More Motel Charm, plus Mary Szybist's "Night Shifts at the Group Home"

Blue Traveler

In case you came for a poem, a discussion of Mary Szybist’s “Night Shifts in the Group Home” follows two brief travel notes from strange bedfellows on the internet. But play before work. For . . . charm? . . . the first note probably depends entirely upon high quality Kleenex. The second speaks for itself.

1     They were evaluating different TV providers so we had almost no channels all week. They paid for any guest to go see a movie in town as compensation . . . . If they get new mattresses, flat screen TVs and softer Kleenex the hotel will be up to the chain’s standards.

The Road

       2. I stayed in [that motel] for 3 days and i got bit up by bed bugs. i came back after christmas to his other motel and told him he called me a liar and didnt believe me. he said he just had it gone through and sprayed they didnt find any bed bugs. a few night later he comes to my room and chews me out telling the guys i work with about it. he said they came in with me my bag or clothes that it could have been a spider or somthing. i know that is not that case that it was his motel that i got bit up at and nothing came from my house or bags and i know it wasnt a spider. I dont appricate being called a lair or cussed out.

Convent or Group Home?

Night Shifts at the Group Home by Mary Szybist : The Poetry Foundation

The connection between motel visitors and group homes may seem thin and far-fetched, but think about it. In travel, our actual, current neighbors and our imagined past fellow travelers are arbitrarily appointed to
us, a little like the members of a group home—or boarding school, or college, or apartment building.

So the relationship between the speaker and the resident
in Mary Szybist’s “Night Shifts at the Group Home” is more universal than it might seem. The resident, apparently named Lily Mae, is some kind of patient, “older than my mother: manic, caught / up in gibberish,” while the speaker, a supervisor of some sort, a  protector and keeper of order, says, “I needed relief // from myself” and “I just didn’t love / my loneliness.”

Atlantic on Rocks, Manic, Caught Up in Gibberish

So the two end up in a somewhat forced intimacy in a single cot--the speaker’s.

Girls, Those Same Rocks

That’s a strange situation, but isn’t it just an extreme example of humans being thrown together in one or another kind of communal living? The lines and the idea I like best in this strange portrait are:

                   Sometimes
                   I imagine I 

                   was someone she won

                       at a fair as the wheel spun

     under the floating, unfaltering sun

                       

Feeling destiny cast her about like that, plus seeing herself as a doll-object in someone else’s view, plus being pulled from her lofty intellectualization into an awareness of separate selves as inarticulate bodies—all that adds up to a supra-rational liberation for the speaker. So yes, she ends up “undone,” but “happily” so.

Night Shifts at the Group Home by Mary Szybist : The Poetry Foundation

Grackle on Ice

ROBERT BLY: IS THE TAIL WAGGING THE DOG?

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2004/02/16

Robert Bly’s “The Resemblance between Your Life and a Dog” might, in its accessibility, make Billy Collins and others proud. That is not a criticism; there are various ways for a poem to make an impact, to have staying power. Poems that wear everyday clothing might entice more people to stroll along with them, and during those casual walks, some surprising turns can happen, events that are more challenging and magical than first glances indicate.

Ovenbird? Thrush?

Comparing a human life to a stray dog—not just the cliché of a dog’s life, but the dog itself—probably qualifies as a poetic “conceit”—a metaphor or simile that is extremely far-fetched. In any case, Bly establishes his conceit immediately, and I was interested to follow his opening surprise. How does that wagging coexist with the life he “never intended to have?” Where will he go with this mutt that cannot articulate much, but wags—not just its tail, it seems, but its whole self?

The answers, both literal and richly connotative, are:  a boy’s bedroom mirror, a clear river,
mountain wind, a sparrow in winter (which somehow ends up in the same poetic line as the boy’s teachers—explain that), and finally, a return to the stray dog, which is not exactly the lovable pooch of cliché country, but a dog that “Doesn’t particularly like you.”

Mirror

Winter Sparrow

Yet you must live with him, and vice versa, wondering all the while who owns whom. Especially for those who don’t like poems with bookends, I’ll argue that that’s a remarkable and wonderful circling back to the opening line:  “I never intended to have this life.”

Whether we inhabit a life or it inhabits us, and how much control we have over our lives—those questions crop up periodically (or is it daily?).  Maybe they are merely new phrasings about fatalism, destiny, and such, but Bly shakes it up in a more substantial way, I think. He offers this seemingly small, comfortable chat—dog, farm, wagging, sparrow, river, wind—until we realize we’re facing a big question: Who can say he intended to have this life? Who chose the life he’s had? Who among us can say confidently and honestly how he’d have reacted, at age ten or twenty, if he’d been told what lay ahead in his life? Even the most comfortable among us might have been stronger, waggier, than we’d ever have thought possible.

APPENDIX:

I’ve known a couple of people who confess that they read the last few pages of a novel before they start Page One. That’s always struck me as not merely odd, but wrongheaded, somewhere between eccentricity and neurosis. Then again, I’m the guy who rarely finishes novels, period.

Although Bly’s poem seems to be well known, I only stumbled across it for the first time this morning in an anthology I’ve long meant to recommend, though it’s a bit pricey (my used copy was $18 at Amazon):  Contemporary American Poetry, eds. A. Poulin, Jr. and Michael Waters. The contents vary somewhat according to the edition; I’ve been very satisfied with the 6^th and 8^th editions.

By the way, after Bly’s poem, The Writer’s Almanac notes on the novelist Richard Ford are pretty interesting. I still haven’t gotten to Ford’s The Sportswriter; maybe this new bit of info will be the kick in the pants I need.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2004/02/16

New Year's Resolutions and Existentialism

Didn't mean to leave you hanging . . . .


So, first and foremost, Brenda, BobG, Farmchick, Pierre, Ken, Jeff M, Susan, anonymous, Barbaro—and others?—I think I have found, posted, and tried to respond to your comments from the last three weeks or so. I’m not sure what went wrong, but I think see how to prevent it in the future. Thank you for your patience, and please don’t hesitate to email me at “corndogj@gmail.com” if I ever seem to be ignoring you again.

Now back to everyone’s favorite topic, One’s Way of Being in the World. One more reason it fascinates me, I think, is that we presume for ourselves a lot of free will, maybe more in the U.S. than in other parts of the world. We are the children of Sartre; some of us even believe we chose to be born. With the notable exception of religious fundamentalists, it’s been awhile since it was fashionable to speak of destiny or fatalism.

Compared to most other parts of the world, we have political freedom, and we figure, apparently, that this translates into psychological or philosophical freedom, or freedom in planning a business, or personal finances, or diet and exercise, or selection of a career, or selection of a mate. “Billy, you can be anything you want to be. This is America.”

Evidence accumulates concerning brain chemistry, genetics and DNA; it seems to support the notion that “biology is destiny,” but we don’t like accepting limits on what we can do or become (or spend). We are 21st century Americans, still saving the world for democracy and Walmart, still living the dream.



The lady in purple is “The Communicant,” by Gari Melchers, around 1900.


A quarter-century earlier, Renoir gives us “Woman in an Armchair” (below, left). I’m imagining Lady Purple telling her shrink about her dyspepsia, insomnia, headaches, and anxiety attacks. Dr. Frood hands her an 8 x 10 postcard of Renoir’s woman in an armchair and says, “Here, be her. If you'll just change everything, your symptoms will vanish, and you will be happy.”

Can she do it? Should she try?

How much change can she impose upon her current Way of Being in the World? How would you guide and support her, step by step in the process of her transfiguration?

**