Week Three: Adrienne Rich

           While Merwin used the poetic “I” to explore the Self, Adrienne Rich seems to use her “I” (and “you” and “we” and “us”) to explore social and political issues and their relationship to self in The School among the Ruins. The “I” makes her poetry intimate and personal for the reader even though many of her topics are very global. Her writing is so much more than “’grinding a political axe’” (“Blood, Bread, and Poetry” 53)—she begs her reader to see political issues as things that affect everyone’s “I”—as issues that are more than headlines.  Placing herself so prominently in her poems also allows her to emphasize her philosophy that a poem is “not a single, encapsulated event” (54), but in fact is a snapshot from the progression of her life.  Using the vulnerable “I” also puts Rich “face to face with both terror and anger” (56) in a clear way. But she also frequently eschews the I in favor of “you” or “we.” Her “we” and ”us” confront large, frightening concepts and issues together. These second-person pronouns also emphasize the immediacy of the issues she’s addressing—they prevent us from reading with too much distance. I think this strategy is particularly clear in “Ritual Acts.”

It’s clear throughout all these poems that Adrienne Rich sees the power of pronouns , but that awareness is made explicit in “Transparencies.” While talking about known things, Rich says, “any child on the playground knows/That asked your favorite word/in a game/you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river/(never a pronoun never God or War)” (The School Among the Ruins 49). Pronouns make things real, make things close, and Rich uses that reality and closeness effectively.

I very much enjoyed reading Rich. I wasn’t expecting to from the moment I heard “political” used to describe her, but her beautiful language and honest, straightforward opinions won me over quickly. Where I expected to find angry rants I instead found observations as gorgeous as they were keen. Out of all of them, the poem that particularly resonated with me is “The Eye.” I think it says beautifully how different this war is from all previous wars—we are in the eye of the war, safe, far-removed, and largely unaware of the real effects of its storm. Although this poem, dated 2002, was (I assume) written in response to the shock of the events of 9/11, I think it is extremely relevant to the cultural attitude today. While my husband was deployed I was frequently frustrated by people who, upon learning that he was in Afghanistan, told me that they saw on the news that Obama ended the war and everyone’s coming home and there’s no more danger. They told me these things while my husband zipped up body bags, attended memorial services, and received enemy fire more days than he didn’t. Every one of those well-meaning people were in the eye of the war but completely unaware of it.

I love that Rich dates her poems—knowing context gives them a very specific depth and meaning, especially since most were writing in and around a very difficult, shocking time in our history. But I also liked ignoring the dates sometimes. Her words are so applicable to so many times and situations—“The Eye” is a perfect memorial to the now-shattered peace that existed in the days before 9/11, but the idea of a war’s eye is one that transcends that moment in history. I’m very interested to talk more about her, particularly the second section of the book, which, in its specificity, was somewhat less accessible to me than the other parts of the volume.

Week Two: More on Merwin

How do Merwin’s poems explore and test the notion of the poem as an expression of lived experience and memory?

                Reading Helen Vendler’s review after finishing The Shadow of Sirius was enlightening. It was clear while reading that Merwin’s lived experiences and memories were the subjects of the bulk of the volume. But just from reading these poems I never would have guessed at the man tragedies of Merwin’s life. I’m glad that I didn’t know the details of his life story before reading because it allowed me to see how relatable all of the poems are. Merwin uses very simple words and images in these poems—words and images that I think most people would call “familiar.” The way Merwin relates his own memories sparks memories of my own, though now, having read his brief biography I have to say in reality we’ve shared few experiences. Though written with specific language in response to a difficult life, the emotional response they provoke is vague enough to allow anyone to find a way to relate. And his difficult past makes both his wistful, sad poems more meaningful as well as the few very happy ones. “Day without a Name” stood out to me as absolutely joyful—a word that I don’t think I would use to describe many other poems in Sirius. Although Michael Davidson says that “it makes little sense to speak of poetry's ability to express the Self, capital S,” I think that Merwin does express his full Self through these poems. Does that mean each reader can “know” Merwin from these pages? Not fully, no. But I do think each reader can identify with and know a part of Merwin’s self from time spent in these pages.

It was also fascinating to hear about Merwin’s changing style. Since I haven’t read any of Merwin’s early work, I was unaware that his poems were once very different. The knowledge that Merwin was once full of poetic vinegar lends even more weight to the simplicity of these “worn words.” I thought Vendler expressed very eloquently the importance of Merwin’s lack of punctuation. I felt that she said what I wanted to say last week. It’s also interesting to compare his lifetime transformation to the progression I see in this book: it seems like the first two sections are more internal, while the third looks out into the world. The shift to nature, other poets, and animals seemed sharp to me, but not at all unwelcome.

I think that Merwin creates experiences through his poems that can be universally shared though they are based on his very specific lived experiences and memories. And I found it interesting that when Merwin’s poems become very specific he lets the reader know. The four poems in the third book written “to” people are titled with their names so that we, too, can know who inspired him—three poets: Ruth Stone, Basho, and Su Tung-p’o, and his wife, Paula. I think it would be difficult to discuss Merwin if we were to treat these poems as something other than an expression of lived experience and memory. 

Week One: W.S. Merwin

                  What are Merwin’s poems made of?

On The Shadow of Sirius

Before I opened this volume, the only Merwin poems I had read were the few that we looked at in American Lit. These were different and surprising to me and I found the line structure very interesting. I think The Shadow of Sirius was a great companion to the introductory chapter of The Art of the Poetic Line because Merwin uses the line so effectively. His poetry is unpunctuated in the conventional sense, but his lines (which vary in size) seem to take the place of punctuation. In the poems with shorter lines (which is most of them), the line breaks seem to be more effective than periods or commas possibly could be. This is something that I had never really thought about before reading Longenbach’s many re-linings, if you will, of King Lear’s mad speech. Although the poetic line seemed intentional and important to me in the past, I wouldn’t have been able to explain why I felt this way. But now I guess I can say that the frequent enjambment in Merwin’s poetry helps me see how the speaker’s “mind is in motion” (Longenbach 10).  While I don’t feel that Merwin’s speakers share in Lear’s madness, I do see a lot of emotion in Merwin’s syntax and a reflection of how memory works. Sirius is clearly an older man’s book. I think even if I had somehow avoided looking at the author photo on the back cover of the book I would have known that these poems couldn’t have been written by someone young. The volume—especially in its many references to family and its deep sense of life experience and resulting understanding—reads very much like a beautiful conversation with an elderly person reflecting on the past.

“The Song of the Trolleys” is one that has stuck itself in my brain. It startled me in reading because its subject seems more tangible than most of the other poems’.  The lines—short, halting, but never stopping—gave me a feeling that I’m hearing a memory that both takes some work to recall and also contains more than the speaker can express to the reader. I hope that makes sense—it’s like it’s a memory so old that it’s too full and the speaker has to concentrate to choose the parts to share. In reading the short lines aloud I found that the constant enjambment of these brief lines encouraged me to move quickly through some lines but to linger in the breaks between others. This poem also stood out to me as one of the more rhythmic ones in the reading we’ve done thus far. I enjoyed the way it sounded—echoing the rhythm of the memory of the trolleys’ “song.” The repeated “-ing” verbs made me think, oddly enough, of Poe’s “The Bells,” one of the few poems I remember reading in high school, since I imagine a trolley “tolling” and “clanging” as well.

So, after some rambling, I believe that Merwin’s poems are made of memory, of a full lifetime’s experience, of nostalgia, and of line structure that punctuates better than punctuation. Is the poetic line the punctuation of emotion? I like thinking of it that way.