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,
beautifuland 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
thingsare 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 fishand 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 downto 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.
*
* *
The fish
are dreadful. They are brought up
the
mountain in the dawn most days, beautifuland 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.
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)
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