Poetry Wednesday

I've been meaning for a while now to write about poems on the blog. This is for my own sake as well as the fact that lots of non-poets I know often ask me about how I read poetry or what kind I read. I thought it would be interesting to offer my own reading of poems that I like. And since I don't get to teach poetry this semester, it'll be a nice catalyst for me to keep reading and thinking.

Well folks, today is the day! I just happened to read this poem by James Schuyler, which is in this week's New Yorker. (I know: The New Yorker. But I keep getting it for the poems, the restaurant review and the cartoons, as well as the occasional amazing story, like the one about arson and the death penalty last week, which I can't link to because The New Yorker won't let you see their stuff online unless you subscribe. Bleh.)

ANYWAY. the poem (please ignore the copyright infrginement):

Love's Photograph (or Father and Son)

Detected little things: a peach-pit
basket watch-chain charm, an ivory
cross wound with ivory ivy, a natural
cross. The Tatoosh Mountains, opaque
crater lakes, a knickerbockered boy
who, drowned, smiles for a seeming ever
on ice skates on ice-skate-scratched
ice, an enlarged scratched snapshot.
Taken, taken. Mad charges corrupt to
madness their sane nurses. Virginia
creeper, Loose Tooth tanned black snake-
skins, shot crows for crow wings for
a black servant's hat, lapped hot milk,
flung mud in a Bible reader's crotch:
"You shouldn't read the Bible nekkid!"
Family opals, selfishness changes hands.
Tatoosh Mountains, opaque crater lakes,
find me the fish skeleton enclosed in
fish skeleton (fish ate fish) he had.


Whew! This is a hard poem to start with. If you're in with this post, you should reread the poem. Or read it aloud.

To me the poem is a collection objects, memories and people related to a speaker's childhood, a childhood "traveled" to through looking at by old photographs. However, I did NOT come to that conclusion until I read the poem several times and then wrote this whole post. I just moved it here to the beginning to make the post less confusing. I want to try to describe my process of reading and figuring out the poem.

First, what made me keep reading this poem after the first couple of lines was not the story (because I did not know what was going on at all) but the sound. I think the best place to begin is with the concept of rhyme.

A common discussion to have in a beginning poetry class is whether or not a poem should rhyme. You have the staunch defenders of rhyme, who vehemently recite Frost: ("Whose woods these are I think I KNOW/ His house is in the village THOUGH"), and you have your free-versers, who see rhyme as a trap and a prison.

In my opinion (and aesthetic), the truth is in the middle. While a contemporary poem that is a slave to its end-stopped rhyme (that's rhyme at the end of the line) is at risk of being viewed as (and actually being) boring and sing-song, a rhymeless poem has no music. One of the things I find to be the most fun, and challenging, about writing my own poems is finding ways to include rhyme-ish-ness without following a set form.

So let's look at rhyme-ish-ness (by which I mean both slant rhyme, which is when words ALMOST rhyme but don't quite, like "cat" , "car," and "can," and alliteration, which is when the same sounds are repeated, like the "k" in Kitten, Kettle, licK) in Schuyler's poem. First, "a peach-pit basket watch chain charm." You have your "ch" sounds woven through: peaCH, WatCH, CHain, CHarm. The "sk" of "basket" is close enough to "ch" to be a nice cousin. Then you have your "a" sounds and diphthongs (that's blended vowel sounds): pEAch, bAsket, wAtch, chAIn, chArm. None of the these make perfect rhymes, like "cat" and "hat," but the sounds echo each other with a pleasing similarity.

So the sound sucked me in, and there's tons more to say about the sound in the poem. But in the meantime, I'm reading the poem, thinking what in the world is he talking about? Lots of people's frustration with poetry, I think, comes from simply not knowing what in the world the poet is talking about. This poem, I think, ALMOST shuts out the reader but throws out enough lifelines so that a reader can build a little story and stay with the poem. The title helps: are we looking at photographs in a photo album? If so, then the opening lines tell us that we are zeroing in on "little things" in the pictures and then shows us some of those little things.

They are weird things. What's a peach-pit basket watch-chain charm? It is, I assume, what it says, a basket carved out of a peach pit attached to someone's watch chain. What a crazily small detail to see in a photograph! At this point, I'm drawn in to the poem by both its incredible particularity and its sound. And we keep looking: an ivory cross wound with ivory ivy. Well, that's a little easier. Most of us have probably seen something like that. Note the "o" sounds in use here, and the slant rhyme of "ivory" and ivy." (This slant rhyme is intensified by the fact that the poem repeats key words, here using "ivory" twice. This fascinated me too because it's breaking a KEY rule of good poetry, which is that you don't repeat words in a poem unless it's absolutely necessary. Here the repetition creates a sense of playfulness, and in this poem SO many words (cross, skates, lakes, scratched, mad, crow, fish..) are repeated that as a reader you know it is purposeful.)

So. This is a lot to have said about two and a half lines.

Moving on, I'm willing to stay with the poem, assuming I am looking at photographs. "A natural cross" catches me up a little. Is that a cross somehow found in nature? Like the intersection of branches or something? I can skip over it, assuming it is (or ignoring it). The fact that "the Tatoosh Mountains" comes next is reassuring too: not only is is also a "natural" image, it signals that we've moved from tiny and weird things to other things and places in the pictures. The lakes, the boy. (Note: I'd never heard of the Tatoosh Mountains but it turns out they are in Washington state.)

Now, a very interesting thing happens with the boy. It's an amazing transition from image to story and memory. The boy, in the photograph, "smiles for a seeming ever," because that's what people in pictures do. However, he is also "drowned." Whether this death is real or metaphorical, the boy is both present forever (in the picture) and gone forever (dead or grown up). "Taken, taken" emphasizes this beautifully. And it applies both to the "taking" of photographs and how the boy was "taken." From this point on the poem seems to move from looking at things in the photographs into memory or reflection, and to events that happened in the time and place the poem has created for us so far (which I am reading as a childhood vacation or home in the Tatoosh Mountains). Because I feel the poem now has a context and setting (which the title again helps to assure me of), I am willing to read the rest of the poem without exactly knowing what's going on or what's what, experiencing it as a collection of things and memories related to the speaker, his childhood, and his memories.

An interesting question is what is "Loose Tooth"? After I reread the poem several times it occurred to me that it could be a name or nickname. If it is, it makes the 4 or 5 lines after it make more sense. Someone named Loose Tooth tanned snakeskins, threw mud on someone reading the Bible naked. Could it be--going back to the title again--the father?

The poem ends in a glory of repetition, the mountains and the lakes again, as well as the image of the fish skeleton enclosed in bigger fish skeleton, another crazy object that the speaker is asking someone to "find" for him. But it's all done so compactly, and so swiftly. It's beautiful. There's a clear sense of loss, as is often felt, I think, when looking at old photographs.

One of the reasons I like this poem is that it IS so crazy. But, importantly, the poem gives me enough ground to stand on so that I can make my own sense out of it.

When I was thinking about wanting to write poems on the blog, one of my purposes was to show other people how I read poems, since when people find out I write poetry, they often want to know what I like to read and how I read it. I guess the lesson here is that reading poetry can be an adventure. I didn't mean to start with such a crazy poem, but to me this poem illustrates that you don't have to know what's going on all the time in the poem to enjoy it. If the sounds and images pull you in, you can read the poem the way you would look at a somewhat abstract painting, finding your own shapes and stories. Or the way you would look at clouds.

For anyone interesting in more about James Schuyler, here's a link to a brief bio. He died in 1991, but apparently a new book of previously unpublished poems is coming out soon, so I guess that's why he's in The New Yorker.