Fieldand things in fields
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177001
One of the most youthful, most basic of our philosophical ponderings is, "Who am I?" For most of us, it probably remains relevant for a lifetime, though we might blush to admit it.
But maybe our most sophisticated add-on makes it just a bit less narcissistic: "What am I?" -- as if we can know. But we should want to; we should be Sisyphus rolling our rocks up that hill.
I don't know Mark Strand's poetry as well as I intend to, but I stumbled onto "Keeping Things Whole" a couple of years ago, and this or that cue keeps me coming back to it. The poem strikes me as simple and playful on the one hand, but as profound as subatomic particles on the other. It is as self-important as its conclusion, "I move to keep things whole." But it's also humble--literally self-effacing: "I am the absence" . . . . That is, absence of field. And who doesn't like a field? A field is an intuitively good thing unless added information convinces us this is one of those rare malevolent fields.
The other day (Dec. 9), in talking about Grace Paley's "Walking in the Woods," I mentioned the uses of white space in poems. In "Keeping Things Whole," notice the way Mark Strand's trail of words is much thinner than the white space surrounding it, as if the poem is a thing like its speaker, moving into and out of spaces in a mysterious, ineffable way. And the inked words are not loud or bellicose or imperialistic; they are not bombs, but small, soft-spoken shapes, wondering about themselves and space and matter, as they wind and sneak along.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177001
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