"Ativan" by Laura Kasischke

Ativan by Laura Kasischke : Poetry Magazine

I’m not at all confident that I have a handle on Laura Kasischke’s  (Ka-SHISH-key) “Ativan,” but I like its emotional intensity and vivid, evocative imagery. It has the density and precision I’m always arguing for—when I’m dissatisfied with talk-y, prosy “poems”—so I’ll stick my neck out on its behalf.   

 

Maybe the poem proposes that we take tranquilizers like Ativan because we cannot escape our awareness of the fact that we are doomed by mortality—just as all small, delicate beauty lives in the shadow of a gallows tree and a hanged man’s boots. What’s your take on the poem’s title, as wel as its overall content?   

I hope everyone hears the poem, so please excuse this reminder about meter and music:  an “anapest” is a metric foot whose three syllables are:  unstressed, unstressed, stressed, as in “to a HANGED . . .” bah bah BOOM.  A few anapests in proximity are sometimes called a waltz rhythm. If you weren’t already Strauss-ing around the room, you may now begin.

In the first stanza of “Ativan,” I’m charmed by the musicality of the anapests at the center. It started with a somewhat hard iamb in “That dream” (which could come across as an even harder, stronger spondee (two consecutive stressed syllables), and we finish the stanza with two more iambs:  “-lows TREE.”  But in the middle are some softer minuets, which we can hear as the vulnerability of the cricket:

            in the DARK            of the NIGHT

            at the FOOT

            of the GAL-  lows TREE.

A cricket’s noise might be perceived as somewhat musical, and the poet brackets that little three-four tune with a harder, sharper beat in the iambs of “That DREAM” and “the GAL-lows TREE.”

Red-Bellied Woodpecker, male

Can we conclude that Kasische’s rhythms reflect, and even help to create, the central conflict in the poem:  the perception of delicate beings surrounded and threatened by our awareness of death, which we try to soften with Ativan, among other antidotes.

Like the speaker, we’re likely to identify with creatures like crickets. Like her, we might even call them “virtuous” and “hopeful” and “heart-faced.”  Although science tells us that crickets (and cockroaches and other bugs) will succeed us on the planet, we see the singers as profoundly sweet and profoundly vulnerable—or maybe doomed, more than vulnerable.

 

(As a FWIW aside, in Kasischke’s phrasing and music, I hear an echo of Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale”:  

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

         I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

         To take into the air my quiet breath;

                Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

         To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

                While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

                        In such an ecstasy!

         Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

                   To thy high requiem become a sod.

Kasischke seems at least half in love with her subject, nature’s most fragile creatures; but of course it’s the tiny living things she loves, not the hanged man. Still, I’ll cling to the notion that Kasischke is half in love with crickets and her unconscious might have heard Keats rummaging around in her attic—Wait!   I can’t say that. I’m a quasi New Critic!).

If I had a picture of a cricket, I’d post it. Today’s photos are an attempt to capture additional “Little, hopeful, insistent things,” whether or not their faces are heart-shaped or “lit up by the moon,” and whether or not they knowingly sing to a “hanged man’s boots.” I’m pretty sure the red-bellied woodpecker and the milkweed have not taken the Ativan, yet they seem hopeful enough.

As for the big trees with overhanging branches, let’s not talk about them, neither the autumn orange nor the stripped bare version. 

Ativan by Laura Kasischke : Poetry Magazine

THE NEW CRITICISM, Part 3, The Biographical Fallacy

The Biography of the Nut? The History of This Nut's Species? The Context of the Nut? What the Nut's Team of Psychoanalysts Said about the Nut?

Or the Nut Itself--Taste, Smell, Touch, Sight, and even Sound?

Regarding The New Criticism--my version of it anyway--the history, context, and so forth, of the nut are of no use, are without nutrition, unless the user has understood and experienced the nut itself. Once the nut has been experienced directly, by one who knows nuts, those other factors might make interesting playthings, but they will not feed the squirrel--who, I repeat--can distinguish a good nut from a rock, without memorizing Herodotus on the Peloponnesian Nut Wars.

Here's some more on the quasi-academic way of saying that.

Surely the “biographical fallacy” is a self-evident truth: good reading does not inject details of the author’s life into his writing. The author or his biographer might have gotten it wrong, might not have understood where a particular creative impulse came from. Or he might lie about it!

Yeats’s love for Maud Gonne, Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne, Nietzsche’s apparently pathetic life in relation to his bold notions, including that of a superman—these putative facts about the author’s life, juicy as they might be, should have nothing to do with the way we interpret or evaluate his words on the printed page. We’ll never actually know the biographical details, so let’s just do the honest, sometimes difficult work of interpreting the text.

Of course there are some qualifications. For example, language has changed since Shakespeare’s time, so we need an occasional footnote about telling “a hawk from a handsaw” in Hamlet or “’Sblood” as a recurring oath. And in Macbeth, it helps to know we can reasonably assume that childless Lady Macbeth’s comment about “the babe that milks me” probably refers to a child who died, given the commonness of infant mortality in eleventh century Scotland. What we must not do is jump to the conclusion that a significant theme in the play is, for example, a Shakespearean obsession with abortion-related guilt or the bard’s mourning the death of his own lost child.

Even the facts about the actual Scottish king should have no bearing on the Macbeth in the play, who is a fictional creation. Shakespeare played fast and loose with the sketchy historical facts available to him, so why should we bring them to bear on his plays, his works of art?

All this seems so obvious to me that I do not understand why the New Criticism has fallen out of favor in the last few decades, unless its proponents grew so extreme that they became absurd. I’m aware that the New Critics are associated with formalism in poetry; but I don’t remember, or never knew, if that was a justifiable connection or one created by their detractors. I see no reason why a New Critic’s careful attention to text—including punctuation and line breaks—should be limited to rhymed or metered poetry. Surely good free verse requires, deserves, and should invite the same kind of scrutiny.

Next, I intend to get back to Mr. Gothpunkrocker. But this should be enough for one day. Enough of what? Be kind. (Rewind?)