The Victims 11/23

"The Victims" by Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 and is an American Poet. She has won many awards for her writing over the years such as the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Books Critic Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center award in 1980. She currently teaches creative writing at NYU.

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away, 
your secretaries taken away, 
your lunches with three double bourbons, 
your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits back, too, those dark
carcasses hung in your closet, and the black
noses of your shoes with their large pores? 
She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it
until we pricked with her for your 
annihilation, Father. Now I
pass the bums in doorways, the white
slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits of compressed silt, the stained
flippers of their hands, the underwater
fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and 
took it from them in silence until they had
given it all away and had nothing 
left but this. 

“The Victims” begins as a second person narrative where the narrator is referring to her father and “you”. The tone is very bitter and indignant with the narrator mercilessly calling her father out on his luxurious and insensitive lifestyle. The very first line explains how she was glad when her mother divorced her father and “kicked him out”. She describes her glee when she found out her father had gotten fired and would no longer have his office, secretaries, “lunches with three double bourbons”, suits, etc. Additionally she characterizes her mother as the victim describing how her mother “took it and took it, in silence, all those years” and the narrator creates a unit with her mother and other siblings as she uses the pronoun “we” throughout the poem. This is how the first 17 lines go.

However, at the end of line 17 there is a significant tone shift as the narrator addresses her father. The “you” in the poem is now her father and she is talking directly to him in a very sympathetic manner. She recalls bums she has seen on the street who begin to seem like victims. The picture she paints is depressing as she describes their bodies as “slugs” and their hands as “stained flippers”. The narrator seems to not have forgotten about her father’s past and how his actions affected her family, but recognizes that her mother and siblings were not the only victims not her father the only villain. The way the narrator set up the poem with two different parts each carrying their own unique point of view and tone helps bring the idea of the poem full circle. 

The Leap 11/19

"The Leap" by James Dickey

James Dickey was born in 1923. He fought in the second World War and later graduated from Vanderbilt University. He was an American poet and Novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966 and also recieved the Order of the South Award. He died in 1997.

The only thing I have of Jane MacNaughton                                 

Is one instant of a dancing-class dance.                                

She was the fastest runner in the seventh grade,                                       

My scrapbook says, even when boys were beginning

To be as big as the girls.                                                                     

But I do not have her running in my mind,

Though Frances Lane is there, Agnes Fraser,

Fat Betty Lou Black in the boys-against-girls

Relays we ran at recess:  she must have run                                

Like the other girls, with her skirts tucked up                                               

So they would be like bloomers,

But I cannot tell; that part of her is gone.

What I do have is when she came,

With the hem of skirt where it should be

For a young lady, into the annual dance                                                        

Of the dancing class we all hated, and with a light

Grave leap, jumped up and touched the end

Of one of the paper-ring decorations

To see if she could reach it.  She could,

And reached me now as well, hanging in my mind                           

From a brown chain of brittle paper, thin

And muscular, wide-mouthed, eager to prove

Whatever it proves when you leap

In a new dress, a new womanhood, among the boys

Whom you easily left in the dust                                                       

Of the passionless playground.  If I said I saw

In the paper where Jane MacNaughton Hill,

Mother of four, leapt to her death from a window

Of a downtown hotel, and that her body crushed in

The top of a parked taxi, and that I held                                                       

Without trembling a picture of her lying cradled

In that papery steel as though lying in the grass,

One shoe idly off, arms folded across her breast,

I would not believe myself.  I would say

The convenient thing, that it was a bad dream                                              

Of Maturity, to see that eternal process

Most obsessively wrong with the world

Come out of her light, earth-spurning feet

Grown heavy:  would say that in the dusty heels                        

Of the playground some boy who did not depend                                       

On speed of foot, caught and betrayed her.

Jane, stay where you are in my first mind:

It was odd in that school, at that dance,

I and the other slow-footed yokels sat in corners

Cutting rings out of drawing paper                                                   

Before you leapt in your new dress

And touched the end of something I began,

Above the couples struggling on the floor,

New men and women clutching at each other

And prancing foolishly as bears:  hold on                                         

To that ring I made for you, Jane --

My feet are nailed to the ground

By dust I swallowed thirty years ago --

While I examine my hands.

“The Leap” begins with the narrator describing Jane MacNaughton, a spunky girl he knew as a young boy. He reminisces on Jane but details one specific memory that he describes as “the only thing” he has from her. During a dancing class she jumped as high as she could to prove that she could touch one of the paper-chain decorations he was making. To the narrator this leap symbolizes the moment he was personally touched by Jane. Additionally the paper-chain signifies what held Jane in the narrator’s mind for all these years. He even recalls that when she touched the chain during her first leap, she “touched the end of something he began.”

To him this leap was daring, courageous, bold, and mature and he greatly admired her for that. The Jane in that moment was the Jane that stayed suspended in his memory until he read the paper many years later and saw she had leapt to her death from a hotel window. These two leaps are so symbolic because the first one was a leap of courage. It was an aspiring leap, jumping to touch something just to prove she could. The second leap was a leap of despair and sorrow. She gave up on the one thing she would always have: life. Jane’s two symbolic leaps contrast so significantly because one was up, springing towards the sky and stretching her body while the other was down, limply falling to what she knew would be her death and finally laying crumpled on the top of a parked taxi. That news breaks the ongoing dream the narrator had of Jane in his mind and reminds him of the reality of life. 

My Papa's Waltz 11/16

"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke was born in 1908 is Saginaw, Michigan. Roethke graduated from U of M in 1929 but felt like school was not for him. He began to dedicate all of his time to writing. He established a reputation in the literary world with every publication. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 and was close friends with many other acclaimed writers. He died in 1963.

The whiskey on your breath 
Could make a small boy dizzy; 
But I hung on like death: 
Such waltzing was not easy. 

We romped until the pans 
Slid from the kitchen shelf; 
My mother's countenance 
Could not unfrown itself. 

The hand that held my wrist 
Was battered on one knuckle; 
At every step you missed 
My right ear scraped a buckle. 

You beat time on my head 
With a palm caked hard by dirt, 
Then waltzed me off to bed 
Still clinging to your shirt.

Initially I read this poem and assumed it was about a child being abused by his father. With one read through it is easy to take that stance because of the details Roethke provides about his father. For example, the very first line says, “The whiskey on your breath.” Someone with the smell of whiskey lingering on their breath is assumed to be drunk but in a violent, certainly not loving, way because whiskey is a hard liquor. Also in stanza’s 3 and 4, Roethke uses harsh verbs like “scraped” and “beat” when describing his interactions with his father. The mood those words create lead the reader to assume it is a story about child abuse.

However, upon the second and third read-through, I found that many of the lines that led me to believe that this was a poem about abuse actually had two meanings and interpretations. For example, the line, “You beat time on my head” I originally inferred as literal beating and abuse but now I read it as the father keeping time by tapping the little boy’s head as they waltzed.

There seems to be an overall tension surrounding this poem. It was written in 1948 and the narrator is reflecting on his childhood. The reader can infer that his childhood was during the Great Depression. His father, therefore may have been working hard labor to earn enough money for the family which would explain the calloused and dirty hands. His family also may have had money problems such as rent and other expenses, which correlates to the looming tension throughout the poem because money was an ever-present worry. However, the narrator is choosing to remember a happy memory in which he danced with his father despite the depressing times. We often remember the Great Depression as a dark time in America’s history, however Roethke is trying to convey through the double meaning of the poem that, although the Great Depression may look one way from the outside, he remembers the enjoyable times he had with his father.

The Night Wind 11/12

"The Night Wind" by Emily Bronte

Emily Bronte was born in Yorkshire, England in 1818. She and her two sisters, Anne and Charlotte, enjoyed writing poetry and novels. Emily wrote many poems but only one novel, the critically acclaimed Wuthering Heights. She died in Yorkshire, England in 1848 of tuberculosis.

In summer’s mellow midnight,

A cloudless moon shone through

Our open parlor window,

 And rosetrees wet with dew.

 I sat in silent musing,

 The soft wind waved my hair:

 It told me heaven was glorious,

 And sleeping earth was fair.

I needed not its breathing

To bring such thoughts to me,

 But still it whispered lowly,

How dark the woods will be!

“The thick leaves in my murmur

Are rustling like a dream,

And all their myriad voices

Instinct with spirit seem.”

I said, “Go, gentle singer,

Thy wooing voice is kind:

But do not think its music

Has power to reach my mind.

 “Play with the scented flower,

The young tree’s supple bough,

And leave my human feelings

In their own course to flow.”

The wanderer would not leave me;

 Its kiss grew warmer still.

“O come!” it sighed so sweetly;

“I’ll win thee ’gainst thy will.

 “Have we not been from childhood friends?

Have I not loved thee long?

As long as thou hast loved the night,

Whose silence wakes my song.

 “And when thy heart is laid at rest

Beneath the church yard stone,

I shall have time enough to mourn,

And thou to be alone.”

“The Night Wind” by Emily Bronte is a sensually eerie poem. Bronte achieves this mood initially through the scene she describes in the first stanza, a summer night with “A cloudless moon” that “shone through Our open parlor window.” Right away the reader gets the feeling that the narrator is alone for a reason; her solitariness is not casual and it means something.

The next stanzas detail a conversation the narrator has with the “wind”, however, the wind symbolizes death. The mysterious wind seems to be trying to coax and entice the narrator to come with it, like when it says, “‘O come,’ it sighed so sweetly, ‘I’ll win thee ‘gainst thy will.” The narrator is resisting the wind’s pull calling the voice “kind” but assuring it that it will never penetrate her mind.

The context of “The Night Wind” heavily contributes to the overall message and mood of this poem. The solitude of the narrator connects with the idea of death because no matter what humans leave behind in their earthly lives, they are alone at the time of their passing. The level of intimacy that the nighttime context brings also helps create this unnerving feeling throughout the poem. However, the narrator gives off an air of strange comfort in the night. She does not to seem taken aback or frightened of the wind that is trying to pull her away. She handles it with ease and comes to terms with her impending death at the end. This is exemplifies in the last stanza when she says “And when thy heart is laid at rest… I shall have time enough to mourn, And thou to be alone.”

Practicing 11/9

"Practicing" by Marie Howe

Marie Howe was born in Rochester, New York, in 1950. She attended Sacred Heart Covenant School and the University of Windsor. She earned and MFA from Columbia University. Howe's works include The Good Thief  (1988), What the Living Do (1997), and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008). Howe was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012-2014.

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,

a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:

That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and

one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our

nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.

Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,

plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs

outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d

shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,

just before we’d made ourselves stop.

“Practicing” is a nostalgic poem from the point of view of a woman reminiscing on early memories of her first sexual encounters. The poem is a very open description of what the narrator and her friends did when they had sleepovers at each other’s houses when they were young.  The girls would kiss one another and call it “practicing” for when they kissed boys. The speaker is looking back and reflecting on these past experiences and it is clear that she sees these actions differently now. While recounting what her and her friends engaged in, Howe adds in quick comments that shows how her perspective has changed over the years. Her open and reflective tone shows how she has developed a new perspective over the years of what “practicing” meant; it was actually the girls’ exploration of their sexual curiosity. However, towards the end of the poem, a new side of this story surfaces when Howe adds that they “never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once.” They kept their actions a secret for fear of what other people would think. Howe’s last line also packs a punch when it says, “I want to write a song for…the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we made ourselves stop.” The girls were so young that they really didn’t know what and why they were engaging in these activities so they called it “practicing.” They were also terrified, because they didn’t know what they were doing, how other people would react if they found out. Therefore they felt oppressed and kept it a secret. The way Howe inserts her thoughts as a grown woman about this time in her life all while keeping the nostalgia of the poem helps invite the reader to feel as if they are experiencing this all first-hand right with her.

Driving Glove 11/6

"Driving Glove" by Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson was born and raised in Chatham, Virginia. She studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her honors include two additional Pulitzer Prize nominations as well as fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2008 she was appointed poet laureate of Virginia, a two-year role. She died in 2014.

I was unloading groceries from the trunk
of what had been her car, when the glove floated
up from underneath the shifting junk--
a crippled umbrella, the jack, ragged
maps. I knew it was not one of yours,                               
this more delicate, soft, made from the hide
of a kid or lamb. It still remembered
her hand, the creases where her fingers

had bent to hold the wheel, the turn
of her palm, smaller than mine. There was                      
nothing else to do but return it--
let it drift, sink, slow as a leaf through water
to rest on the bottom where I have not

forgotten it remains--persistent in its loss. 

In this poem, Emerson writes with a clear melancholic tone about a painful reminder. However, there are multiple tragedies that appear in this poem. It begins with a woman going about her everyday life and unloading groceries from the trunk of her car. During this task she finds a glove belonging to her husband’s late wife. With it comes the reminder of her husband’s past life and all the pain and sorrow it held. She details the glove as “delicate, soft” and that it “still remembered her hand.” The first tragedy is the physical one of a husband losing his wife. Even though this tragedy is not detailed at all in the poem, it is relevant because this poem would not exist if not for it. That tragedy still creates ripples of effects like the scene shown in the poem.

The second tragedy is the emotional one that comes from the narrator finding her husband’s late wife’s glove as she is trying to go about her daily life. It feels as if this has been just one of many reminders of this woman that have resurfaced as the narrator is trying to live a normal life with her husband. She feels torn because she is tired of finding bits and pieces of his late wife and past life everywhere she goes but knows it would not be appropriate to share her feelings on this sensitive topic with her husband. That is noted in the shift in tone after she finished detailing the glove. The tone is suddenly despairing. I envision her sighing and placing the glove back where she found it, knowing that dwelling on it will do no one any good but notes “I have not forgotten it remains.”

Ars Poetica 11/2

“Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish

           Archibald MacLeish was born in Illinois in 1892. He studied at Yale and Harvard Law School and began writing poetry during his time there. After WWI, MacLeish worked as a lawyer in Boston but resigned to focus his time on writing. He moved to France in 1923, wrote poetry, and befriended any other famous poets. From 1930 to 1938, MacLeish worked as an editor at Fortune magazine and spent his time writing works to warn Americans about fascism. He spent his later years working as the Librarian of Congress, director of the War Department’s Office of Facts and Figures, and as Harvard’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. MacLeish died in 1982 with an Academy Award and three Pulitzer Prizes under his belt. 

A poem should be palpable and mute   

As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless   

As the flight of birds.              

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs.        

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean   

But be. 

                        MacLeish’s poem “Ars Poetica” exemplifies for the reader exactly what poetry should and should not be, and how poems should convey their message. MacLeish’s use of many metaphors and vivid illustrations yet simple language help him achieve this. However, “Ars Poetica” is backwards in its nature in the sense that MacLeish’s main idea can be summed up in the last line, “A poem should not mean / But be.” A poem needs to be more than just descriptive metaphors placed sporadically on a piece of paper; it needs depth and meaning. However, on top of meaning, a poem’s message needs to be understood by the reader. That is what MacLeish illustrates in the beginning of the poem.

He uses the first stanza as an extended metaphor that explains what a poem should be. MacLeish gives visual examples such as “palpable and mute,” meaning that a poem needs to be tangible and easily felt by everyone. Additionally, at the end of this stanza, MacLeish says that a poem should be like a flight of birds, in the sense that it is naturally and effortlessly beautiful in its simplicity. In the second stanza, MacLeish says that a poem should “be motionless in time.” This means that not only should it be felt by everyone, but it also needs to be felt by every generation. MacLeish is saying that the best poetry can apply to anyone in any time period, even if the message is slightly different. 

"Ars Poetica" is written in a unique way and MacLeish truly exemplifies what he is saying in his poem. By saving his message for the end and elaborating on it in the beginning, he is able to close out the poem by coming full circle and help the reader fully understand his message.