 http://www.wccha.org/images/TessGallagher.jpg  http://www.nationalbook.org/_images/nba/2007/finalists_photos/plumly.jpg | Though they grew up on opposite ends of the country, the influences and content of Tess Gallagher and Stanley Plumly's poetry is very similar. Gallagher was born in Washington in 1943. Her family was involved with logging and she spent her childhood exploring the Ozarks. Plumly was born in Ohio in 1939 and spent his youth logging and farming between Virginia and Ohio. Needless to say their poetry tells of their common roots in nature. Both have experienced the loss of someone close to them: Tess, the loss of her husband Raymond Carver and Stanley, the loss of his father to alcoholism and his divorce from Deborah Digges. Both poets use free verse to talk about their wounds. Though lyrical, their poetry is usually narrative. I will be reading and analyzing Tess Gallagher's poetry, while my partner, Elizabeth Kimmel will be researching Stanley Plumly. We plan to compare how their similar influences have impacted their writing style and portrayal of emotion.I like Gallagher's poetry because of her honesty and her ability to see a story in common situations, such as in her poem "Black Silk". I am finding Gallagher's work in sites online, such as the Poetry Foundation, in one of her anthologies Moon Crossing Bridge, and also in videos on YouTube (some of them are of her reading and others are of fans reading). | Black Silk
By: Tess Gallagher
She was cleaning—there is always
that to do—when she found,
at the top of the closet, his old
silk vest. She called me
to look at it, unrolling it carefully
like something live
might fall out. Then we spread it
on the kitchen table and smoothed
the wrinkles down, making our hands
heavy until its shape against Formica
came back and the little tips
that would have pointed to his pockets
lay flat. The buttons were all there.
I held my arms out and she
looped the wide armholes over
them. “That’s one thing I never
wanted to be,” she said, “a man.”
I went into the bathroom to see
how I looked in the sheen and
sadness. Wind chimes
off-key in the alcove. Then her
crying so I stood back in the sink-light
where the porcelain had been staring. Time
to go to her, I thought, with that
other mind, and stood still.
 Denise Levertov is associated with the Black Mountain School of Poetry. As such, her work displays many qualities of her fellow Black Mountain poets. These qualities include an emphasis on projective verse - a type of poetry through which the emotion/energy of the poet is projected to the reader. Levertov is very descriptive and honest in her work. Spontaneous at times, her poetry has a lyrical rhythm as seen in her poem "Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees" (view quotes below).
Levertov makes use of nature (as in "The Sharks") and fictitious situations (as in "The Third Dimension") to express humanistic themes.
Deborah Digges' poetry demonstrates all of these characteristics but to varying degrees. Digges shows a greater affection for balancing between reality the supernatural which is highly evident in her poem "My Life's Calling". She also tends to be more personal in her poems, allowing the reader to know what life event inspired her writing. Digges often writes about her divorces or the death of her third husband as in "So Light You Were I Would Have Carried You". This poem is also an excellent example of Digges' lyrical voice, which parallels that of Levertov. The imagery in both of their works is vivid and makes their poetry enjoyable to read. Both write poems that are straightforward as well as some that have more complex content.
“The yellow moon dreamily
tipping buttons of light
down among the leaves. Marimba,
marimba - from beyond the
black street.
("Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees")”
― Denise Levertov
"Well then, the last day the sharks appeared.
Dark fins appear, innocent
as if in fair warning. The sea becomes
sinister, are they everywhere?
I tell you, they break six feet of water.
Isn't it the same sea, and won’t we
play in it any more?
I like it clear and not
too calm, enough waves
to fly in on. For the first time
I dared to swim out of my depth.
It was sundown when they came, the time
when a sheen of copper still the sea,
not dark enough for moonlight, clear enough
to see them easily. Dark
the sharp lift of the fins."
--- Denise Levertov, "The Sharks"
"Who’d believe me if I said, ‘They took and
split me open from
scalp to crotch, and
still I’m alive, and
walk around pleased with
the sun and all
the world’s bounty.’ Honesty
isn’t so simple:
a simple honesty is
nothing but a lie.
Don’t the trees
hide the wind between
their leaves and
speak in whispers?
The third dimension
hides itself.
If the roadmen
crack stones, the
stones are stones:
but love
cracked me open
and I’m
alive to
tell the tale — but not
honestly:
the words
change it. Let it be --
here in the sweet sun
— a fiction, while I
breathe and
change pace."
--- Denise Levertov, "The Third Dimension" "But to be mistro-elemental.
The flute of clay playing
my breath that riles the flames,
the fire risen to such dreaming
sung once from landlords' attics.
Sung once the broken lyres,
seasoned and green.
Even the few things I might save,
my mother's letters,
locks of my children's hair
here handed over like the keys
to a foreclosure, my robes
remanded, and furniture
dragged out into the yard,
my bedsheets hoisted up the pine,
whereby the house sets sail."
--- Deborah Digges, "My Life's Calling" "So light you were
I would have carried you,
hacked from the ice
a bridge,
you in my arms,
from February into April."
---Deborah Digges, "So Light You Were I Would Have Carried You"
 Rhapsody on a Windy Night
By T.S. Eliot
TWELVE o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
5
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
10
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
15
The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
20
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
25
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
30
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
35
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
40
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
45
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
50
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
55
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
60
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
65
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.”
The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
70
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
75
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife. Reflection: “Rhapsody of a Windy Night” was written by T.S. Eliot. I appreciate the imagery of the twisted branch: “Eaten smooth, and polished as though the world gave up the secret of its skeleton…” and of the moon: “A washed-out smallpox cracks her face”. The words “as a madman shakes a dead geranium” serve to preface the coming spontaneity of the walker’s thoughts, which teeter on the border of insanity throughout the poem. Eliot also uses many sensory terms, such as “‘smell of dust and old Cologne,’ ‘torn and stained with sand,’ ‘cigarettes in corridors’…” which paint a picture of the bleak and ruined city at night. Furthermore, I appreciated the author’s personification of the streetlamps to show how the protagonist’s thoughts and memories were triggered by what he could see under the light of the lamps. This poem is a narrative poem because it has a beginning that sets up the scene (the protagonist on the street at midnight), a middle conflict (the scattered memories he recollects and the sights he sees on his way), and an end (finally arriving at home). This poem shares features with the poem “A Red Dawn” by Gary Soto because it is a narrative poem that uses lyrical language in addition to being dramatic. In Soto’s poem, the sun is described as a red blister and the narrative ends with the man going home. Also, both poems are written in second person and make use of dialogue.
 I cannot live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf
The sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup
Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
A newer Sevres pleases,
Old ones crack.
I could not die with you,
For one must wait
To shut the other's gaze down,--
You could not.
And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
Without my right of frost,
Death's privilege?
Nor could I rise with you,
Because your face
Would put out Jesus'.
That new grace
Glow plain and foreign
On my homesick eye,
Except that you, than he
Shone closer by.
They'd judge us--how?
For you served Heaven, you know
Or sought to;
I could not,
Because you saturated sight,
And I had no more eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise.
And were you lost, I would be,
Though my name
Rang loudest
On the heavenly fame.
And were you saved,
And I condemned to be
Where you were not,
That self were hell to me.
So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale svustenance,
Despair!
I'm ceded—I've stopped being Theirs—
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I've finished threading—too—
Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace—
Unto supremest name—
Called to my Full—The Crescent dropped—
Existence's whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.
My second Rank—too small the first—
Crowned—Crowing—on my Father's breast—
A half unconscious Queen—
But this time—Adequate—Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown--
Reflection:
I chose these poems because I found Dickinson’s honesty both tragic and fascinating. Both poems relate to her struggles and rebellion against Christianity. In the first poem “I cannot live with you” Dickinson explains her reasons for not being able to be with someone who had faith in God.
“For you served Heaven, you know
Or sought to;
I could not”
She believes they are too different and therefore must remain apart. She says that her life is the one the sexton holds the key to: the graveyard and things of death. She cannot see what this person sees. I wonder if she was ever in love with a man who believed in God or if perhaps she wrote this about a family member, since Dickinson’s relatives were practicing Puritans.
The second poem is about Dickinson’s decision to chose her religion (or lack thereof), rather than have it decided for her. She admits to having walked in the way of her family’s wishes as a young girl, but now she is mature enough to “choose or to reject”. She compares her Baptism as a child to becoming a queen (as God is King) and thus receiving a crown, but now she has decided to be independent and she chooses her own crown, without the royal inheritance of Heaven.
Dickinson’s unconventional punctuation does make her poems hard to interpret sometimes and requires careful reading. I wonder if this was influenced by the fact that she wrote for her own enjoyment and therefore wrote her thoughts as they came, which at times may have been sporadic.
|
RSS Feed