Zapruder, Day Two. Windbag Alert. Teacher Instruction. Bed and Breakfasts, continued.

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

From time to time, visitors’ comments get me all wound up, because they open new windows onto a poem, and I use those comments and my responses as a post unto themselves. This is such a day.  Lucky you.

I just said to a friend that sometimes I weary of blogging, but I realize that it leads me to new poems and poets, and it usually makes me like the poems better as I look at them more carefully. Zapruder’s “The Prelude” is a case in point.

Add to that the comments I get from readers—whole new humans opening up aspects of the poem that I hadn’t considered, and sometimes aspects of themselves—I tell you, it’s better than NASCAR, and I bet it’s better than crack.

Sidebar:           

Speaking of a need for artificial stimulation . . .

So many, many times I’ve heard teachers, parents and other putatively caring adults who need to tone down their advice-giving to young people who have stalled, or gotten into real trouble. Instead simply asking, then asking again, searching for specifics, “What do you like? What would you rather be doing? How can we work that into a course of study and, with some luck, a career? I don’t care if Mommy’s a CEO. If you like woodworking, let’s look into that.” 

But in a sad miracle, the talk—it’s not a conversation—stops at, “You have to do better . . .  because I said so.”

I predict the geezer will toss out 20 times as many words as the teen. What are the teen’s options, beyond being overwhelmed and probably resentful and maybe enraged? Oh, he may obey, but look it up:  obedience is not a synonym for cure.  

End of Sidebar.  Beginning of Comments, Yours and Mine.

 Brenda's Arizona said...

"...should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.” 
So did Wordsworth follow his desire whereas Coleridge couldn't? 

I have been told by B&B owners that the reason they have the business is to fulfill the need to follow a desire. You have come full circle, Banjo!
And I'd love to see more photos of the B&B where you stayed. These are inviting, but please - more coffee.

February 8, 2013 at 11:19 AM

 

 altadenahiker said...

Filled with self-deprecating humor, isn't it. And comparing himself, as a poet I think, with Wordsworth the nature boy and Coleridge the tortured soul, he comes up short in his own estimation. 

I find B&B's creepy, too. Especially when they've filled your room with stuffed animals. But maybe that's a Northern Calif thing.

B and AH, about the poem, what you say is the way I see it. I seem to remember that Wordsworth’s hikes were considerable. I followed one of his routes in the Lake District, and it was much more than a stroll in those almost-mountains. Maybe he really was more adventurous than Coleridge—or Zapruder.

I was at first curious that Coleridge’s “love of friends” wasn’t more comfort than it was, but Zapruder, ever the poet, adds more threatening stuff:  “love of friends and the wind.” Oh, that wind.

And there’s more. The wind is “taking his arrow away.”  Is it a phallic arrow? Whether or not, it’s his edge, and most of us would say, I think, that we want our edge (as well as our “ease”—face it, we want it all).

Do you think the last two lines hint at suicide? If so, is that too “big” for a  poem that opens with Diet Coke?

The more I read this thing, the more I like it. I’ve said umpteen times here (not that it’s original) that poems almost always need to offer surprises (sometimes “gifts”) along the way. In that context, compare the tone and mood of the first two lines with the last two lines. Talk about a journey! 

And that thorough analysis of chocolate, leading into vapor (“nothing”), then back to a field and finally to “ham and rustic chambered cheese”—I hear a dialectic between airy nothing and richly sensuous items, items of appetite and delight, culminating in chocolate.

I’m also drawn to the almost confessional mode of his wishing to be “at least a little more than intermittently/at ease with being loved. I am never at ease.”  That has a peculiar power for me.  Is it just me?

Even in terms of grammar and syntax, how does Zapruder get away with the gangly “at least a little more than intermittently”?  But the speaker is something of a brainiac, and brainiacs say stuff like that. Or at least they think it.

Did anyone see baseball on the horizon?  But it fits. It’s the more common pleasure to accompany his more “poetic” and neurotic items like the hallway and time?  What’s bigger than time? What’s more ordinary than baseball? How do we get them into the same poem? Zapruder does, and for me that’s a happy surprise, a gift. 

The Prelude by Matthew Zapruder : Poetry Magazine

Theodore Roethke, "I Knew a Woman": The Gift of a Poem

I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

A couple of times recently (see, for example, Banjo52, December 8, 2010), I’ve agreed with others in saying that art, including poetry, should be a gift—and bear smaller gifts along the way of its journey. As an example, Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman” is almost a cheat, the poem is so full of pleasures. It’s more playful than serious, but it illustrates my point. Male readers should appreciate the poem’s gifts without need for explanation. But female readers, even militant feminists, might smile too as they hear Roethke proclaim—and exaggerate, perhaps—women’s powers and their dominance over men.

These are not new gambits about gender, but consider a few of the new images or phrases. First, the woman sighs back at birds. Birds don’t sigh, as far as I know, but what a charming, though improbable image. If a man insists upon going dopey over a woman, what better defense for his insanity than her ability to sigh with the birds? Who could resist such a woman, gentle, at home in orchards, cousin to the finch? It's the end of the paradigm of Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll.

So, by the end of Line 2, Roethke has made clear that there will be some frippery here; if you want King Lear wailing over Cordelia’s corpse, you’ll have to go read the bard. Or Dostoevsky, or dozens of other somber works. This poem is primarily playful, though it might gently raise the serious issue of dominance, who’s running the show, and how much inequality of power is healthy in a relationship. There's also a bit of philosophy, mystery, even witchcraft:

What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.

Is this is enough of a non-erotic basis for worship, enough adoration for attributes other than the physical? I suspect various readers will answer that differently. But the primacy of the female in Roethke's overall scheme is beyond doubt, and that primacy resides in a sublimity that's much more than lust.

Roethke died in 1963, so he missed the most recent decades of feminism as well as the latest news from evolutionists: in mating, the female of the species does the choosing. She's The Decider. (Sorry, couldn't resist). So, knowingly or unwittingly, Roethke's playful poem might be touching on some scientific concepts, proven or otherwise.

Much of the gift in art is offering the unexpected and making it seem appropriate and be appropriate--natural and convincing, both rational and supra-rational. In this vein, Roethke’s next surprise is his adoration of his love as a “bright container.” As a pick-up line, I’ve never considered, “Hey, baby, you’re one bright container.” I wonder if it would work. It should; a suitor should get points for originality.

Whatever else she is, a woman is surely a container, a bright one; she should be honored to be called a container, though it took Roethke to show me this truth. (I suppose men are containers too, but maybe we’re not all that bright . . . maybe we're milk cartons).

I’ve contemplated a hip or two passing by, but I don't recall any hips with noses. Still, Roethke-think has persuaded me to play along, just in time for a somewhat menacing image: this fine woman of circles is also a sickle—a tool! a blade! And Walmart is fresh out of codpieces! But she and he are both happy with the male as rake, following along, cleaning up after her. Only a few weeds have been amputated; all his . . . digits are intact.

There might also be a play here on that other meaning of “rake,” the rough and ready playboy, as in the song verse, “I am a rake and rambling boy.” Maybe that’s Roethke’s effort at a shred of dignity for his gender—romanticizing, idolizing tin-cup beggars that we are. But that's a stretch, and even if it has merit, it yields to the primary image of “rake” as clean-up device.

A truer test of my assertion about gifts in art would be a darker poem that we’re nevertheless glad we’ve read. Its thinking and language are so incisive, fresh, surprising, and significant that they are unquestionably worth the new light of day (or night) the poet has given them. But there have been and will be grim poems aplenty; maybe it’s all right to begin with “I Knew a Woman”—light but ingenious—so that we might all be on the same page about what I mean by gifts in a poem.

Do you find any gifts in "I Knew a Woman"? Elsewhere?

I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry

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