Column079 — January/February 2007
A Visit to Crag Hill’s Blog
Volume 39, Numbers 1-2, January/February 2007
Crg Hill’s poetry scorecard. Webmaster: Crg Hill.
scorecard.typepad.com/crag_hills_poetry_score.
The better poetry reviews quote a poem, or two, which I consider obligatory. But, aside from a word of praise or criticism, the reviewers let the quoted poems speak for themselves. Many readers like this, but I feel, considering how few readers are genuinely able fully to appreciate poems without help, that more is needed. Ergo, to review Crag Hill’s blog, I’m just going to explicate a single poem, a found poem by Crag, that I consider representative of the kind of fascinating material one can bump into at his blog:
From Index of First Lines Selected Poems Charles Olson
I come back to the geography of it,
I don’t mean, just like that, to put down
I have been an ability–a machine–up to
I have had to learn the simplest thingsI live underneath
I looked up and saw
Imbued / with the light
I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s
In cold hell, in thicket, how
In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–
is a monstrance,
I sing the tree is a heronI sit here on a Sunday
It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death
it was the west wind caught her up, as
Now, the poem again, a line at a time, with my comments interspersed:
I come back to the geography of it,
A great beginning. We don’t know what “it” is (and I’m purposely not checking Olson’s Selected Poems to find out), but here–dislocated–“geography” can wing us to the terrain of all kinds of things, including the memory of a breakfast, banking procedures, 3 A.M., since everything has a geography. Less surrealistically, the word brings us to fundamentals, to the earth, to reality seen large, solid, inanimate . . . What, I suddenly wonder, would the geography of geography be? Poems like this– effective jump-cut poems, that is–can flip us into such questions. Questions that resonate for the person flipped into them, I mean–as this one will surely not for everyone.
I don’t mean, just like that, to put down
Now a jump-cut leaving “geography” to simmer unconnected to any specific, and making the poem’s narrator more than a pronoun through his attempt to explain himself better. His explanation breaks off, which effectually explains all the better his state of mind.
I have been an ability–a machine–up to
I take this line to mean the narrator has not been personally/ emotionally involved in whatever it is he’s talking about, “up to (now).” Note, by the way, how this line, with its pronounced metaphor, disturbs the quotidian tone of the previous (which, in turn, had demotically countered the academic tone of the first line).
I have had to learn the simplest things
Wow, no longer able (I guess) to let his machinery run his life without his involvement, the narrator has to concentrate, start from a sort of zero (as geography sort of is).
I live underneath
We’ve come to a new stanza. That the narrator says he lives underneath, which the lineation compels us to consider, rather than underneath something, opens a world for me. Certainly, we’re with a narrator deepening through himself (as we would expect from the poem’s consisting entirely of lines in the “i” section of an index).
I looked up and saw
Again, a line-break re-locates us, in this case keeping us from a transitive verb’s object, compelling us to consider “saw” as an intransitive verb. The narrator has experienced illumination, not just seen some detail of ordinary life.
Imbued / with the light
Yikes, this sentence carries on trouble-free from the previous one.
I met Death–he was a sportsman–on Cole’s
The grammar now shatters the logic we seemed for a while to be in, just as “Death” shatters the text’s positive bright ambiance. I can’t help, by the way, thinking of Emily at this point. Death, however, is an absurd, trivial figure, some guy pursuing some conventional sport at some named, run-of-the-mill who-cares-where.
In cold hell, in thicket, how
After the intrusion of a line with something of the effect of the famous porter scene in Macbeth, a new stanza, and high rhetoric electrifyingly bleakening the scene. Fascinating how “Cole” quickly colors into “cold hell,” by the way.
In English the poetics became meubles–furniture–
Another weird shift–to the cold, densely thicketted geography of poetics (in English). “Furniture.” Something inanimate, stupid–but comfortable, for our convenience, to be used. . . . in fact, “meubles” means “household furniture.” Somehow, we are now in a man trying to explain himself in a geography/text trying to explain itself. At least, according to my way of appreciating language poems of this sort, which is partially to take them as exposures of mental states.
is a monstrance,
The poetics (become furniture) “is a monstrance,” or “a vessel in which the consecrated Host is exposed for the adoration of the faithful!” The poetics (once like household furniture) holds a divinity, a redeeming divinity, that must render the cold hell surrounding it wholly impotent. “In cold hell, in thicket,” (and “in English”) we learn how the techniques, the poetics, that life can be thought to be composed (comfortably) in accordance with, is a sacred demonstrance of its transcendental value. Olson is Roethke.
I sing the tree is a heron
But the narrator can sing. Whitmanesquely inpired, he sings (presumably) of a tree’s resemblance to a heron. In other words, the tree, something dark (probably) and solid and motionless, like furniture, has something undark and capable of flight in it. Thus, the stanza ends hopefully, to set up the final one, which begins:
I sit here on a Sunday
The tone quiets into mundane sitting, but is implicitly celebratory, Sunday being generally a day-off, and devoted to (generally happy) religious services.
It’s so beautiful, life, goddamn death
The early chaos of the poem is resolved with this line. The fragments we’ve been stumbling through, dark and light, are life–which is beautiful in spite of the presence of death.
it was the west wind caught her up, as
Because of the line before this one, I’m prepared to read this to be about a woman turned magically into a weightless angel the pleasant west wind is going to give a ride to. Chagall, at his undrippiest. I also read the awe of a man beholding a beautiful woman into the line. An image illustrating the climactic previous statement.
So endeth explication and column.