ESSAY ON "ESSAY ON WOOD"

I never leaf through a copy of The New Yorker hoping to find a great poem. The poetry therein often reads like a series of chapters from an outdated manual that profiles the lives of ordinary garden rocks. The poem, “Essay On Wood”, from the June 9 & 16 double issue, troubled me enough to formulate a critical response. I once met the poet, James Richardson, many years ago, when he served as one of the judges at the first annual Ruth Lilly Collegiate Poetry Fellowship—a lucrative competition I had improbably qualified for, as a finalist. While I don’t remember him very well, he seemed like an all right guy. According to Wikipedia, Richardson teaches at Princeton, but let’s not hold that against him. Wikipedia credits him with several book publications and several prestigious awards; I’m hardly seeking to impeach the man or his accomplishments in this post, but rather investigate the poem’s language.

“Essay On Wood” appears on page 52. Richardson has structured the 18-line poem in three, six-line, free-verse stanzas. The first stanza reads as follows:

At dawn when rowboats drum on the dock

and every door in the breathing house bumps softly

as if someone were leaving quietly, I wonder

if something in us is made of wood,

maybe not quite the heart, knocking softly,

or maybe not made of it, but made for its call.

Okay? Here goes, first stanza, line-by-line.

Line 1. How many poems, by now, still begin with words like dusk or “dawn”? As if the poem can’t ‘actualize’ until the first little bits of color inhabit this privileged setting. I say ‘privileged’ because I don’t vacation on idyllic shores with many rowboats at my disposal. For the boats to ‘drum’ against the dock, I suppose there might be 15 of them. If they’re the speaker’s watercraft, then how many boats does one person require? Perhaps this is one of the Romney docks. But of course, boats can’t really ‘drum’ against a dock. Do they beat a rhythm? Are they M’boom loud? Max Roach loud? Are there but two rowboats, to effect drumsticks? If so, perhaps the poet could write “two rowboats.” True, these skiffs aren’t yachts, and they might be tied to a warped communal dock upon which many poor bastards trudge—but the poem doesn’t nearly confirm this theory.

Line 2. I like the phrase “breathing house” because it suggests open-window spring or summer imagery. But I do question just how many doors can simultaneously [bump] softly. To “bump” is to nudge softly, so I doubt that Richardson really needs the word “softly” anyhow; he can just chip that one away. Here, we have, what, about 15 doors bumping softly at once in a house that’s inhaling like a set of lungs? To say “every door” suggests many doors, and again, I conjure a large plot of land with a dock, many dugouts, and a domicile with more rooms than you can shake a skeleton key at.

Line 3. This narrator reminds me of a modern-day CPA with flexible accounting standards … when he’s in the city. He appears to count things—the number of boats, the number of doors—without precision. Nobody’s leaving in any event, since the narrator only establishes that quantity as part of an unlikely comparison. This poem sure ain’t Creeley in the 60s. In Creeley’s poem, “Goodbye”, one person pleads with another anguished person to turn from a painful situation, the rationale being that “the pain is / not unpainful.” But here, among docks and boats and summer houses, we have the vagueness of “someone” who never exits (or enters) the poem and a milquetoast narrator in whom we can’t invest much emotional or philosophical currency. If someone were leaving “quietly”, by the way, then would she or he make any sound at all?

Line 4. The “wonder” is so significant that it’s planted out there on the right margin as we slug into the next line—but what a whopper! Our narrator fancies that “something in us is made of wood.” (Does he mean something in a guy, that’s made of wood, every morning?) No, but—really? If you believe in Mono Deity, then you probably believe that “something in us” is made of 5 Hour Energy, seeing as Mono Deity sprinkled the earth with people and critters rather hastily. If you believe in science, then you probably believe that there’s something in us made of earth and Africa. And you know what else? So is wood. Wood is made of earth and Africa. The poem, in this line, repeats a dead sound from the line before: “someone” in line 3 and “something” in this one. These “some” words avoid a tangible count and default to typical abstractions that further dull the possibility for investment by the reader.

Line 5. Ah, the “heart”, that over-spent word that keeps appearing, like a Canadian quarter, at the coin return of the Grape Nehi vending machine. The heart doesn’t drum like rowboats, according to Richardson’s narrator. The heart doesn’t bump like every door. No, the heart “[knocks] softly”, but why does it knock? Does it want in from the cold? Does it bear a message for a slumbering person? In Philip Levine’s poem, “You Can Have It”, two brothers “are only one man / sharing a heart that always labors” at the ice plant, where the narrator’s brother “had fed / the chute its silvery blocks” and the narrator “stacked cases of orange soda for the children / of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time.” They shared a “laboring heart” in that they tangibly shared strenuous manual labor in the postwar boom city of Detroit, but in Richardson’s poem, I am led to “the heart”, as if one heart represents all our billions of hearts. The repetition of “softly” but three lines apart seems a bit careless. Also, I question whether a heart can actually “[knock] softly.” Knocking reminds me of a loud, thirsty engine that must be slaked with motor oil.

Line 6. “Someone” isn’t really leaving in this poem, and what may be wooden in us isn’t quite the heart, and furthermore, something in us might not be made of wood after all—but instead, “made for its call.” I had to keep reading through the difficult convolutions of this stanza to ensure I properly situated the pronoun reference, among other entities. In the end, the narrator “wonders / if something in us is made … / … for [wood’s] call.” Is wood on the telephone? Or is it like the call of the wild? That is, wood howls out there in the gorge, and I, reminded of my feral impulses, gallop toward wood’s call. I suppose the wooden boats call, and the wooden dock calls, and the wooden doors call, okay, okay, Big Concept, I get it, I get it, okay.

  

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

The narrator of Richardson’s poem drifts onward in a similar fashion, opining, if you will, on wood. The narrator in Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Song”, on the other hand, establishes loneliness as a “rowboat ice-fast on the shore / in the last red light of the year / that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither / ice nor mud nor winter light / but wood, with a gift for burning.” See? Rowboat and wood, but better. The humble and heroic father in Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” rekindles the heating element, the stove, in the family’s ramshackle house, presumably by adding coal or wood to the “banked fires.” The strength of the father’s devotion to his son causes the cold to splinter and break—the sounds, perhaps, of wood popping and sizzling. Many years later, after the father has died, the narrator expresses his own regretful isolation in a famous repetition, “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” Where are lines like those, in The New Yorker? I ask you.

Too serious? Perhaps you ought to read a Summer Fish Story.

HOW TO READ POETRY (FOR DUMMIES)

The great poet, Robert Hayden

Look here, see now. I say ‘Dummies’ affectionately. As in all those famous self help books—incl. Roots & Tubers, The Real Josef Stalin, The Party of No, and Offshore Drilling—for Dummies. You’re probably not a Bro, Brah or Bruh if you’re reading this post, you’re probably not populating a Pan-Hellenic Greek Org. such as STD or ABV. No, you’re probably a Good Sport who’s attempting to make headway with difficult reading material, so let’s advance Your Cause and score some Lasting Change. As part of our Joint Exploration, we will link to some very fine poems by Robert Hayden, Li-Young Lee, Harryette Mullen, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Creeley, and P. Inman.

1. First of All, Relax. Can you hear Jeff Spicoli (from Ridgemont High) saying that, after he’s crashed the car? (“Ruh-laaax!”) The fact is, you’re probably trying to navigate poetry as you might navigate fiction, by expecting plot or seeking the familiarity of narrative sentence structure. Perhaps you’re expecting the lyrics to approximate pop music or patter through a regular rhyme scheme. In the end, many contemporary poems operate outside these conventions, and you may need to—train yourself to—read differently.

2. ‘Meaning’ Is Overrated. Let’s start with The Big Picture. Do you understand the Universe? Do you comprehend America? Can you explain why one athlete who prays to God triumphs, while another athlete who prays (just as fervently) to the same Lord, fails? If so, proceed to The End and Receive Cookie. Why demand ‘Sense’ from poetry when you cannot wring ‘Sense’ from a glance out the window? Importantly, there are Other Ways to penetrate a poem, and there are Many Ways in which poetry can Reg-U-Late.

3. Determine Situation. I realize that the Intended Audience may vary from piece to piece, but in general, a diligent reader should be able to establish ‘Basic Footing’ in any poem. Consider Robert Hayden’s masterpiece, “Those Winter Sundays.” Written, arguably, in the sonnet form, it establishes a speaker (presumably male) who voices profound regret at never having thanked his father for all his blue collar devotion, indeed “…Speaking indifferently to him, / who had driven out the cold / and polished my good shoes as well.” The poem’s elegiac address allows for many “lonely offices” at the end: the father’s various toiling places as well as the poet’s austere desk.

4. Assemble a List of Images. You can also ‘enter a poem’ by assembling a constellation of its snapshots. The speaker in Li-Young Lee’s poem, “This Hour and What Is Dead”, calls God an “old furnace”, who “keeps talking / with his mouth of teeth, / a beard stained at feasts, and his breath / of gasoline, airplane, human ash.” Through this imagery, a reader can obviously detect the intense upheaval threatening the speaker’s life. What might one group of images—“blueblack cold”, “cracked hands”, and “banked fires”—suggest about the hardscrabble environs of “Those Winter Sundays”?

5. Don’t Fear Responsible Abstraction. Most Irresponsible Abstraction veers into Cheese. The more a phrase—“the dark depths of my soul”, for example—allows for too many destinations, the more the reader can’t attach any significance to it. On the other hand, take Robert Hayden’s line, “fearing the chronic angers of that house”, where “chronic angers” may refer to the latent tension amongst the house’s inhabitants or the cantankerous noise of a cold house warming. The poet doesn’t include an image there, but the abiding originality of this Responsible Abstraction attaches itself to the speaker’s sense of familial alienation, and nourishes the Elasticity of the (Reader’s) Mind.

6. Discover the Slants. Many poems succeed by offering innovative soundings: where words correspond ‘in Slant’ with words that aren’t, thankfully, their sing-song counterparts. I call your attention to the poet Harryette Mullen, and her abecedarian book, Sleeping with the Dictionary, and to the first sentence of “The Lunar Lutheran”, a poem therein: “In chapels of opals and spice, O Pisces pal, your social pep makes you a friend to all Episcopals.” Just in one sentence alone reside many Slants: chapels/opals; spice/Pisces; opals/social; and O Pisces Pal/Episcopal. Can you see how the rhymes aren’t ‘exact’? Doesn’t that line Bounce? The Hayden poem offers intricate sound-work, as well. Trace the “c”, “ck”, and “a” sounds inside words, alliteratively, and in Slant.

7. Thoughts on Macro-Structure. Lyn Hejinian wrote her masterpiece collection, My Life, originally, in 37 parts of 37 sentences apiece, when she was 37 years old. Eight years later, she added eight more sections, and expanded the previous sections, such that My Life grew to hold 45 sections of 45 sentences apiece. But that’s not all. Consider this excerpt, hosted at the University of Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center. Her writing—parts image, detail, non sequitur, fragment, definition, list, idea, witticism, and so forth, and all of it in prose—comes to resemble a jazz solo, in that the elements provide a “searching foundation” which soars to stunning moments of discovery.

8. Thoughts on Micro-Structure. Try reading Robert Creeley’s poem, “Goodbye”, by (a) stressing words at the ends of lines and (b) insisting upon pauses between stanzas. Creeley’s organizational strategy emphasizes the emotional stances of persons, the beginnings of thought and speech, and the isolations inherent in ill-fitting relationships. Of course pain is painful, by the way. When someone says “the pain is / not unpainful”, doesn’t that smack a bit? “Those Winter Sundays” was included in a recent edition of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, even as its fourteen lines are broken a bit unusually for a sonnet. Try reading it as you read the Creeley, and weigh the effectiveness of its breaks.

9. A Difficult Poem. A writer named P. Inman is one of my favorite poets. I didn’t always feel that way, though! When I first heard him read his poetry, I was like, “wtf?” But I was wrong about that. I reflect upon my first cup of coffee, or my first jazz listen, and how neither quite worked for me, but now, having cultivated a love for them, both are irreplaceable parts of my routine. The same with experimental poetry, the works of P. Inman included. Consider his poem, “lac[e]y”, which may be a comment on lace, lacey-ness, or the jazz musician Steve Lacy, and all his Lac[e]y-ness. (It’s dedicated to another hero, the English poet Tom Raworth.) Rather than analyze its ‘meaning’ (right?), let’s just state some observations: the lines are short and metered by numerous periods; the poem reads jaggedly; some of the word combinations—“a. taupe. wald.”, for example—suggest more in the way of sound-scrabble; some stretches provide astonishing connections: ‘“let’s. call. / this.’ / my. age. / leaning. into. / some. dream.”; the piece is separated into six stanzas; sometimes an asterisk breaks the stanzas; the piece is further divided into two halves by an unconventional margin; the piece is (visually) unbalanced—sometimes the left half is heavier (with words) than the right and vice versa; the poem is tightly bound to that unusual margin. P. Inman’s poetry at times reminds me how language and sound is about us, a bit on the street, a bit from the radio, a bit on the subway, a bit from memory, a bit from nostalgia, a bit from wit, a bit from optimism. A piece like “lac[e]y” can be enjoyed for its shape, runs of words, ideas, sounds, scraps, persistent introversion, persistent invention, undeniable authenticity, and for sure, its “polk. m’edge.”

10. The End: Receive Cookie. Hey, if you’re a Bro, Brah, or Bruh, and you’ve made it this far, then there’s hope for you yet. This post will hardly address all the nuances of reading poetry, but if you’ve Gleaned a Few Nuggets, as they say, then it’s time to hit The Pub. Incidentally, Hitting the Pub can help you with No. 1, above. (“Ruh-laaax!”) Good luck and please comment if you’d like to correspond about any of this mayhem.

Also see: Blogpost to a Young Poet.