Author: Loren

The Girl Can’t Help It

Though not particularly one of my favorite poems, “The Girl,” and the title says it all, is one of those poems that seems to stay with you over the years. Though I hadn’t read it in probably 20 to 25 years, I remembered it almost instantaneously once I started reading it.

Wonder why that is?

This poem, unlike “The Poor” contain no commentary from the poet, thus beautifully fitting Williams’ idea that there is “No ideas but in things.”

The Girl

with big breasts
under a blue sweater

bareheaded-
crossing the street

reading a newspaper
stops, turns

and looks down
as though

she had seen a dime
on the pavement

So, why is it that this poem works perfectly well without any commentary from the poet? Has Williams found the ultimate “objective correlative?”

Is its appeal to human nature, at least male human nature, so basic, so universal, that it needs nothing more? Or, have past societal trends, like Holllywood “sweater girl” promotions been so widespread and pervasive that we have been “conditioned” to react exactly the way the author wanted us to?

Would a primitive native who lived in a society where women didn’t cover their breasts react the same way to this poem that someone from the West would react?

:: The Object and Nothing but the Object ::

“The Poor” is one of my favorite William Carlos Williams poems. In many ways it fits Williams’ idea of “No ideas but in things.” It contains a number of vivid, concrete images that certainly convey emotions to the responsive reader.

In order to make a point, though, I’ve taken the liberty of removing the first line and a half from the poem. Read the poem without this line, then insert the line that has been removed and reread the poem to see whether you believe it changes the poem or not:

THE POOR
___ ___ ______ __ _______
_______ __ , the old
yellow wooden house indented
among the new brick tenements

Or a cast iron balcony
with panels showing oak branches
in full leaf. It fits
the dress of the children

reflecting every stage and
custom of necessity-
Chimneys, roofs, fences of
Wood and metal in an unfenced

age and enclosing next to
nothing at all: the old man

in a sweater and soft black
hat who sweeps the sidewalk-

his own ten feet of it-
in a wind that fitfully

turning his corner has
overwhelmed the entire city

Personally, the image of the old man sweeping his sidewalk in a city overwhelmed by dirt is a favorite image that has stayed with me for many years, one I remembered without even trying to memorize it.

"Why would that be?" you might ask. Perhaps because I was a caseworker for awhile and observed many futile attempts by clients to overcome the problems they faced, while society ignored more serious problems that were sure to overwhelm them relatively quickly. Obviously I bring experiences to this poem that most people would not bring.

What would you say is the “tone” of this poem? Is it melancholy? Is it full of despair? Is there a sense of delight? How are all of these images tied together?

What happens to the poem when you put the opening lines “It’s the anarchy of poverty/delights me” into the poem? Do these lines change your perception of the poem itself?

For me, at least, this sentence serves as the “thesis” statement of the poem, changing the tone of the poem considerably. The word “anarchy” provides a different structure to the poem than I would have imposed on it. “Delights” is, for me, though, quite unexpected, changing the whole meaning of the poem. I doubt that “delights” is a way I would have ever described this kind of poverty.

And though I’m still not entirely convinced that poverty can ever really be a “delight,” it makes me look back at the images in a new way.

It seems to me, though, that Williams does not merely present the object “without further comment;” in fact, his comment alters not only the way we see this poem but, quite possibly, the way we see poverty.

:: MT and ME ::

Okay, I have to admit it, I’ve been thinking about switching from Adobe GoLive to MT. Unfortunately, I know a lot less about coding than Jonathon gives me credit for. I hand code very little. I’m a layout, print, person, not a computer person. Because I was into Photoshop I naturally gravitated toward GoLive, and that’s about as far as I have gotten.

The real hold up is that I don’t think ATT broadband will work with MT since it doesn’t work with Blogger. When they lost Excite, ATT would no longer allow outside access to their websites. You have to use ATT Broadband to connect. I’ve sent an inquiry to tech support to see if there is any chance MT will will work with their servers and am anxiously (STILL) awaiting their response.

Nor can I host my own site using an old computer because that is against the contract I’ve signed with ATT Broadband.

I’ve noticed that Alwin Hawkins, who also has ATT broadband, hosts his site on another host. I’m supposing that there is a good reason.

I’m not sure I want to pay more than the $40+ a month I’m already paying to play this game, though I am watching comments on Jonathon’s site to see what it might cost for a new host.

(Oh, by the way, how do you set the width of your page so that it is variable? I thought I had solved that problem earlier.)

So Much Depends Upon…

Whitman’s use of the term “dumb ministers” in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” to describe objects that contribute to our soul, and Jonathan Delacour’s ongoing discussion of “objective description” and “subjective description” somehow reminded me of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a poem students often found “dumb,” though not in the sense Whitman used it.

“The Red Wheelbarrow”

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

In discussing his poetry Willliams said, “Emotion clusters about common things, the pathetic often stimulates the imagination to new patterns—but the job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language to him which is authentic. In my own work it has always sufficed that the object of my attention be presented without further comment.” Later, he stated, “No ideas but in things.”

Judging from many a student’s reaction to “The Red Wheelbarrow,” though, it’s not clear that pure description does “suffice.” Students were most likely to react in dumb silence or outrage when presented with the poem. Simply put, they didn’t get it, and often felt that there was “nothing to get,” much like the outrage expressed by many when confronted with modern paintings with titles like “White on White.”

One wonders now that it has become stylish to include an old wheelbarrow as a planter in a garden whether some students would react differently to the poem, and whether Asian students, having been raised in a very different poetic tradition, might have a different reaction to it.

In other words, do objects have meaning in themselves or do they only have meaning within a cultural context?

Was T.S. Eliot correct when he argued that: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion?” (See the Dead Poet’s Circle for further discussion of objective correlative.)

What Agony Lies in a Choice

In Catholicism limbo is the temporary place of souls which are purified of sin. It is also the permanent place of the souls of unbaptized children who are excluded from the vision of Christ.

After reading this poem it would be easy to rail against the Catholic Church for its stern and dispassionate rejection of unbaptized infants from a permanent place in Heaven, but I think society in general must share the blame for its lack of support of the innocent.

It is too easy to pass judgment upon women particularly who find themselves in untenable positions, giving birth to children outside of a stable and supportive marriage. These are the very souls who most need the help of society. In society’s defense, I would like to think we are becoming more accepting of children “born out of wedlock” as they used to say, but nonetheless even today most single mothers have a hard life ahead of them.

This may be a good place for one of my ongoing rants. Until you and I insist on the education of all women and the acknowledgment of the advantages of birth control, this poem’s story will sadly stay a current one.

Heaney tells the story that reaches to the very heart of the reader.

Limbo

Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning.

A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I’m sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.

She waded in under
The sign of her cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ’s palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there.

The story in this poem leads the reader to ask as many questions as it answers. What has happened to the mother who makes such an unspeakably horrible choice to drown her newborn son? What becomes of the mother who with freezing hands quietly drowns him?

The infant is found by fishermen who have been netting salmon. What shock has leapt through their souls as they discover what lies in their nets?

And what religion can be so stern as to teach that illegitimacy is so unacceptable that a mother would choose to destroy the outcome of an liaison outside the accepted parameters of marriage?

The mother must forever remember her child in limbo, one of a cold glitter of souls. Even Christ Himself feels his wounds and cannot draw near the drowning sight as though he never intended such an act to be performed under the sign of His cross.

The poem calls to mind one experience I had when I was teaching. A beautiful 17 year old student of mine became pregnant during the school year and when she “began to show” the administrators expelled her, adding one more obstacle she would have to overcome, that of a reduced opportunity for an education. The most I could do was box up my children’s baby clothes and give them to her.

She did have the tenacity to attend night school to earn her high school diploma. I often think of her and hope she has a good life with a child who would be 30 years old now. I hope he is a great comfort to his mother, but the odds are against that, aren’t they?

Diane McCormick

Counterpoint to Walden Pond

Poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature was born in County Derry, 30 miles northeast of Belfast. The eldest of nine children, he became a teacher and a writer who now lectures at Harvard.

Heaney earns much praise from fellow writers. American poet Robert Lowell called him the most important Irish poet since Yeats, easily recognized as the most popular Irish poet writing today. His most recent contribution to literature has been his translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf.

Echoes of Robert Frost, Ted Hughes, George Manly Hopkins, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy are said to be heard in his work. For an umbrella impression of his work, one critic has mentioned that Heaney writes predominately about things that lie deep in the earth. So far I can’t argue against him.

Try the following:

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the damn gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats; Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting;
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

On the subject of tadpoles, allow a personal anecdote.

One spring when my daughter Molly was three, she scooped from the slough that ran behind her grandmother’s house a coffee can full of frogspawn, bringing the watery nursery into the house to sit on the breakfast bar.

Just as Seamus Heaney did, we watched the dots turn to tadpoles that grew back legs, adding size and function to the little comma bodies.

Finally, biology being what it is, we rose one morning to a kitchen filled with miniature frogs jumping from counter to window sill to floor. Very carefully my mother and I cupped the bouncing adolescents in our hands, returned them to the bowl, the bowl to the pond. Nature belongs outside.

Seamus Heaney’s poem captures that season in childhood when if a child is very lucky, he can become enthralled with frogspawn. Molly had been fascinated by the growing tadpoles; most of us are drawn to the young, the beginning of things.

But Seamus Heaney and I agree; big old frogs become slime kings. Their slaps and plops are obscene threats, poised mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. What vengeance would frogs inflict upon little girls and their mothers who kidnap their babies for a biology experiment?

Nor is the home of the frogs in Heaney’s poem Walden Pond. The flax dam holding back the water in the town stream is described as a barrier which festered in the heart of the townland, the flax rotting in the punishing sun. Bluebottle flies buzz above the smell. Dragon-flies, butterflies, flit over the thick slobber of frogspawn, growing in the clotted water along the banks.

I suppose one could make a great fuss over the symbolism of the festering source of life, the figures of the young frogs turned gross bellied, but I think I will deny my English teacher roots and simply say I like the humor in the poem’s title, the sharpness of detail to describe one spring in a boy’s life and the sharp decline in enthusiasm for one venture into nature. It makes an enjoyable counterbalance to all those nature poets who would find inspiration in anything outdoors.

Diane McCormick