Need (Jack Gilbert and Connie Voisine)

In the movie Wall Street, stock trader Gordon Gekko famously asserts, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." While not everyone might agree with Gekko's assessment, the presence of an acute personal Need in a poem can take the reader to an enhanced understanding of the complexities of human desire.

Let's see how such desire plays out in two poems: Jack Gilbert's "Going Wrong" and Connie Voisine's "Hungry."

Jack Gilbert, who died on November 13, 2012 at age 87, grew up in working-class Pittsburgh. While winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1962 for his book Views of Jeopardy, his career did not follow a more traditional path of "teach at a university, publish poems in many literary journals, publish poetry collections through notable presses." Indeed, the notion of a "career" in poetry was anathema to Gilbert. He did not teach, had no students, and eschewed publication until he felt his poems had reached the necessary level of craft and fidelity to the great human themes: love, solitude, desire, and the sensuous nature of the physical world.

For Gilbert, poetry was not a "career" but a calling, one that involved self-discipline and a ruthless poetical eye. His motto could have been "The easy way is not The Way." His self-imposed solitude led to a peripatetic life in England, Denmark, Greece and the United States.

Gilbert's output is sparse: Monolithos Poems, 1962 and 1982 (published in 1984), The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992 (published in 1994), Refusing Heaven (2005) and The Dance Most of All (2009). His Collected Poems appeared in 2012.

Gilbert's poem "Going Wrong" inhabits a Greek countryside landscape and opens abruptly:

      The fish are dreadful. They are brought up

      the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
      and alien and cold from night under the sea,
      the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
      Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
      washing them.

A curious "conversation" ensues: a Heavenly Voice intrudes and the speaker’s response is merely an aside: 

      Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,

      washing them. “What can you know of my machinery!”
      demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
      and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
      getting to the muck of something terrible.

Note the percussive short-u sounds of cuts/struts/muck : the speaker will not be deterred from preparing the fish, even as the Heavenly Voice continues to hector him:

 

      The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses

      to live this way. I build cities where things
      are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live
      with rocks and silence”   
      . . .
      “You have lived all year without women”
      . . .
      “No one knows where you are. People forget you.
     You are vain and stubborn.”  
 
But the speaker will not be interrupted and responds only with a thought, not spoken words.
It is the speaker who defines the nature of the relationship between himself and that Heavenly Voice

                                          . . . The man slices

      tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish
      and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
      laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
      full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
      on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

Several aspects of Gilbert’s craft in this poem are worth noting. His choice of details is razor-sharp—see how one of the Lord’s pronouncements is followed by an action which echoes the supposed emptiness of the speaker’s condition:

      “You have lived all year without women.”

       He takes out everything [from the pan] and puts in the fish.
 
In addition, Gilbert ensures that the poem’s vantage point (third-person observer, present-tense verbs) aligns perfectly with the poem’s title, which is not “Gone Wrong” (an evaluation after the fact)  but “Going Wrong,” which signals a present and ongoing disposition in the speaker.
 
Finally, the leisurely pacing of the poem is embodied in the flexible 5-beat lines from start to finish.
 
* * * *
 
While Connie Voisine’s poem “Hunger” also centers around a hungering, it contrasts in interesting ways to Gilbert’s “Going Wrong.”
 
Where Gilbert's poem takes its time traversing the flexible 5-beat lines, Voisine's poem is a quick set of eleven very long lines. There is no capitalization (except for 'I' and the brand-name of a shaver) and the punctuation is missing, producing an on-rush of revelation. Where "Going Wrong" centers around self-preservation in the face of the world at large, "Hunger" focuses on self-preservation within the particulars of an economically-strapped family ("I traded our surplus cheese from the state / for and electric Lady Shaver").
 
Instead of Gilbert's outside observer of the speaker in present-tense, Voisine provides a gripping first-person narrative in past-tense, whose compactness embodies the furtive correspondence the teenage speaker had with "an incarcerated man in Florida." The transgressive nature of the relationship shows up not only in particular diction ("I knew it was a sin but I was so / poor") but also in the detail which results from the obsessive quality of that relationship:

                                                                   . . . my prisoner wrote

           he wanted to lick my legs slowly like two popsicles down
     to the white stick . . .
           and I shaved myself for days
     in the secret disco on the radio flooding over my legs I bent I twisted
          touched every inch with the razor the plastic shell buzzed in my hand
     and numbed my skin while my mother pounded my door
 
Just like the Gilbert poem, Voisine's "Hungry" involves a conversation, but here both the speaker and the other participant inevitably and directly confront each other:
 
                                                                                       . . . I bent I twisted
              touched every inch with the razor the plastic shell buzzed in my hand
         and numbed my skin while my mother pounded my door
              I was hungry I yelled she kept on pounding we all are too
 
Where Gilbert's speaker is defiant at the end of the poem, Voisine's fourteen-year-old protagonist
is not-quite-apologetic.
 
So: two poems that use contrasting strategies to address the same great human themes: need and desire.

* * *

 

             Going Wrong  (Jack Gilbert) 

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up

the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,
washing them. “What can you know of my machinery!”
demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live
with rock and silence.” The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. “You have lived all year without women.”
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
“No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn.” The man slices
tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs. I am not stubborn, he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food. Not stubborn, just greedy.

         (from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992, page 3: Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY ©1994)

 

                            Hungry  (Connie Voisine) 

 
      when I was fourteen I wrote lies to an incarcerated man in Florida
lies about my pretty clothes palomino disco records gold rings my mother
      bought me he believed me I knew it was a sin but I was so
poor and hated having to eat anything that was free my prisoner wrote
      he wanted to lick my legs slowly like two popsicles down
to the white stick I traded our surplus cheese from the state
      for an electric Lady Shaver and I shaved myself for days
in the secret disco on the radio flooding over my legs I bent I twisted
      touched every inch with the razor the plastic shell buzzed in my hand
and numbed my skin while my mother pounded my door
      I was hungry I yelled she kept on pounding we all are too

        (from Cathedral of the North: University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA ©2001)

 

 

 

 

 

       

How To

After enjoying the hammock this summer and soaking up some sun, Poem-Pairs is back with a post-Labor-Day session on "How To."

Americans are a practical, do-it-yourself people. Their homes are filled with various books on How to Do X , How to Do Y, etc. This session considers a pair of poems in which instruction is offered to the reader.

Lucille Lang Day's poem "Instructions for a Wampanoag Clambake" describes a modern-day Native American ceremony of the Wampanoag tribes in southeastern Massachusetts. One gathers tide-smoothed stones for a cooking hole, plus clams and rockweed. Once the fire is started over the stones, more ingredients are added.

By following the instructions step by step, the participants will become receptive to those aspects of existence which are blessings:

     The deer will always make you laugh
     the mountain lion take your side,
     the Star People shine on your path
     if you do it this way.

This poem is an invitation to the members of the tribe as well as to the reader who is an outsider to this community.

In the William Carlos Williams poem Tract, the ceremony is a funeral. While the poem is also a set of instructions, it stands in contrast to the Lucille Lang Day poem by being a warning and an  admonishment to his townspeople: for heaven sakes, do it right—don't screw it up.

Yet the speaker's voice is tender towards his audience. Note the opening lines:

     I will teach you my townspeople
     how to perform a funeral
     for you have it over a troop
     of artists—
     unless one should scour the world—
     you have the ground sense necessary.

Now for some warnings:

     I begin with a design for a hearse.
     For Christ's sake not black—
     nor white either — and not polished!
     Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—
     with gilt wheels (this could be
     applied fresh at small expense)
     or no wheels at all:
     a rough dray to drag over the ground.

     Knock the glass out!
     My God—glass, my townspeople!
     For what purpose? Is it for the dead
     to look out or for us to see
     the flowers or the lack of them—
     or what?
     To keep the rain and snow from him?
     He will have a heavier rain soon:
     pebbles and dirt and what not.
     Let there be no glass—
     and no upholstery, phew!
     and no little brass rollers
     and small easy wheels on the bottom—
     my townspeople, what are you thinking of?
     A rough plain hearse then
     with gilt wheels and no top at all.
     On this the coffin lies
     by its own weight . . .

                                 No wreathes please—
     especially no hot house flowers . . .
     So much for the hearse.

     For heaven's sake though see to the driver!
     Take off the silk hat! In fact
     that's no place at all for him—
     up there unceremoniously
     dragging our friend out to his own dignity! . . .

     Then briefly as to yourselves:
     Walk behind—as they do in France,
     seventh class, or if you ride
     Hell take curtains! Go with some show
     of inconvenience; sit openly—
     to the weather as to grief.
     Or do you think you can shut grief in?
     What—from us? We who have perhaps
     nothing to lose?

As Williams says, Dignity is the name of the game.

And finally, the send-off. Like Lucille Lang Day, Williams now feels the participants are fully prepared to carry out (and thereby to experience) the essential qualities of the ceremony at hand:

                               Go now
     I think you are ready.

* * * * *

           Instructions for a Wampanoag Clambake  (Lucille Lang Day)

 

Wade into Popponesset Bay

to collect some Rock People—
old round stones
smoothed by the tide.

Remember Moshup, the giant

who predicted the arrival of white men.
When he said good-bye
to the People of the First Light,

he turned into a whale.

Find a place in forest shade,
make a circle, and dig
a shallow round hole for the stones.

Moshup’s friend, the giant frog,
came to the cliffs and wept.
Changed into a rock, he still sits
at Gay Head today and looks out to sea.

Before finding dry wood for the fire—

your gift from the forest—
notice the shape of the hole
and the stones: All life is a circle.
 
When the tide is low, gather
quahog and sickissuog clams
and plenty of rockweed,
whose stipes are loaded with brine.
 
Light a fire over the stones
and when the Rock People start to glow,
pile rockweed on them.
This is their blanket.

As saltwater is released

from the stipes and steam rises,
add clams, lobsters, corn,
more armfuls of rockweed.                                                    

This is the apponaug: seafood cooking.

Now thank Kehtannit, who saw
the frog’s sorrow and turned
him into a rock out of pity
 
and taught the People to use
the Earth, plants, animals
and water to care for themselves
after Moshup left.
 
The deer will always make you laugh
the mountain lion take your side,
the Star People shine on your path
if you do it this way.

        (used by permssion of the author, to appear in The Tower Journal in late September 2012)

* * * * *

      Tract  (William Carlos Williams)

I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral
for you have it over a troop
of artists—
unless one should scour the world—
you have the ground sense necessary.

See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ's sake not black—
nor white either — and not polished!
Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh at small expense)
or no wheels at all:
a rough dray to drag over the ground.

Knock the glass out!
My God—glass, my townspeople!
For what purpose? Is it for the dead
to look out or for us to see
the flowers or the lack of them—
or what?
To keep the rain and snow from him?
He will have a heavier rain soon:
pebbles and dirt and what not.
Let there be no glass—
and no upholstery, phew!
and no little brass rollers
and small easy wheels on the bottom—
my townspeople, what are you thinking of?
A rough plain hearse then
with gilt wheels and no top at all.
On this the coffin lies
by its own weight.

                                    No wreathes please—
especially no hot house flowers.
Some common memento is better,
something he prized and is known by:
his old clothes—a few books perhaps—
God knows what! You realize
how we are about these things
my townspeople—
something will be found—anything
even flowers if he had come to that.
So much for the hearse.

For heaven's sake though see to the driver!
Take off the silk hat! In fact
that's no place at all for him—
up there unceremoniously
dragging our friend out to his own dignity!
Bring him down—bring him down!
Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride
on the wagon at all—damn him!—
the undertaker's understrapper!
Let him hold the reins
and walk at the side
and inconspicuously too!

Then briefly as to yourselves:
Walk behind—as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you ride
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly—
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What—from us? We who have perhaps
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us—it will be money
in your pockets.
                           Go now
I think you are ready.

     (from William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems (1985), New York, NY: New Directions, pages 19-20)      

 

 

 

Back from vacation! (Smoke, etc.)

After a bit of vacation in May, the Poem-Pairs Blog is back with its energy recharged.

Sometimes two objects seem to have only the slightest connection. The two poems below share the word "smoke." A tenuous link at best -- or is there something more going on?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poem "The Secret of Soil" begins with smoke, rather than soil:

     The secret of smoke is that it will fill
     any space with walls, no matter
     how delicate: lung cell, soapy bubble
     blown from a bright red ring.

So perhaps the author is going to drive the poem toward the theme announced in the title . . .

     The secret of soil is that it is alive—
     a step in the forest means
     you are carried on the back
     of a thousand bugs. The secret

     I give you is on page forty-two
     of my old encyclopedia set.
     I cut out all the pictures of minerals
     and gemstones . . .

Wait a minute -- she just veered away from the supposed central idea of the poem!

     I cut out all the pictures of minerals
     and gemstones. I could not take

     their beauty, could not swallow

     that such stones lived deep inside
     the earth. I wanted to tape them
     to my hands and wrists, I held

     them to my thin brown neck.

     I wanted my mouth to fill
     with light, a rush of wind
     and pepper . . .

Maybe the theme of the poem is that the speaker is trying to ingest the essence of the world around her, and that like smoke, this essence will fill all of her interior and exterior being. But the poem does not end there:

     . . . I wanted my mouth to fill
   with light, a rush of wind
   and pepper. I can still taste it

   like a dare across a railroad track,

   sure with feet-solid step. I’m not
   allowed to be alone with scissors.
   I will always find a way to dig.

Perhaps "dare" is the crucial word here. The speaker's overwhelming need to subsume the particulars of the world makes her (relative to other people) dangerous: she's the one you cannot trust with scissors, and she's the one who will keep on digging to find and experience the true taste of the world she inhabits.

* * * *

In Sally Ashton's prose-poem "I wait for a rogue wave," the word "smoke" doesn't appear until the final sentence within the second paragraph. How does the poem find its way there?

     I wait for a rogue wave to hit or a seagull to shit in my hair, what it means to sit on a rock
     near unprecedented sea, the sea that sounds like itself and nothing else in the world at the
     edge of the world where the waves change themselves against cliff. Here comes another
     woman down the same path, silent because of the self-sounding sea. Who isn’t obvious,
     only where and when. She hops the stream that barely troubles the surf.

Besides the self-mocking humor about the seagull and the fresh notion of "unprecedented sea," we have a simple stage with two actors: first the speaker appears, then another woman enters. Nothing unusual has happened . . . until:

     She hops the stream that barely troubles the surf. Next I look, she sits naked on the sand with
     a flame between her legs.

Ashton mysteriously and delightfully subverts our expectations:

     Next I look, she sits naked on the sand with a flame between her legs. This sounds like sex
     but it’s pages she burns, not self or passion though that’s implied.

The tension builds as the speaker notices her own mini-conflict: should she continue watching or not? 

     I can’t bear to watch nor should I. Watch. One who waits for birdshit must not interfere with
     one who self-emoliates [sic]. Instead I pocket two stones, one smooth, one jagged like an
     arrowhead and climb back up the cliff careful at each pitched step.

We notice the first of two curious words in the prose-poem: "self-emoliates". Is it a typo or what? (The bracketed Latin word sic means "thus" and is the literary convention for an editor to say "I'm quoting the author as is. I'm just as puzzled and curious as you the reader might be.") Obviously, the other woman on the beach is not immolating herself: she's just burning some pieces of paper. Or has Ashton created a word to subsume the notions of immolate, mollify (to placate or calm) and emollient (a lotion which softens)?

Back to Ashton's prose-poem. Curiosity gets the better of our speaker in the second of the two paragraphs:

    And I look back where one at a time each torn page torn out goes up in flame, each page a
    prayer. I don’t pray, such unbinding the loosening of thought, an unbodiment [sic] of desire.
    How is a mystery, and why can’t be spoken. Even what fools the eye. Only fuel, smoke rising
    in a pillar, my lips flecked with salt.

And now the other curious word: "unbodiment," perhaps a way of capturing a notion opposite from "embodiment."

What strikes us about Ashton's speaker is her honesty. She confides that she cannot help gazing at the other woman and trying to make sense of the mysterious fire ritual. She interprets each burning page as "a prayer" and confesses that she herself doesn't (cannot?) pray. Her take on the seaside mini-drama? It's "fuel, smoke rising in a pillar."

So: are the two members of our poem-pair only weakly related via the single word "smoke?"

"Fuel" might just serve as the stronger-than-originally-thought connection. Nezhukumatathil's smoke signals the desire to absorb/devour the speaker's world. Ashton's smoke signals the fuel that drives our curiosity about potentially unknowbale facets of our world.

* * * *

          The Secret of Soil (Aimee Nezhukumatathil)

The secret of smoke is that it will fill

any space with walls, no matter
how delicate: lung cell, soapy bubble
blown from a bright red ring.

The secret of soil is that it is alive—

a step in the forest means
you are carried on the back
of a thousand bugs. The secret

I give you is on page forty-two
of my old encyclopedia set.
I cut out all the pictures of minerals
and gemstones. I could not take

their beauty, could not swallow
that such stones lived deep inside
the earth. I wanted to tape them
to my hands and wrists, I held

them to my thin brown neck.
I wanted my mouth to fill
with light, a rush of wind
and pepper. I can still taste it

like a dare across a railroad track,
sure with feet-solid step. I’m not
allowed to be alone with scissors.
I will always find a way to dig.

     (from Lucky Fish, page 3: Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA © 2011)

* * * *

                                   I wait for a rogue wave (Sally Ashton)  

 
I wait for a rogue wave to hit or a seagull to shit in my hair, what it means to sit
on a rock near unprecedented sea, the sea that sounds like itself and nothing else
in the world at the edge of the world where the waves change themselves against
cliff. Here comes another woman down the same path, silent because of the self-
sounding sea. Who isn’t obvious, only where and when. She hops the stream that
barely troubles the surf. Next I look, she sits naked on the sand with a flame
between her legs. This sounds like sex but it’s pages she burns, not self or passion
though that’s implied. I can’t bear to watch nor should I. Watch. One who waits
for birdshit must not interfere with one who self-emoliates [sic]. Instead I pocket two
stones, one smooth, one jagged like an arrowhead and climb back up the cliff
careful at each pitched step.
 
And I look back where one at a time each torn page torn out goes up in flame, each page
a prayer. I don’t pray, such unbinding the loosening of thought, an unbodiment [sic] of
desire. How is a mystery, and why can’t be spoken. Even what fools the eye. Only
fuel, smoke rising in a pillar, my lips flecked with salt.

 

     (from Some Odd Afternoon, page 30: Blaze VOX [books], Buffalo, NY © 2010)