The Tag

Text by Leon Wing
Poem by Ciaran Carson

THE TAG

round your wrist
bore a number

your name
and D.O.B.

two weeks after
two stone less

the day you
came home it

slipped off
no need to snip

*

Whose wrist is it the tag is around? Who is the poet talking to, directly, who is having a tag around ‘your’ wrist? Normally anybody having such a tag around his/her wrist might be a child, or a baby. This might be the kind of tag one would find most of the time in a hospital, perhaps in a maternity ward.

This short poem is made up of mostly inchoate lines of seemingly unfinished constructions. In so far as they are sentences, they do not follow the normal convention of capitalising the first letter of the starting word in a sentence. Neither do they end the sentence with a full stop. Also absent are punctuation marks separating a succession of items, like for “a number, your name and D.O.B.”

This is because the person who has this tag around his/her – “your” – wrist is such an inchoate being, that we’re not told of its gender, even. It is so immediately recent in existence that it only has a number and a name – but still nameless to us – and date of birth that is not even fully spelt out (“D.O.B.”) or has no specific date revealed.

The line with “bore a number” is rather telling. Pertaining to birth, the word “bore” would mean one bears, or bore, a child. However, in this case it is not a child but a number, something cold and not even specific – which number?- is borne.

The only specificity, in the third stanza, is the number of weeks and the weight that the child lost: two. The placing of “after” and “less” at the end of the two lines in this stanza underpins the moving forward of a life and the cramping of it. The mirroring of those two words and of “two”, sitting opposite them, adumbrates this movement and expiration of life as a cycle.

The penultimate stanza has lines which should have been a parents’ celebration of new life if they were in another context other than in this one. The last line in this stanza has a very poignant, and powerful, run-off, when “it” enjambes down to the first line of the last stanza which begins with “slipped”. The baby’s tag slipped off, and so has the baby's short two-week life. The tag did this so effortlessly because of the weight the baby lost, that there is no need to snip it off, as there was that necessity, when the child was born, to snip off the cord connecting him to the placenta.

*

The Tag by Ciaran Carson first appeared in the February 15, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.

Not Knowing Why

Text by Leon Wing
Poem by Ann Struthers

Not Knowing Why

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings,
lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger.
What danger on this island in the middle
of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel
the lift of wind under their iridescent wings,
because they were born to fly,
because they have nothing else to do,
because wind and water are their elements,
their Bach, their Homer, Shakespeare,
and Spielberg. They wheel over the lake,
the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes.

In autumn something urges
them toward Texas marshes. They follow
their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles
creeping along geometric roads, going toward small boxes,
toward lives as narrow or as wide as the pond,
as glistening or as gray as the sky.
They do not know why. They fly, they fly.

*

Why do animals do the things they do, really?  Not being human they do not have any agenda nor reasons for their actions, do they?  Well, they just do, is all. 

And why do the movies, and movie makers like Spielberg, endow animals with human characteristics?  So that humans watching can relate or make a connection when watching them in the film?

Which is why in the first line even the poet imbues the pelicans flying off from the island in Marble Lake with human qualities, as if they are really some adolescents, like our human equivalents. But these feathered adolescents are not very graceful, at the beginning. They “squawk, rustle, flap” and then “lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger”.

The balking at the end of “squawk” tells us how akward their take-off is. As they gain height, they become less so, as “rustle” tells us.  Then “flap” and “lift”, with their l sounds, tell us they’re off and flying smoothly now. Or are they, with “ragged spiral at imaginary danger”:  danger./What danger?

After this question mark, the pelicans continue their flight smoothly.  And the reader can feel this unruffleness, reading the soft and lulling r’s, f’s, l’s and w’s in “They’re off to feel/the lift of wind under their iridescent wings”.

The three “because”s bring us humans down back to earth, to realize why these pelicans fly so.  At the break, after “Spielberg”, with a full-stop, like a cut-to in a film, we see them fly, effortlessly, again, reading the repeating of the  w’s, l’s and f consonants and the long vowels in “They wheel over the lake,/the little farms”. “little” , followed, a word later, by a comma marks the sight of the tourist village from a bird’s eye view.

The second stanza explains more about why the birds fly away, even when there is no danger. The explanation: none, really; besides just hunger and animal instincts, just like the ground-moving animals. 

The last two lines are a symphony of rhymes: possible off-rhymes in "gray" and "sky"; full rhymes in "they", "they", "they", and "sky", "why", "fly", "fly".  They simulate the many birds up in the sky, flying.

They just fly, is all. 

*

This poem first appeared in the Coe Review, Vol. 39, no. 1, in 2008.


Recent work of Ann Struthers:
What You Try to Tame, The Coe Review Press, 2004

A Christmas Poem

Text by Leon Wing
Poem by Wendy Cope

A Christmas Poem

At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle,

The cold winter air makes our hands and faces tingle

And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle

And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful, if you're single.

***

It's December and it’s more than two weeks away till Christmas.  What more germane than to have a Chrismassy poem in here.  For this, I have taken A Christmas Poem, aptly titled, from Wendy Cope’s collection Two Cures For Love.

Just like the bells that jangle and jingle in rhythm, this poem rhymes at the end of lines, at end stops.  There are no enjambements for Cope to work on here. Also, this kind of rhyming is preponderant in most of the poems in her collection. Here, when it is utilized it works particularly well.

At the start the rhythm is regular and uplifting:

At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle,

… till you reach jingle, when there is a reversal of the rhythm, from uplifting to a downward lilt.  There is an imperceptible jolt in this disruption, but the import of jingle hides this.  The lines, by rights grammatically, should have ended at the end of the line with a full-stop. But, no, merriment seems to be carrying on still, to the next line, even if there has been an end-stopping, heavily at that, underpinned by a comma.

But, does it? The string of short vowels in line one, with the exception of ‘At’ and ‘and merry bells’, is taken over with a heavy ‘The cold’; very foreboding, this, as you’ll see at the last line. The rhythm also breaks the regularity here, at first, in the first half of the line. But after that the remaining half carries on in regularity: ‘our hands and faces tingle’.

Beneath the happiness of the third line, we get ready for what is to come in the last line.

‘church’ and ‘cheerily’ is alliterative of ‘Christmas’; as traditionally this season is all church and midnight mass and cheer afterwards. Keep in mind the fricative of ‘families’, because the plurality of families contrasts sharply with the singularity of being alone. And, this is ‘dreadful’.  ‘Whole’ rhymes neatly with ‘cold’, to remind us of the utter coldness of being single. Cope marks this dreadfulness with the second comma of the poem, with a poignant pause and another reminder of this dreadfulness with the fricative of ‘if’.

The rhyming works so well here: There is jingle and tingle, and people and families mingle, but not if you’re single.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

***

Find out more about Wendy Cope and her collection Two Cures for Love

Rae Armantrout's "New"

Here's a take, or, at least, an informal but very interesting, interpretation of Rae Armantrout's poem New, by somebody called Steven Fama (no profile available). Rae Armantrout is one of the finalists for the US National Book Award.

New

If yellow
is the new black,

the new you
is a cartoon

spokesman
who blows his lines

around bumptious 3-D
Hondas,

apologizes often,
and remains cheerful.

*

The new pop song
is about getting real:

“You had a bad day.
The camera don’t lie.”

But they’re lying
to you
about the camera.

*

Since Fallujah
is the new Antigua,

sunlight nibbles
on pre-
charred

terrain
in the electric fireplace.

Harryette Mullen : interesting take on 2 lines

Here's a very good analysis of a poem by one American poet Harryette Mullen.

She just won the Academy of American Poets Fellowship 2009. 

Take a look at how ROBIN TREMBLAY-MCGAW, at X POETICS, interprets these lines:

Night moon star sun down gown.
Night moan stir sin dawn gown.

The Pick

Text by Leon Wing

Poem by Cecilia Woloch

The Pick

I watched him swinging the pick in the sun,

breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock,

and the rocks into dust,

and the dust into earth again.

I must have sat for a very long time on the split rail fence,

just watching him.

My father’s body glistened with sweat,

his arms flew like dark wings over his head.

He was turning the backyard into terraces,

breaking the hill into two flat plains.

I took for granted the power of him,

though it frightened me, too.

I watched as he swung the pick into the air

and brought it down hard

and changed the shape of the world,

and changed the shape of the world again.

*** 

Within the first line itself this poem is utilizing poetic rhythm judiciously.  Just observe the rising and regular rhythm in ‘I watched him swing ...’. This shows us the point just prior to the swinging of the pick, where the continuing rising rhythm now grows swifter with ‘..ing the pick in the sun’. Here, the pairs of non-stresses accelerate the action.

The second line uses r and k sounds to give us the sense of solid concrete breaking into smaller chunks of rock.   Also, observe the similar construct of the words ‘break’, ‘chunks’ and ‘rock’, and lesser so of ‘concrete’; but the it’s still there.

More fast breaking of rocks: in lines 3 and 4, where in 4 the swift rhythm is maintained till the first two-thirds of the line. Thereafter, the rhythm slows down as the concrete has broken into rocks, the rocks into dust and, finally, the dust into the earth.

Line 5 is the longest line because it identifies the protracted time the poet sat watching the action. This line breaks down – just like the rock-breaking – into line 6, into smaller components, of just three words.  Contrastingly the shortest – or smallest – line, it reflects the breaking down of larger elements into smaller ones.

This shortest line also marks the change from the breaking-rock action into a more observing mode. The child here sees the father as something as slick as a snake and as dark as a bat: she is a little afraid of him, of the power he can wield. But that passes, when she realizes how she has taken such power for granted, how someone could change a hill into plains, or change the world.

The last four lines repeat the action of the swinging of the pick, one last time.  The last two lines repeat, like a mirroring or rhyming action, with a final addendum, ‘again’.  This line also parallels line 4: ‘and the dust into earth again’

This says much about how all things change inevitably, and can break down into dust, like our bodies after we die and go under the ground.  Going back to the first four lines, we can now see how the repeating of ‘rock’ and ‘dust’ is emblematic of  the final send-off: dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

This might be a bit far-fetched, but when you take in the significance of the ‘dark wings’ to hint at an evil, like Satan, you could imagine the small-lettered ‘he’ as the big-lettered one, of the Almighty, who can wield the power to change the world, or who has done it as His creation.

***

About the poet Cecilia Woloch

Language Lessons

Text by Leon Wing
Poem by By Alexandra Teague

Language Lessons

The carpet in the kindergarten room
was alphabet blocks; all of us fidgeting
on bright, primary letters. On the shelf
sat that week's inflatable sound. The "th"
was shaped like a tooth. We sang
about brushing up and down, practiced
exhaling while touching our tongues
to our teeth. Next week, a puffy U
like an upside-down umbrella; the rest
of the alphabet deflated. Some days,
we saw parents through the windows
to the hallway sky. "Look, a fat lady,"
a boy beside me giggled. Until then
I'd only known my mother as beautiful.

Here’s a poem ‘seen’ from the point of view of a child, one who is attending kindergarten. The scenario in question here, in this poem, is a lesson in language.

If we still remember our own kindergarten years – those who went to one – most likely a young teacher would have brought out wooden blocks with the alphabets on their faces or sides, for the elucidation of the yet unmolded young minds.

In the case of this child in the poem, her teacher has placed such blocks on the floor, onto the classroom’s carpet. They probably wouldn’t have been such a lot that they cover up the entire stretch of the carpet. But for a little girl who is just learning the alphabet, they look like so. And, they seem so cartoonishly enormous, as though they are being sat on by tiny fidgety children. In the alliterations in "bright, primary", the b tells us what they are sitting on is hard, and the r that it is uncomfortable.

It’s quite interesting to observe that the first line cuts off – or runs-on, enjambes – at “room/ was ...”. The adult would have been taught to use a more active verb than “was”. However, a child still learning the language is expected to use something more static, like “was”, because she cannot think of a stronger word, or verb, yet. And, probably, also, a child always sees things as they are.

She is in empathy with her other classmates who are in a similar quandary. They are all fidgetting, unsure about the letters. This is made emblematic with the use of a semi-colon, instead of the normal comma to delineate a subordinate clause. We can imagine the confused child: is it a comma? is it a full-stop? Also, the incomplete syntax of the phrase following the semi-colon shows that they have all given up on completing a full sentence, after that punctuation.

The point of view, after the full-stop, is from the floor she is sitting on, when she looks up to see that week’s word or part of a word. Of course, she cannot envision or hear the sound that word makes. She just sees the alphabet as a tooth. For a child the alphabets look like a tooth, an umbrella, and other inflated and deflated objects.

And, learning how to make the correct sounds from these letters can take so much effort for a child: "touching our tongues/ to our teeth". The t sounds show this, the th showing the final strain to reach the teeth with the tip of the tongue. And later, they have to contend with sounds difficult to get around the tongue with, like the U (say "eweee"); so much acrobatics, too, ("upside-down umbrella") with the u's and r's. Then, they'll get a reprieve with deflated sounds : the f sounds in "alphabet deflated".

Now, at this point of the poem we see the significance of the use of "was" in line two. As I already mentioned, a child always sees things as they are. The last four lines illustrate this:

Imagine the shock this child gets when one of her classmates, a boy, suddenly is able to see things as they really are. He has seen her mother through the windows as she really is, a fat woman, and not as the beautiful woman she has alway known her to be.

The point of this poem is, this is one of the first of many lessons about how we use language. For instance, we can be polite and not hurt somebody's feelings by couching our language in vague terms. Or we can cut to the chase, as it were, and come right out with the ugly truth. Like, "You suck at this, at that", "You look fat in that dress".

***

To know more about the poet Alexandra Teague, click here.