Robert Hass, "Dragonflies Mating"

Reminder: you may click on any Banjo52 image to enlarge it.





Blurry with desire
















All aflutter




I wonder if Robert Hass’s “Dragonflies Mating” is a history of humanity, at least our breeding, our complexity in love, including the evolutionary and the Oedipal implications. The poem is a bit long, so I’m offering the following teases in the hope of pulling you in.

“Such a terrible thing / came here with their love.”

“weeks of drinking she disappeared into.”

" . . . I’d bounce
the ball two or three times, study the orange rim as if it were,
which it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing . . . “

“. . . [I] feel the grain of the leather in my fingertips and shoot.
It was a perfect thing; it was almost like killing her.”

“ . . . they mate and are done with mating.
They don’t carry all this half-mated longing up out of childhood
and then go looking for it everywhere.”

Notice how plain this language is. “She” disappeared into her drinking, or “I’d bounce/the ball two or three times,” or “then go looking for it everywhere.” Couldn’t such language be overheard in a coffee shop or a neighbor’s yard? But the ordinary words quickly lead to (or have grown from) images, actions, or thoughts that are anything but casual.

Here is the whole of "Dragonflies Mating":

Dragonflies Mating by Robert Hass : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

When I talked about Hass’s “Faint Music “ (May 27, 2010), I mentioned that he has me on the edge of impatience with his talk-y language. Is it poetry or prose, as I’ve asked repeatedly about contemporary verse? In both “Faint Music” and “Dragonflies Mating” I think Hass lands well inside the unsafe, tense zone of that which is poetry, where details are precise and compact, and the questions plopped on our plates are huge. Maybe it could be called poetry masquerading as conversation. The reverse of that is what causes my grumpiness.

It’s been a while since I’ve explicitly thanked The Poetry Foundation for the richness of what they make available to us. At their site, www.poetryfoundation.org , we find not only the poem, but a Dan Chiasson essay about it, as well as other work by Hass. The Poetry Foundation came into a bundle of money a few years ago, and I’m glad to see them spending it well. (Yes, my approval will make them shiver with delight).

**

Emily Dickinson, Poem 510, "It was not Death"

I was delighted to hear Poetry Foundation say that Emily Dickinson is “a poet who took definition as her province.” I’ve been on the edge of thinking one of her major contributions is her effort to pin down psychological conditions that are too vague, too subtle, too large for definition or conventional thinking. Therefore, she creates analogies.

Poetry Foundation goes on to say her effort was “to make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.”

“She saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded.”

I’ll say more tomorrow, but for now, I think this is a large part of what’s going on in her Poem 510. She’s not sure what “it” is, so she defines by negation; she tells us what it is not.

It was not death, for I stood up by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.