Week Six: Anne Winters

After a couple of weeks of severe uncertainty, I feel much more comfortable in the realm of Anne Winters. That’s certainly not to say that I have full understanding, but Winters’ prosy style is more akin to other things that I’ve read in the past. Her narrative, perhaps simply because of the sheer number of words, is more substantially fleshed out and I think slightly (only slightly) less open to interpretation than the sparse verses of Merwin and Valentine.

I found The Displaced of Capital very moving. The stories were so singular, so compelling, I don’t think I’ll forget them any time soon. “The Grass Grower,” being so near the beginning of the book, is the one that first drew me in. It never ceases to be startling that people alive today have memories of the Jim Crow South, whether firsthand or one degree removed.

I thought the way Winters explores displacements feels like a continuation (in more detail) of Rich’s “Dislocations.” Winters’ narrative of Pilar and Pequita in “An Immigrant Woman” was fascinating. I’m curious if these stories are true. Winters voice is so genuine and she so clearly places herself in the narratives that it’s easy to believe them and accept them as fact. I think it’s interesting that Winters is the first of our activist poets who makes it plain that her message comes not just from conviction, but from very specific experiences. After Merwin, Rich, and Valentine, Winters specificity is surprising, not just in the full, round, characters she describes in the beginning half of the volume, but in the “Sonnet Map of Manhattan” we also get specificity of place—a very detailed exploration of New York and of the poet’s relationship with her father.

The final poem, “The First Verse,” continues in volume’s pattern of specificity but seems different from the clear narrative arcs of the majority of the poems. “The First Verse” was the place I felt most intrigued. I enjoyed reading what I assume was Winters’ own process through reading and translating the first verse of the Hebrew Bible. I was especially interested in the third stanza which talked about the goddess Tiamat and referenced the feminine aspects of God in the Psalms. I’ve always been interested in the way God’s absence of gender turned into militant insistence of his manhood. I’m very much looking forward to discussing all of these. I think everyone will have a lot to say about these much more explicit poems.

Week Five: Jean Valentine

When we read Merwin I latched on to the idea of the aging poet reflecting on his life as my anchor in understanding. With Rich, as soon as I saw the date (2000-2004) on the cover I knew I would be reading poems that came from the time surrounding September 11^th, 2001, so that tragedy was my anchor. I also found she shared some ground with Merwin—since both of them were writing from advanced age, they had an often similar tone—soft even when discussing difficult things.  In Break the Glass, Jean Valentine reads like a cross between Merwin and Rich. She also, writes from a perspective of experience. Her sparseness of language reminds me of Merwin’s simple, yet complicated work. But rather than the more internal poeticism of Merwin, Valentine leans more towards Rich’s political and social agenda.

                As I began reading, noting these similarities and differences, I thought my newfound familiarity with Merwin and Rich would make Valentine easy to understand. No such luck. Her poetry is beautiful in its vagueness and its measured, careful use of words, but I found it difficult to unravel such simple, yet very complicated poetry. I then turned to Buber, looking for enlightenment and found it… to a degree. Buber’s writing, just like Valentine’s is hard to describe—it’s so simple that it’s complicated. The translation felt poetic—it was easy to see Buber as part of Valentine’s lineage, and I think his I-You I-It words pairs (Buber 54) and his concepts of you, I, and it are very interesting.

                Valentine’s “Lucy” and Buber’s I and Thou had similar effect on me. I liked the words I read, but had to work to gain any comprehension and earned only the smallest amount. It seemed like in “Lucy,” Valentine is using the discovery of the missing link to explore other missing things or things that were once missing but are now filled—similar, in my mind, to the kind of recursive logic that Buber employs in I and Thou. I’m really looking forward to discussing “Lucy”—I feel like there’s so much there and I want to understand it better.

                A poem that particularly lingered in my mind after reading Valentine (besides “Lucy”) was “The Young Mother.” This poem was one of the most clear to me and though my interpretation is likely wrong I found it meaningful. I thought it beautifully described conception and birth in just a few short lines—an impressive feat for sure. And I took it to be, overall, a statement about the status of the single mother in American society—that she is excluded from the “white ship Witholding” (Valentine 46)and left to sink or swim alone with her children. It was very memorable poem because of that image—an enormous ship that carries some to middle class and beyond while leaving others behind with no way to board.

                Overall, I found Break the Glass to be hauntingly beautiful. Though I often felt lost, too far from meaning to even reach for it, the words as they stood on the page were beautiful in themselves. I didn’t feel like I had to understand these poems to find them moving. But hopefully more understanding with come with our class meeting!

Week Four: More on Rich

EDIT: Oops! Missed the mark big time on this one, but in any case, this was my process in attempting to understand this poem.

              
           In “Dislocations: Seven Scenarios,” Adrienne Rich depicts seven very distinct situation and continues using pronouns strategically. This time, however, it is less clear to me what, exactly, her strategy is. This poem is intriguing to me because I found it very powerful though I don’t quite feel able to articulate why. Continuing in my fixation with Rich’s pronoun usage, I was looking for a formula in “Seven Scenarios.” All of her poetry seems so intentional I expected to find a clear pattern, but after reading and re-reading many times I’m still not sure what I’m seeing that I like so much.

As in “The School among the Ruins,” she’s still demanding that the reader acknowledge how thin the lines are between the comfort we enjoy now and what could be, that seemed clear to me. While in “The School Among the Ruins,” Rich paralleled the trauma of the events of September 11, 2011, with the wartime traumas faced by other countries, the first section of “Seven Scenarios” places the reader in the situation of an elderly immigrant. Though the finger-pointing “you” is only used once here, I felt that once was enough to bring me into the role of the adult immigrant. I thought this was a clever reversal of the stereotypical angry foreign neighbor—I liked how Rich essentially said, “Don’t get mad, this could be you someday.” Rich also employs the second-person pronoun in the second section of the poem. I am much less sure of the circumstances of this section—is this about an addict? A patient? A prisoner? But regardless, Rich forces empathy from the reader (even the confused reader like me) when we find ourselves clutching for bread. I think this section is beautiful and moving, but I don’t think I would feel comfortable defining the situation here yet. I think it speaks to Rich’s effectiveness that I don’t feel I need to know what her poems are about to feel their power.

In the third, fourth, and seventh sections Rich moves to third person. My initial reaction is that Rich allowed the third person in the sections that are somehow familiar yet distant to the readers. Perhaps where we can easily insert ourselves she sees no need to push us? The seventh section presents a lovely introduction to a man about to leave for a Doctors without Borders stint and the fourth is the story of an under-funded Veterans hospital. Both of these situations seem fairly familiar to me yet outside of my every-day realm, so my hypothesis held true for me there. I’m less sure about the meaning of the third section. It begins discussing an infection that “drinks like a drinker/ whatever it can” (87). Immediately, reading the word “infection” in a politically-minded poet’s work I jumped to literal infection and assumed this poem was about AIDS, but the final line which says that the solipsist is still safe made me doubt that interpretation. Since solipsism is a philosophical idea, I began to think the infection may be one as well. So could the infection represent hatred or racism? Either way, this fit in with my idea that topics of familiar distance receive third-person treatment.

Section five seems a little more personal, so using the second person makes sense here as well. Section six, however, initially seemed to destroy my theory—its message of perceived failure seems like a universally relatable topic. Then I realized that it’s the only one that is both vague enough and specific enough that (I think) most everyone can immediately relate to—not in a second-hand, I-saw-on-the-news kind of way, but a really personal experience. So I’m going to place it outside my theory as a different kind of second-person voice from Rich.

I’m unsure of everything, but I like it—it’s a comfortable uncertainty.