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So What Things Do You Find Satisfying?

In Ars Poetica on 4 February 2010

One might be tempted, in writing a poem about a difficult topic like the violence that underlies sexism (and makes it both possible and pervasive), to become didactic. One might also be tempted to be heavy-handed in the storytelling, or to draw conclusions for one’s reader or listener. What one doesn’t see often in such poetry is humor and a complicated speaker.
This poem by New Yorker Eboni Hogan is, among other things, a list poem. It’s not a typical list poem, however, because the speaker is repeating someone else’s list, effectively creating two speakers, the story’s narrator and the author of the beer poster. Hogan switches back and forth between telling the story and quoting the poster, sometimes cueing us with numbers, and sometimes simply weaving the statement into the poem so that there are moments when it’s difficult to tell whether we are hearing the narrator’s perspective or that of the poster’s author.
This structural device is quite effective, and accomplishes a lot in this poem. One of the most difficult things to pull off in a three-minute poem is to address a complex, nuanced topic without becoming academic or didactic. This particular topic has been addressed often and poorly, and here Hogan’s unique structure allows her to treat the topic with the sensitivity and complexity it deserves and yet still tell a powerful story.
How, for example, to explain, in three minutes, the complex relationship between a particular person and the larger social and political context that informs, enables and partly causes their behavior without stereotyping or resorting the very sort of academic language I’m using in this very sentence? How do we bring an audience to that kind of complexity without preaching at them and while entertaining them?
The concepts that sexism requires at least the threat of violence to remain powerful, and that to some degree a larger cultural set of normal or accepted ideas creates an environment whose existence surrounds woman making otherwise benign interactions deadly, that marketing continues to rely on sexist ideas about women to sell things like beer, and that participating in seemingly-harmless joking like that in the poster is really a connection to those deeper and darker tools of oppression are not the sorts of topics most except a small handful of people want to think about ever, but especially at a bar or while doing reading for pleasure.
So Hogan co-opts the rhetoric of sexism, weaving the statements on the poster into her narrative. Instead of going down the list in exact order, she’s taken some of the statements out of sequence and ordered them in the poem to align with what’s happening in the narrative.
What this does is help characterize the male character in the poem — as he takes actions, the poster “speaks” to us, so that we are led to make an implicit connection between what the poster is saying and what the man is doing. This opens up the topic of how advertising might create or undergird or enable the violent choices of the male character without actually saying as much. To put it another way, instead of delimiting inquiry on the part of the readers and listeners by making a declarative statement, Hogan encourages us to infer connections, which opens up inquiry into the larger world outside the poem.
Hogan uses this technique often in the poem. Imagine, for a moment, that in this poem, the speaker had been raped by the man or shot by him. The sympathy we as her audience would feel for the speaker would outweigh the thinking she wants us to do, necessary thinking about how sexism actually works, thinking we can’t do if we are feeling too much. So instead, Hogan has the male character head-butt the speaker (here I just want to point out that whether or not this happened in this way to Hogan in real life is beside the point in terms of how the writing is done). Here’s the speaker’s description of the head-butt:

He bowed like a gentleman,
body curled like so many question marks before him
and blessed me with a running start
a grand, glorified, dick-encrusted
American-as-apple-pie Rambo-style head butt

Note that the head-butt is compared with several overlapping modes of manhood: gentlemanliness, wholesomeness (American-as-apple-pie), militaristic (Rambo) and sexual (dick-encrusted). The head-butt itself can easily act a symbol for penetration, implying rape, or as the motion of a bullet, implying murder or (as the poem’s final image suggests) execution.

Sticking with one overpowering image would not allow Hogan to weave together so many manifestations of sexism, so she’s made the choice to back off what emotional power she could squeeze from the poem and instead offer us the chance to notice these overlapping concepts. Instead of being a woe-is-me poem about a single, sad moment, it becomes a poem addressing a larger, complicated topic — how sexism itself functions.
Part of that function includes how deeply-ingrained its ideas are in our culture so that women who are aware of and critical about sexism often report realizing that they have internalized sexist ideas and messages without being aware of it. Remember how at the beginning I mentioned that Hogan sometimes switches from the narrator’s account to a list item from the poster without cueing us, so that there are moments when the line between characters is blurred? What a masterful way to illustrate that internalization!

She gives the poster the final line of the poem. The effect of this is to both tie up the list and also make it clear that we’re meant to go back over the list and examine not only what is underlying the statements themselves, but also, how they connect to the choices the characters makes. The poem doesn’t tell us what to do about sexism or sexual assault. It doesn’t condemn anyone in specific. It never makes any proclamations. What it does very well is invite us to continue thinking about its subject matter long after the poem is done, the entire range of images and ideas echoing in our minds like the gunshot in the poem’s concluding image.

Ok, Any Star

In Ars Poetica on 24 January 2010

I came across this video of William Stafford reading one of my favorite poems of his, “The Star In The Hills,” while looking for examples of his work for a friend. The poem is one to which I have returned over and over for years. I love the combination of quirkiness and spooky mysticism and the political commentary implied by the speaker’s attitude, but, in all honesty, until I watched this video, I never thought of the poem as funny.
As I’ve moved back into participating in poetry slams again after ten years away, I’ve had to relearn how to perform poems. When I began practicing and preparing my work for the stage, I found that, overwhelmingly, I scored better with slam judges, and connected more reliably with my audiences when I read from paper than when I memorized and “performed” the poems. I began paying attention to the poets around me whose writing and performances I admire and find powerful, and re-realized that reading is a performance, and that the reason my readings off paper were more powerful and effective than when I had poems memorized is that, with the memorized poems, I was trying too hard to perform, whereas when I read off paper, I feel less inclined to do so, and I sound more like myself.
That’s the irritating thing about the false dichotomy, supported by both sides of the divide, between so-called “page” poetry and “stage” poetry. Poetry is poetry. I expect that it’s because many “page” poets don’t want to take the time to become good at performance that they like to distinguish the two, and I think the same might be true of performance poets, who find it easy to win over audiences, but more difficult to do the difficult work of editing.
Those of us who have chosen both work to become better writers, participate in a largely arbitrary, fickle, nepotistic process of getting published; and also work to become better performers of our own writing, participate in a largely arbitrary, fickle, random game of chance that is the poetry slam. I cannot, of course, speak for all practitioners of performed poetry. For myself, I find that each informs the other and becomes part of the writing process, for the better, I think. It is most often the case that what a poem needs to work well on the page is also what it needs to succeed well on stage.
Reading is a performance. There are some incredible writers who are just awful at it, and I don’t believe that makes what those writers can do as writers less effective or interesting, just like when I don’t enjoy reading on the page the poems of an excellent performer whose writing is not as polished doesn’t make that performer’s work any less interesting. For myself, I hope to do well at both, because I believe that an audience deserves the respect of my bothering to pay attention to both of those modes of delivery.
Which brings me back to William Stafford, who has long been one of my favorite poets, but who, for obvious reasons, I have never seen perform his work — until I stumbled on this video. Stafford’s performance of this poem, which works so well on the page that I have read it if not a hundred than at least dozens of times, reveals something by which I was taken aback — how funny the poem is.
The humor becomes a part of the poem’s meaning, and underscores the political dimension of the poem at the same time. Stafford’s delivery, charming and somewhat folksy, makes the speaker out to be a certain kind of character — a likable fellow, which is important for the poem, since the subtext of the poem could make the character seem self-serving rather than eager. Stafford also feels the music in his poem and convey it well. All told, this was a pleasant surprise — giving a long-beloved poem a new, interesting dimension. Which is what performances of poems should be doing.

Packing Then Unpacking Figurative Language

In Ars Poetica on 18 December 2009

Last night I had the pleasure of hearing one of Marty McConnell’s newer poems, from her series-in-progress exploring fidelity. In this poem, the speaker is addressing her lover, who is leaving for a short trip. Aside from McConnell’s always-lovely image work, the poem stood out to me for how it uses structure, simile and symbol rhetorically.
In the poem, the speaker begins with a series of what are more or less literal images — (”our bodies toss toward each other in the night,” etc). Once the speaker begins to use figurative language, she makes what seem at first to be expected comparisons — “we are like our fathers,” and the symbolic image of the horses in the field: “the horses face each other in the field, daring each other to run.”
In the beginning of the poem, every sentence contains either a coordinating conjunction or dependent clause, which does several things: 1. underscores the speaker’s own ambivalence about not only what is happening, but also what it means, 2 it acts as a structural symbol for the the several dualities in the poem: the speaker’s internal struggle to identify as someone who is faithful, and two characters, who are joined together in love, but are also discrete people, and 3. creates a particular music we start to expect. When this suddenly doesn’t happen at “Do horses dare?” the sudden shift in sentence structure makes the statement stand out. The speaker then makes several such short, direct statements, mostly in the middle of the poem.
And it’s what these statements are doing that drives the poem to an unexpected place. The question, “do horses dare?” and the subsequent questions and observations (”we are not our fathers,” etc) unpack the previous section’s figurative language. The speaker disassembles her own myth-making about the relationship because though the narrative she first created will describe the relationship, she is not satisfied with what that description will allow her to make her lover’s absence mean.
She wants it to mean something more. So, she rejects the impulse toward romantic myth-making, and, under the guise of being empirical, leans toward a new set of images altogether, ones more mundane in construction, but also more capable of performing the task she wants them to: making the lover’s leaving understandable as a vehicle for her own transcendence away from the past faults hinted at in the end.
This disassembly is mirrored in the poem’s second half; for most of it, we are given a string of short declarative statements comprised of only one clause. As the poem progresses toward the end, though, the speaker begins to construct her single-clause sentences more and more like they are clauses in her compound or compund-complex sentences at the poem’s beginning. At the end, she leaves us with one final compund-complex: as the speaker’s lover’s plane is taking off, we get a sentence that syntactically and grammatically makes a pair out of the two characters again.
The poem itself, being divided into two parts, therefore has a rhetorical parallelism: first the speaker makes similes and symbols for us, then she unpacks them and ultimately creates new ones, giving the poem a feeling of winding and then unwinding, which feeling is enhanced by the dancing from complicated to simple sentences structures and then back to complicated again.
I think we are meant to know the speaker is a writer. That she makes so much of language use, and that the poem itself relies so heavily on grammar and structure to make its meaning is amplified by the image the speaker uses to generate the new myth of her relationship: that of writing a word on her foot (and here’s where I geek out even more about how the grammar and structure underscore the poem’s movement and meaning: in the most important and last of the single-clause sentences, the speaker, alone now, writes a single word on a single foot. Contrast that with the image of the two horses, who the speaker asserts cannot speak to each other.)
She is a writer, and like many of us, cannot always get out of her own head. She wants this absence to mean something more than simply an absence, and more importantly, wants it to take her somewhere new. She hints at this with: “I know what it is to be faithful.” One gets the sense that the speaker is so troubled by this leaving, and finds it so important to create a new myth about her lover’s absence because she has been unable to do so well in the past. Her solution is to write “home” on the sole (and note the obvious homophone association with soul — this reminds me of a passage in the Christian Bible, in which St. Paul argues that spiritual maturity is like having God’s law written not on tablets of stone, but on one’s heart — the speaker is coming to adulthood in this way — figuring out how to use language to change her innermost being). This final image, of a word on the bottom of a foot, paired with that of an airplane taking off, creates a mirror image, “home” coming down in a footstep, “love” going up in an airplane, home being that which grounds us, after all, and love, that which can takes us away and out of ourselves, to new selves, to new grace.