One of the most interesting things in poems is how they travel from one place to the next–from beginning to end, and all the twists and turns along the way. What are the transitions–some subtle, some obvious–from one thought to the next, one image to the next, one emotion to the next? We say that poems transport us–they take us somewhere. We enter with the title and first line, move through the world of the poem, and are shown out at the end. What was that ride like? Where did it speed up and slow down? What would a map look like?
Thinking of transportation reminded me of one of the most magical versions I know: the cat-bus in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated movie My Neighbor Totoro. This was my introduction to his films, and I think I’ve watched almost all of them now, including his best known, Spirited Away. Reading some poems can be like getting onto the cat-bus. Here’s a link to the cat-bus arriving to pick up passengers.
So how would you describe the transitions in the poems below? Post your thoughts here, and plan to join us for this week’s Fridays at 4 (eastern time) discussion. I’ll send the zoom link later this week.
THE WAKING
Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
*
THE FISH
Marianne Moore
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices—
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice—
all the physical features of
ac-
cident—lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
*
ALLEGRO
Tomas Tranströmer (translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly)
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
*
BLOOD LIGHT
Natalie Diaz
My brother has a knife in his hand.
He has decided to stab my father.
This could be a story from the Bible,
if it wasn’t already a story about stars.
I weep alacranes—the scorpions clatter
to the floor like yellow metallic scissors.
They land upside down on their backs and eyes,
but writhe and flip to their segmented bellies.
My brother has forgotten to wear shoes again.
My scorpions circle him, whip at his heels.
In them is what stings in me –
it brings my brother to the ground.
He rises, still holding the knife.
My father ran out of the house,
down the street, crying like a lamplighter –
but nobody turned their lights on. It is dark.
The only light left is in the scorpions –
there is a small light left in the knife too.
My brother now wants to give me the knife.
Some might say, My brother wants to stab me.
He tries to pass it to me – like it is a good thing.
Like, Don’t you want a little light in your belly?
Like the way Orion and Scorpius –
across all that black night – pass the sun.
My brother loosens his mouth –
between his teeth, throbbing red Antares.
One way to open a body to the stars, with a knife.
One way to love a sister, help her bleed light.
I want to continue our discussion of poem endings this week, and I’d like to focus specifically on how the last lines function. Poems have an anatomy that includes not just their shape on the page, but the arc of their thoughts and feelings. One ending might be a kind of summary of what’s come before, a summing up and deepening. If that shape is a container, a box, then another kind of ending is one that adds a new twist, a surprise, a leap. Another might seem to hover in paradox and ambiguity, rather than providing any kind of resolution. Does it leave us in the world of the imagination, or does it lead us back into the world of daily life? What categories of poem endings can you come up with? When you read through the examples here, what do you see? Do a little looking up: read about the Argument from Design for the existence of god, and about heroic similes and Kurosawa. I assume you’ll remember the plot of Hansel and Gretel. I’ve included three poems by Louise Glück as examples of the same author using different kinds of endings in different poems. Look back at the poems for last week with the same question: what kinds of endings do you see?
This seemed like a natural follow-up to last week’s topic, First Lines There are obviously as many and varied kinds of endings for a poem as there are beginnings. A poem might sum up an argument the poem has been making–maybe with a twist–like a Shakespearean sonnet. It might end with the satisfying click of a box, or the end of a scene or story. Some sustain ambiguity and paradox, some end with questions. Some end with images that remain vivid in our minds when we turn from the page, some with a satisfying rhyme. Some return to the title, and repeat it or offer a variation. Some are bangs, some are whimpers. Or whispers. When I was beginning to write, the ending of the first poem here, “A Blessing,” was often used as an example of the kind of leap an ending could make. So was the Hugo poem, which he recited magnificently as he paced back and forth across the stage. I couldn’t resist following it with the Plath poem, as a kind of response–the ferocity of its ending takes my breath away every time. I include it even though the Nazi/ Jewish references that appear at one point still seem wildly inappropriate to me. I also admire the ferocity of the Clifton poem, the self-knowledge and self-accusation of the Merwin, and the double-take of the McHugh.
Continuing our discussion of Shape and Structure in poems, I want to look at first lines this week. So much depends upon them: the poem’s voice and tone, its point of view, maybe its verb tense. The title provides a clue about what we’ll encounter, but often the meaning of it isn’t clear until we’ve read and re-read the poem. But the opening line is a momentous threshold we cross, from our world into the poem’s world. It might be a small step, or a plunge: “Whose woods these are I think I know….” (Frost), or, “They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad…..” (Larkin).