Two Snow Scenes: Maureen Seaton and Naomi Shihab Nye

Here are two poems sharing the title “Snow,” the first by Maureen Seaton  (1991) Snow by Maureen Seaton : The Poetry Foundation   and the second by Naomi Shihab Nye (1998).  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19970

They are an invitation for us to think about this season and all seasons (add in Wallace Stevens” “The Snow Man” last time). Do you have a preference?

What would you write about snow? What do you remember because of snow? Is it simple or complex and nuanced? What are some of the specific details?

Because Seaton’s poem is overtly political and Shihab Nye’s is domestic and personal, I might be asking for a comparison of fire hydrants and cauliflower. So let me say up front that what interests me is that Seaton’s gritty New York portrait of biracial lesbian lovers, from different socioeconomic strata, seems no more interesting or “deeper” than Shihab Nye’s recollection of a girl pulling her younger brother up a snowy hill on his sled.

Not a Winter Hill, Not a Sled

This pair of poems illustrates, for the ten-thousandth time, that the devil really is in the details. I learn more from and about Shihab Nye’s children than I do from Seaton’s adult characters, though I’d have thought them more significant, richer material, caught as they are in the midst of just about every major prejudice.

Here are three gems from Shihab Nye that might compel our deeper wondering about sister, brother, and family, both then and now:

    my brother whom I called by our secret name//

    as if we could be other people under the skin.

    People would dig their cars out like potatoes. 

    How are you doing back there? I shouted,

    and he said Fine, I’m doing fine, 

    in the sunniest voice he could muster 

    and I think I should love him more today

    for having used it. 

She should love him more? What is the gap that remains between them as adults? In the childhood home, there was an unexplained “raging blizzard of sobs,” and now we might wonder about secret names, or being “other people under the skin.” Shihab Nye might be teasing us with incomplete information, but at least she is imbuing her characters with ample human complexity.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19970

In Seaton’s “Snow,” the information is also incomplete, but that’s less about mystery and complexity than turning humans into political types. I don’t know enough about the lovers to determine whether I want still more info. Are they statistics in a sociological pamphlet, or are they intriguing, multidimensional humans? Both? They are not individualized enough for me to feel I know them.

Dove and Dark-Eyed Junco

I’m inclined to like the two, but consider the second stanza where the speaker confesses her white guilt:

                                            

         [I]  strolled along the river, believing

         I belonged there, that my people

         inherited this wonderland

         unequivocally, as if they deserved it.

There’s a social consciousness there, and I’m glad the speaker sees her unfair advantages in finding fine housing. But if we’re the kind of people who read serious poetry, aren’t we just as likely to say, “What took you so long to notice and care about these inequalities?”

I’d be more moved by the situation if there were more thorough characterization, with or without a sociopolitical context, such as these interesting lines about the lover:

               My lover buys twinkies from the Arabs,

                bootleg tapes on ‘25^th,

                and carries a blade in her back

                pocket although her hands

                are the gentlest I’ve known.

                She ignores the piss smells

            on the corner . . .  

In that brief passage, she comes alive,

so I’d like to know her and the speaker in more contexts like this. I wonder if the poem’s situation lends itself better to fiction or essay than poetry.

I’m not satisfied with either poem’s conclusion, and in both works, I want more information. But at least both poems interest me enough to wish for a more complete understanding of their characters.

Snow by Maureen Seaton : The Poetry Foundation

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19970

 

RUSSO'S BRIDGE OF SIGHS: NAMES, PART TWO

Too Toney
To Be Thomaston?






Bobby Marconi becomes an esteemed artist, but by the time we find him in Italy, he has, ironically, exchanged his father's Italian name for his mother’s Noonan. What does all this amount to? Is he shining the light of High Noon on the subjects in his work? But his paintings tend to be grim; so maybe he just seeks the light of noon. Maybe he wants nothing more symbolic than dodging his father's shadow, but when you begin with the name Marconi and end up choosing Noonan, it's hard to call it casual coincidence.

Big Lou Lynch’s brother is Dec, short for Declan--pronounced deck. I’m glad I first encountered “Deck” from the audio book, or I'd have been distracted by the way I was supposed to hear it. Even so, I always choked on it just a little. It's a short, tough-sounding word, which is apt. I suppose it also looks like the abbreviation of December, the onset of winter, season of death; but at the same time it's the traditional birth of Christ (and except for the Bergs, these are Catholic families). How does Dec as a character amount to December (or a deck or Christmas or anything else)? Should I stop wondering? And if there's an answer, is the symbolic name worth the attention-seeking oddness and the questions about pronunciation?

Here and possibly elsewhere, Russo seems to be stretching for something like allegory that is neither clear nor necessary. Nan Beverly has one of the most fitting names in the book; the casually abbreviated "Nan" is at once more youthful and more stately than Nancy. Combined with the surname "Beverly," it smacks of aristocracy, at least a little, without forcing some cosmic symbolism in her character or the narrative as a whole.

Jerzy Quinn. Is he a football jersey? A Jersey cow? With or without symbolism, surely we can’t say that somebody named Jerzy Quinn is just some guy; and in the story line, he is indeed more than a prop. But why the self-conscious name for him?

So, combined with yesterday's post, there's a primer on name symbolism or something along those lines in Bridge of Sighs. Are there other examples? What have I missed in the names of characters and perhaps places? With such evocative character names, why a town with a boring name like Thomaston? Maybe the oridinary name belies a complex reality. Are there any votes for doubting Thomas in the Bible? If so, how would that be relevant?

Notice that I haven’t even touched upon Tessa (Contessa? was it—a contest?) or Sarah (again a biblical possibility), or Owen (is he “owing” someone or something?). I'm reaching, I know, but Mr. Russo has opened that door.

So before you call me one more hair-splitting, anal-compulsive English teacher, ask yourself: even if I've forced the issue here, can all those names be accidental? And as for my modestly New Critical bias, I offer this: whether or not it was the author’s intent, those names have crept into the text, and there they beg for us to do something with them.

Finally, I wonder if the author is wise to infuse a realistic story with such teasing--and some might say, relentless--symbolism. Doesn't it all feel somewhat mechanical, forced, formulaic? It makes a fun game for English majors (or is it math majors who especially like this kind of thing?), but such symbolism might also imply that the characters and events don't carry enough depth and complexity in the real world and thus need an artificial, imposed scheme to become important.

My internal jury is still deliberating, but I suspect it will find that these lives and personalities have plenty of gravitas on their own, without the author's parental over-protection: "I shall enlarge my children's place in the universe by bestowing grand labels upon some of them." Besides, interference from the father is not the way one becomes a character of consequence.

On the other hand, how can you quarrel with the wit and the implications of a town character named Gabriel Mock? Do we trust his philosophizing, or is he mocking himself as well as others? If he's holding himself up to mockery, are we laughing with him or at him? How does our laughter affect our sympathy and respect for him, for surely we have some? There might have been times when I cared more about him (and his son) than any character in the book.

Why do my juries seem to be in eternal deliberation? It's tiring. In any case, a novel that raises all these questions, plus the topics I brought up last summer--surely such a work is no trivial matter and deserves much more praise than criticism.

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