Gerald Stern, "Bolero" and the Roaring I

 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/146770

Gerald Stern’s “Bolero” is a rabble-rousing poem that stirs me up, incites me almost to internal riot, and makes me want to love it. However, it fails to convey the rational components of its argument. In the end, we sense an emotional logic, but its left-brained component leaves us with as many questions as answers.

    With its run-on lines, its (arguably) run-on sentences, and no commas, no pauses of any kind until the final word,  “Bolero” is a rushing, breathless thing. There’s a lively, appealing gusto and some compelling images, such as an azalea bush that’s “firing” and a Japanese maple

that “was roaring” and the speaker’s stocking feet on the “lacquered floor.” And for me, the final line is the most energetic and appealing of all: “where / were you when I was burning alive, nightingale?”

But I’m almost as full of questions as enjoyment and affection. Here are some, offered breathlessly, perhaps.  

What if a reader does not know Ravel’s Bolero?  Granted, it’s famous, but must one hear or remember it to “get” the poem?

Why the odd line breaks such as “firing / away” or “daylight and / turned”  or “for it was / time”?  Have I already answered this in noting how the poem strives for unbridled energy? Is that energy too intense to pay attention to syntax and the point where its poetic line would normally end?

I do see a rationale for the break at end of Line 2, with “roaring I.” With this enjambment Stern is able to make both the Japanese maple and the speaker  things that “roar.”  A “roaring I” is part of the speaker’s characterization of himself.

One Roaring I (St. Clairsville, Ohio)

 

It also makes sense to pause at “roaring I,” in order to emphasize it as its own entity; the roaring I is a being, and to build suspense, as it were, we must wait till the next line to hear what this rampaging thing might do.

More Roaring I  (The Speedtrap Diner, Woodville, Ohio)

Some additional, random questions:  What might “sugar and barley . . .  come to”?  Beer?  Bread? In my quick Google search, I found that sugar and barley yield hard candy. I don't see how that's part of the poem, unless Bolero has the feel of candy.

In what way is loyalty relevant? To whom should the speaker be loyal? Ravel? Or his lover or his wife or his son?  Or his own energy in decades past?  What style might be  “too nostalgic”? His dancing style? Or is it Bolero that’s too nostalgic?

Who is the nightingale? Ravel? Or the speaker’s wife, who is not present for his mad dancing in the kitchen? Or a former lover? The speaker’s “burning alive”—is that his own dancing, his feeling the music in the present moment? Or is it a mental picture of himself in the past, along with a thinner waist?

If not, whose waist is “that thin”?  His son’s?  His wife’s? Has he found himself in an old photo? When, in the timeline of the poem, did that happen?

Even the final line, which I love, is full of questions. How does the speaker get from nostalgia to “burning alive” or “nightingale”? Is this burning alive a good thing—a kind of intensity and vitality? Or was he burning up and wasting away in some deathly fever, with unfulfilled passion?

Nightingale!!  Fever

The nightingale is one of the most romantic birds available as an image—is it a term of endearment here, or are the bird and its music somehow blameworthy in the speaker’s burning alive? Isn't that accusation I hear in the final line? Can it be both? Neither? Is the nightingale an actual bird, whose music somehow connects to Ravel and Bolero?

Floating I

Gerald Stern is about as major a living poet as we have in America, so I want to digest every piece of this or any Stern poem. Maybe “Bolero” is one of those poems where a reader cannot explain just what the poet is saying, no matter how attracted he is to the poem’s lively longing. For me, what’s lovable and stirring are the poem’s energy and its homey specific details. It’s full of heart, but its rational head is confused. Or at least my head is confused—enough to prevent being swept by this engaging, rowdy piece that seems to want to sweep me away.  

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/146770 

Mona Van Duyn’s “A Time of Bees”: Manly Men in Half-Rhyme

Mona Van Duyn’s “A Time of Bees”:  The Half-Rhyme of Men Being Men

A Time of Bees by Mona Van Duyn : The Poetry Foundation

“A Time of Bees” by Mona Van Duyn (1921–2004, our first female Poet Laureate) might seem daunting as we look at it on the page. Her lines are long; there are two pages of them, and maybe there’s something a little intimidating about stanzas that are consistently (rigidly?) five lines long. It’s a good time to practice what I’ve preached before:  look for small gifts along the way, in single images, or find in single lines the hints of larger ideas, even if we must wait to see if they ever expand and cohere. All the while we’re hoping the whole is worth our patience. (Ditto the length of my post).

It would also be easy to overlook Van Duyn’s use of form in “A Time of Bees.” I first noticed the uniformity of the five-line stanzas. Then I saw that quite a few of the line breaks, the enjambments, came at odd places (emphasizing some interesting meanings in individual lines, apart from their meanings in the poem as a whole). In a few lines, chosen randomly, I counted syllables and listened to stresses, but found no consistent pattern. Eventually, however, I saw the half-rhymes, in lines 1,3,5 and sometimes in lines 2 and 4. Some are so subtle, so “halved,” that we might call them eighteenth rhymes; but the rhyme becomes more definite as the poem goes along, and it’s reasonable to claim a rhyme scheme of ababa.

Sneaky Crawling

Why does this matter? Rhyme and meter can be merely decorative, and they often create comedy, as in limericks. To a poet, they can be as much a risk as a weapon. But in the hands of serious writers,  they suggest the poet’s tendency toward perceiving and valuing order in her subjects and her world view. A sense of music is another likely result of rhyme and meter, but not so much when the form is as understated as Van Duyn’s, where the rhyme is hanging by a thread.

Half-Rhyme?

So is she just a sloppy, half-hearted formalist? I don’t think so. The poem centers on the menacing but perhaps alluring way men tear things apart as they pursue a prey, an enemy, in order to repair and make things right and safe. Yes, that sounds a little pre-feminist, but in casual conversation, I’ve heard a number of intelligent women confess to finding muscle, sweat, labor and combat appealing. Some brainy women like seeing the torque of a man as he rips at things in order to fix them—to build, make, create. Isn’t that the end to which he’s been evolving?

And maybe the sweaty stuff becomes more appealing as technology evolves away from our need for physical labor on the home front. Let the robot do it. Or let the men, women and children from afar do it. For better or worse, our airplane drones even show the potential for an evolution away from physical combat.

Wouldn’t the law of supply and demand tell us that, as hunks thin out in the work force, giving way to I.T. guys and lab techs, the appeal and the price of hunks will grow more dear? I’d guess gym memberships are at an all-time high and will continue to grow, unless some dire upheaval returns us to an economy of agriculture and heavy industry.

Frontal

So, as Mona Van Duyn’s speaker watches her husband rip up part of their home in order to destroy an animal-enemy, she loves him. She embraces his animal nature as protector of the home as she watches it emerge. His tearing into things becomes almost a paradigm of the erotic.

But she’s not a dumb woman, and she’s aware that this is something like a double-edged sword. Shall she be cold and mechanical about being rid of the nuisance bees? Or shall she sympathize with an animal that was only doing what it was designed to do? She is so honest that she does both:

                        they writhe, some of them, but who cares?

                        They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said.

                        But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered

                        enough?

          

Love, labor and war make tenuous what she thought she thought—and valued. She’s a bit uncertain, so there is in Van Duyn’s poetic structure an air we might call tenuously formal—rhymes that almost challenge the definition of rhyme. And her clinging to a symmetrical five-line stanza gives way at the end to a single line that highlights a “grubby softness” that “wants to give, to give”—which is surely a reference to women as well as infant bees.

Such a world, such a mind, an experience such as this bee hunt, is surely not as neat and orderly as tidy, self-conscious, exact rhyme or meter would imply. Yet there is some kind of order in Van Duyn’s world of partially-evolved cave dwellers. If someone wants to call her rhymes crude, it’s all right because the world she’s presenting and accepting is also crude—in part. Eroticism is crude. Survival is crude. It’s about tearing things up to get to the bottom of things, where enemies live.

Still, the couple reads “books on bees” and later they bring home a scientist friend, for “they need/the idea of bees” (what an expression, by the way!). But in the end, understanding is secondary to elimination. There are only two forces: the squirming of bees with some life left in them and, with a remarkable adjective, the “unpleading” male’s need to kill them all, permanently, to protect home and hearth. 

There is nothing to plead about here; he is doing the necessary work.

Hiding Its Head in the . . . Sand?

Van Duyn denies us our penchant for simplistic dichotomies. She won’t let her gender, or any of us, say,  “I’m all brain, beauty, and spirit. I am not a savage. I am lofty. God made me in his image.”

To which Van Duyn calmly replies, “Don’t be silly. That sweaty, aggressive, murderous, rampaging, repairing man makes me aware of my own softness. I accept it. Maybe I even like it, and I’m honest enough to say so.”

“A Time of Bees” presents a rough-hewn, physical, even bestial world that continues to call to us, contain us, define us. It has a kind of order, but it’s a brutal order, and trying to prettify it with loud, exact rhymes or overly sweet music, would miss the point, would be a lie. 

A Time of Bees by Mona Van Duyn : The Poetry Foundation

*

John Ciardi's "Bees and Morning Glories": Attempt Number Two

Bees and Morning Glories by John Ciardi : The Poetry Foundation

    Oops on the last post. I linked to the wrong Ciardi poem. It’s interesting that none of us seemed to notice a disconnect between my comments and the poem, or we were all being very polite. AH’s reference to Ciardi’s travels made me say, “Huh?” So I went back to the poem, where I discovered my error. Here is Ciardi’s “Bees and Morning Glories,” which I hope connects even better to what I said last time (I’m repeating it here to save you the trouble of going back).  I think “Bees and Morning Glories” has more going for it than “Lines,” but my reservations remain. What say you? 
    
     Bees and Morning Glories by John Ciardi : The Poetry Foundation

     Lines by John Ciardi : The Poetry Foundation 

    

I don’t think these purple flowers are morning glories, but they’re a rich purple, and after an hour of searching for their name, enough’s enough. 

I’m telling myself it’s more interesting that they seem to be a chorus, or at least a barbershop quartet, groups of three or four heads leaning in one direction, mouths open, as if they’re shouting at or calling to the bees. 

Singing? Calling? Yelling?

Are the bees an enemy (pirates?) attacking or are they a food or friend or mate the flowers have been begging for?

Here’s a John Ciardi poem that captures the bee, if not the flower.

 Lines by John Ciardi : The Poetry Foundation 

The opening image might be one of those verbal wonders that re-define our notion of a thing for the rest of time. How can we un-see bees as hunchbacks in pirate pants, with peg-leg hooks? 

On the other hand, I wonder if there’s enough in the poem. After the charm of the opening and the extended simile of pirates boarding a ship, what new insights are we given? There is the theme of fleeting beauty, of transience, but I wonder how much the poem changes our lives or our understanding. Is that asking too much of a poem? Yet some poems do that. 

John Ciardi, "Lines": Bee Pirates

Bob the Pirate Boards the Ship

 

I don’t think these purple flowers are morning glories, but they’re a rich purple, and after an hour of searching for their name, enough’s enough. 

I’m telling myself it’s more interesting that they seem to be a chorus, or at least a barbershop quartet, groups of three or four heads leaning in one direction, mouths open, as if they’re shouting at or calling to the bees. 

Singing? Calling? Yelling?

Are the bees an enemy (pirates?) attacking or are they a food or friend or mate the flowers have been begging for?

Here’s a John Ciardi poem that captures the bee, if not the flower.

 Lines by John Ciardi : The Poetry Foundation 

The opening image might be one of those verbal wonders that re-define our notion of a thing for the rest of time. How can we un-see bees as hunchbacks in pirate pants, with peg-leg hooks? 

On the other hand, I wonder if there’s enough in the poem. After the charm of the opening and the extended simile of pirates boarding a ship, what new insights are we given? There is the theme of fleeting beauty, of transience, but I wonder how much the poem changes our lives or our understanding. Is that asking too much of a poem? Yet some poems do that. 

About the photos: bees zip about so fast that their visit seems one slurp and they buzz off, no loyalty to any single activity or song—like pirates indeed, rapacious. Surely that excuses the blur in my photos—when in doubt, blame the subject. 

Bee Butt

Lines by John Ciardi : The Poetry Foundation