http://www.ruthgroup.org/2007/08/25/grace-paley-gone/
http://www.ruthgroup.org/2007/08/25/grace-paley-gone/
Is Grace Paley's "Walking in the Woods" a companion poem to Dylan Thomas' famous "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"? Is it also a response to Altadena Hiker when she said here (in the Dec. 6 visitor comments) that people should stop whining and get on with it? (She said it more forcefully than that).
Over decades, a number of scholars and critics have said there is no What in poetry, only the How. The How is the What. Along those lines, form is especially worth talking about in "Walking in the Woods." I'm never sure how I feel about using white space or unconventional (self-conscious?) line structures in place of punctuation and more traditional lines. I like to think I'm open-minded, but there's also a traditional old fart alive and well within me: mellow old quasi-hippie on one shoulder and formalist bean-counter on the other. Something about "Walking in the Woods"--and a lot of Paley's poems--makes my internal codger sit down, shut up and go with it.
I cannot imagine improving upon the closing of this poem, though I suppose someone could argue it's didactic, an instant aphorism, bumper sticker wisdom, a neat ribbon and bow, tied and pasted on a package that exists only to serve the bow. However, maybe I'm tired enough of my own whining, as well as others' self-indulgences, to love Paley's simple and direct command as closure here. I'm at least as comfortable with it as I am with Keats' equally didactic conclusion in "Ode on a Grecian Urn":
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
Notice too that Paley (almost) instructs us not only to shut up and "do it," but also to like life. If you haven't "liked life," why not? What's wrong with you? Look around. Look at that tree. How can you not like that? Those who don't are more or less disinvited from the poem--or at least invited to reconsider their way of being in the world.
This is getting close to a high-handed, judgmental dismissiveness. But for some reason, the whole line of thought and Paley's method of expressing it strike me as completely original, full of impact, and above all, earned. This speaker has forced us to give her permission to say what she says, the way she says it; moreover, she orders us to like it, and I'm guessing most of say okay. Or, Yea Verily. I'm not sure where, why, or how this happens in the poem--something in the voice, I suspect--but I'm convinced it does, and I do not resist.
Many serious lovers of serious poetry (and all art?) argue that there's a magic in it, a power that comes from some unknown source--in poet, poem, and audience. Surely "Walking in the Woods" is a case in point.
http://www.ruthgroup.org/2007/08/25/grace-paley-gone/
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