Monthly Archives: January 2007

The Fine Balance of Political Inaction

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Tom Matrullo writes:

It teeters on antinomy: The people who can speak something like the truth lack power to do what the truth requires; the people in power can’t bring themselves to speak anything like the truth.

Tom is responding to Al Gore’s having said:

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA’s domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government.  [Al Gore]

But Tom’s observation strikes me as a general political truth in a system that so radically shuts off those who hold power from those who (in theory) cede it to them. Words like entropy & solipsism float into consciousness & all that is solid melts into air.

(Still) Cold

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It was twenty-seven below zero here by the river at 7:30 this morning. The sun is shining, though, & it’s now up to four degrees above. This is one of the longer cold snaps I can recall. It regularly gets this cold in January, but we don’t often go for several days without a spike up into the balmy thirties. It’s especially hard on our younger Jack Russell, who has a whole lot of energy & under normal circumstances gets at least one & sometimes two good walks a day. The rest of us — the other (elderly) JRT, the Lab, Carole & me — find it easier to hole up indoors.

“Musicianship” by Barbara Guest

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From Barbara Guest’s 2002 book, Miniatures:

Musicianship

How far are you going in the culture program? Lizt draws nearer. Wagner overwhelmed us in that last demonic song.

Where the snowline fell on its supple track, people lost their maps in advance culture. And the faces, on the back row singing: rare tonalism, lying on its sides like a walrus, chord broken and chewed in liberation.

A poem like this certainly puts my practices of interpretation (see previous post) to the test, but I don’t think it breaks them. The poem makes large, but not impossible, demands on the reader. Or perhaps it simply demands a reader informed about certain things.

Cold (Still) & Interpreting Poetry

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It’s minus twenty-one (F) as I write this at 7:30. Carole has already headed off to the barn where she boards her horse to muck out stalls, which she does to help pay her horse’s board. (The call it “board” even though I’m pretty sure the horses don’t eat from a table.) She wouldn’t have to — it’s not that much money — but it sure as hell shows dedication. Nothing show dedication like shoveling frozen horse shit at twenty below zero. I don’t have to go in to teach this morning until around eleven o’clock & it’s still going to be bitter, though it looks as if the sun will be shining. When the sun came out yesterday after a long string of gray days, people seemed much happier even though it was still bitter cold. Looks like another bright, cold day. I’ll be going in to teach my two sections of Introduction to Literature this afternoon, with whom I am having the damndest time getting them to give up the idea that “everybody has their own interpretation of a poem.” My students make claims that “two people can have completely different interpretations” of a poem. A few seem to be beginning to understand that interpretation can be flexible without being entirely random. I have tried to introduce the distinction, perhaps artificial, between interpretations, which I define as establishing the “defensible meaning(s) of a poem” & responses, which are one’s own individual reactions & feelings evoked by a poem. Multiple interpretations can hover over particular lines of a poem, but I’d argue that a successful poem, read with consciousness of its historical & cultural context, can be given a relatively narrow range of interpretations, using my distinction above. When it comes time to respond to the poem from our own experience, of course, we can draw many “meanings” from it. But we cheat both the poem & ourselves if we leap over interpretation immediately to response.

“My Problem” by Rae Armantrout

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I’ve been meaning to post this poem for a long time. As my students might say, I can identify with it.

My Problem

It is my problem
to squeeze
the present from the past
by demanding particulars.

When the dog is used
to represent the inner
man, I need to ask,
“What kind of dog is it?”

If a parasitic
metaphor grows all
throughout – good!
Why stop with a barnacle?

A honeysuckle,
thrown like an arm
around a chain-link fence,
would be far more

articulated,
more precisely repetitive,
giving me the feeling
that I can go on like this

while the woman
at the next table says,
“You smell pretty,”
and sends her small daughter’s

laugh, a spluttery orgasm,
into my ear –
though this may not have been
what you intended.

It may not be a problem
when I notice
the way the person shifts.

I’m not posting this because I want to write a commentary. I’d just note the way phrases & lines coincide, giving the poem a very matter of fact feel. If it were my poem, my obsession with symmetry would have forced me to make the last stanza four lines long, but that’s my problem. Given Armantrout’s habits or arrangement, I’d say the final three-line stanza is a little nudge to the reader, saying, Notice! Earlier in the poem, I like they way the third stanza might be an aside about the poem, or might be a comment on the putative subject of the poem, or might be a general philosophical proposition. There’s no need to reduce one’s reading of the stanza to any single possibility. The rest of the poem radiates outward from there.

[The poem is from Armantrout's Veil: New & Selected Poems, published in 2001.]