'm not entirely sure that visual imagery isn't a traditional aspect of verse, but I'll accept it. I keep asking myself if paying attention to the voice in Rich's poetry is perhaps more important than watching the imagery. In the political realm, doesn't an audience ultimately listen more than it watches? Yes, we have visual symbols throughout political history such as the raised fist or the swastika, but these images have no meaning without the spoken word on which they are based. Throughout Rich's poetry, there seems to be an evolution of female voice. I'm not entirely sure of its course, but in "Cartographies," there is "The scream of an illegitimate voice," in "Twenty-One Love Poems" there are the "different voices" with "different language, different meanings," and in "A Woman Dead in Her Forties" there are "the secrets and silence/in plain language."
All of these references to speaking tell me that I should be listening and not watching.

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Forche and Rich, Image and Meter

It might be the MC (middle-class) Protestant in me, but I much prefer Forche's political distance, her role as observer (though close in proximity) and witness, to Rich's sense of embattlement, her speaking so personally to the ways in which she both sees and represents particular movements. The former I think is less aggrandizing, while Rich seems content to speak as if she's multitudes, even when speaking more personally. Both see history and its movements widely, but for me Forche despairs less (maybe its her cynicism that allows this freedom), while Rich grinds and grinds toward the realization of a singular ideal and vision (I mean singular in as broad a sense as possible), where the oppositions sometimes seem rather too clear-cut.

Joanie, your question as to the appropriateness of the image versus “more traditional aspects of verse” for political poetry is really interesting; I’m interested to see if Matt might take this question up more thoroughly, but my answer is a definite yes, I do think it’s more appropriate, though I agree with your implication that these things, image and meter, are in no way mutually exclusive, though I get the point concerning the emphasis of one over the other. Partly I think the image carries more power simply because the metonymic or synecdochical properties of image, where the image achieves by seeming to eschew the mask of form a kind of power and easiness that lends itself to being more readily understood as part of something larger (the ears in The Colonel, for example, don’t require much reader work), whereas the more traditional aspects if fore grounded might compete with the message: one seems to eschew virtuosity by quieting the formal aspects in favor of what one simply sees, while the other pronounces its mastery in the wrangling of the word (again, this is an artificial distinction, but it holds in terms of effect, I think).

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Rich, Forche, and Poetry's Political Action

This week we're reading Adrienne Rich's work from the '70s to the present, Carolyn Forche's first book A Country Between Us, and an essay by Anite Helle titled "Elegy as History: Three Women Poets 'By the Century's Deathbed,'" (South Atlantic Review Spring 1996). Given that frame, the proximate focus of our posts this week is open; perhaps though people will comment on the function of "vision" in Rich's and Forche's politically charged work. Is there something about seeing, about the visual image, that is somehow more appropriate to this kind of political poetry than other more traditional aspects of verse, such as the senses evoked by meter and rhyme? Why is this political poetry un-metered and image based (and is it really?)?

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R n F

Interesting that Rich at one time saw the creative production at odds, or even mutually exclusive from, "women's work," and finds in the canon of men and women an odd regard or deference to women's role in the creative production of men. I see what she's saying, but I wonder if she's speaking more to a particular time, to a particular political and sexual "dead awakening" felt by the aging youth of that time. She's right, I think, to point to the pessimism of men's work (especially in light of the many many failed "men's projects"), but that seems, overall, not particularly new by the fifties or sixties, and I wonder at its inclusion, and at how her particular experience is translated into a larger, generational awakening, when she individually has so much vested in the tradition, and in her bearing away from it, of her craft.
I wonder too if more might be made, in the way of Harrington's piece, of the trajectory of industrialization and the progressivist push of the century's history, which gave birth to the individual and the emphasis on the private perhaps because of the public and national costs of persuing those progressivist ideological goals. That the awakening that Rich speaks of seems to occur so closely in time to the Civil Rights Movement, a racial awakening, also seems particularly important, given that both highlight to an incredible degree the hypocrisy of a political system that utilized the individual in a way meant to conserve the power of a particular political order.
I do wonder though, re: Harrington, if Rich seems a bit too self-serious (I wish she were funnier, less earnest), which I think drives home the sense of the work's intense individualism. In some ways I think that this selfish intensity is what poetry does best; like all good art it, the individual consciousness, gives us a sense of the new, which I feel that in the same sense public poetry does not--public poetry is to remind us of a common language, ideology, society--but I do think that at times the newness precludes the comprehension of the public, thus warranting the cry: Elitism! I like what Leroi Jones writes: "Fuck poetry and it is useful," and it seems to me that Rich is saying the same, albeit laughing less when she says it.

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Adrienne Rich and the Function of "Asbestos Gloves"

It was in college—the academy—that I first learned to like poetry. Consequently, I like high modernist poets like Pound and Eliot. I am comfortable with poetry “in its institutional form,” as Harrington would say (506). Moreover, I always thought—and, to a certain extent, still think—that poetry is written for aesthetic appreciation. I would agree with Harrington that this high modernist understanding of poetry turns “’Poetry’” into “’a poem,’” a poem into a “text,” and the text into “a material object” (501). Four of five years ago, if someone had asked me, “why read a poem?” I would have responded by asking, “why look at a picture, or why listen to a symphony?” In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot does not think that this distinction is all that important. He uses the words “artist,” “poet,” “art,” and “poetry” interchangeably. My experience in poetry workshops, where emphasis was placed on “craft” and “technique,” only reinforced the high modernist conception of poetry. The public wanted an aesthetic experience.

But obviously words are not like paint or stone. First, they are not material. Second, they are used for expression and communication, and any brief glimpse at the history of poetry will demonstrate how poetry has not always been crafted for purely aesthetic reasons. Even Eliot and Pound express ideas and emotions in their poetry. Their poems are about “the news that stays news” (Pound) and “the mind of Europe” (Eliot). Some of what they have to say is offensive. Most of it is certainly not “inspirational” like the poetry that Harrington finds outside of the academy. I am still haunted by the lack of inspiration that I find in most of the poetry that I read, and while I do not agree with all of what Rich argues in “When We Dead Awaken,” I can see why she is troubled by the “deep pessimism and fatalistic grief” that she finds in poetry written by men (25). The public can get “deep pessimism and fatalistic grief” from the news, even the kind that does not stay news, so why read this kind of dark poetry?

I find many of Rich’s early poems well crafted, but somewhat pessimistic. “Living in Sin,” for example, ends with an amazing simile: “she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming / like a relentless milkman up the stairs.” However, the poem’s bleakness resembles that of Eliot’s “Preludes.” As Rich struggles to express her own experiences and feelings and begins to remove the “asbestos gloves” of formalism, her poetry becomes less pessimistic, but not less aesthetically effective. For instance, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” depicts the oppression and suffering that Rich wants to make her audience aware of. She uses craft and technique to render the poem’s subject in a powerful and memorable way. In a line like “each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes,” Rich harnesses the power of meter (the trochee in “blowing” emphasizes the force of the “grit”) and figurative language to render profound despair. Furthermore, as in later poems like “Planetarium” and “Diving into the Wreck,” she offers a positive, albeit ambiguous, resolution by indicating the possibility for overcoming oppression and suffering. Of course the possibility has much to do with Rich’s feminist politics. An audience that is resistant to feminism may be turned off by these poems, but at least Rich is attempting to say something to the audience, to spark some kind of conversation. The later poems also demonstrate how she can use craft and technique without having to don the asbestos gloves and shape the “well-wrought urn.”

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Poetry Elite or Everyday?

In the Harrington essay, I'm interested in the idea that the privatization of poetry is, in some respects, elitist. I'm also interested in thinking about poetry as something marketable. I normally think of the creation of poetry as a very personal thing. I know that in my own poetry, I'm not writing for anyone else and think of an audience only insofar as a poem's coherence is concerned (I'm thinking here more of grammatical coherence as opposed to interpretative coherence). I also tend to think of poetry as being inherently self-absorbed, so I find it interesting that Harrington seems to be suggesting that poetry can become too private, too wrapped up in itself (or the poet). I realize that Harrington is referring to a specific moment in American poetry and is by no means suggesting that all personally focused poetry (and I think it can be argued that all poetry is, at least in some way, personal) is elitist. Still, the issue Harrington raises makes me wonder how much poetry is and/or should be concerned with its audience. On the one hand, poetry seems to lose its relevance if a reader can't relate to it, can't find something meaningful within it. At the same time, if poetry is totally absorbed with its audience, it becomes a product to be marketed, reduced, perhaps, to greeting card rhymes. And then there's the question of who makes up poetry's audience; as Harrington points out, poetry's readership seems to exist primarily within the academic realm. In this sense, poetry today could be viewed as elitist. This makes me wonder in regard to my own poetry, what is the point if we are essentially writing poems only for other poets and scholars? Shouldn't the "common man" be able to find something of value within poetry? This is something I've often thought about and I still really don't have a good answer to these questions. Yet, despite this, I still feel driven to write. I think, largely, poetry is created out of a need to communicate. For me, there is satisfaction in laying my thoughts out on paper--the communication lies in transferring what is in my mind into words. If from this initial communication other people are able to get something out of my poetry, all the better.

Eliot and Rich seem to be saying similar things about poetry in regard to the effect of preexisting poetry (and literature in general) on the poet. That is, they both seem to agree that everything that has already been written influences and essentially becomes part of the poet's poetry. For Rich, as a woman, this means that she must work against these traditions because they are inherently oppressive. I think we can see Rich struggling with this throughout her poetry--struggling to establish herself as a female writer within a tradition that has considered the female primarily as an object (i.e. as a muse or as a caregiver). Rich's poems seem to become progressively less formal and more experimental over time and I think this suggests that for her, to write within formalistic traditions (i.e. rhyme or meter) is to be subject to oppression. Breaking free as a female writer seems to coincide with breaking free stylistically.

In regard to how Rich's poems serve or don't serve a public, it seems that she is certainly aware of a public, but perhaps, primarily a female public. I think that she is trying to create a new tradition; to make a space for women within poetry and in doing this is conscious of the fact that women will look to her poems for this new tradition. I think Rich's poems, too, reflect and are concerned not just with women within literature, but also within society. I see Rich becoming most conscious of this in The Will to Change and specifically in "Planetarium," and thus I find it interesting that she talks about "Planetarium" in her essay and mentions that it is tied to the earlier poem "Orion." There's plenty more that can be said about this, but I'll stop since I've already exceeded my "300-500 words."

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