THE SORT
Another box of pictures one’s to sort,
Decades lost in the attic … a light cough
Of separation, instinctual pause
Of action, by those who say little
Of themselves, captors unmarked, unnamed
By the sweet curving hand of late Aunt June,
Who at a glance of rippled-edged rectangles
Would have penned a phonebook of relations. […]
It is all in the voice—or maybe in its emphasis. Every great poem has its own POV, though the wrong voice will diminish it. After all, good sound is measured by its meaning, and sometimes, a woman’s voice feels best for reciting “masculine” poetry. In Dana Gioia’s grim reading of Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” there is nothing left to probe. He is severe where the language is playful, entombing his analysis with guesswork every time he misses a tone. Another reading, from the archconservative Hillsdale College, is uncomfortable to watch, with a trite, melancholy piano that further damages interpretation. By contrast, the poem’s best recital is from a high school student almost twenty years ago. She is energetic, picks up on double (and overt!) meanings, and communicates this knowledge on stage. Her performance works because it does not engage the academic debate—it only speaks the words as written, which appear bigger, broader, and more festive than in the mouths of academics: […]
Chill night duty: rehouse the coffee plant
And the palm grown from that Florida nub,
Now tall enough to search for its own kind,
Its own shade of green, resourceful, not smug,
Thursday: met Susan at the art college.
While she and M talk, you search the passing
Forms for a school-time self—weren’t you once
One of them, as poorly dressed, classes,
Dissection classes every quarter (or
Was it semesters chopping up those years?),
Aged lectors radiating formaldehyde,
Well past their prime yet clear. coherent. […]
What if I had a brother?
More than one?
Just one—pay attention!
Younger, older?
Just a brother.
Patriotic, a war…
Blood needn’t spill or be shared.
Distant cousin?
Nor branch of some tree.
Then, an example. […]
She was serious about this, breaking loose,
Spending twenty bucks (five more than we’d been hooked),
Scoring three joints’ worth of dried cannabis blossom
That crumbled grittily as she rolled.
That’s a lot for someone living on
Her savings and her under-achieving husband’s
Pay, until her thesis is written,
Defended and set on a shelf to collect dust…
She hoped this substance would, she hoped,
Crack routines grown staid as bureaucracy. […]
Reading is a relationship outside of time and distance; however, the reader who encounters something personally known experiences a perceptual intimacy sometimes significant to the course of lives. That known element can be an aspect of identity, or of memory that gains potency in being shared. When an expressive work reveals these moments, there is the temporal consideration: how will time temper resonance?
The reader approaches a work with the entirety of their experience, the force of their life at the ready to engage the perceptions offered by the work. In the case of poetry, the history of the form itself offers potentialities of abundance, of profound reward for the reading experience. We read in search of that satisfaction. […]
