Threshold by Ocean Vuong

Threshold

In the body, where everything has a price,

                I was a beggar. On my knees,

I watched, through the keyhole, not

              the man showering, but the rain

falling through him: guitar strings snapping

             over his globed shoulders.

He was singing, which is why

            I remember it. His voice—

it filled me to the core

           like a skeleton. Even my name

knelt down inside me, asking

          to be spared.

He was singing. It is all I remember.

         For in the body, where everything has a price,

I was alive. I didn’t know

         there was a better reason.

That one morning, my father would stop

          —a dark colt paused in downpour—”

“& listen for my clutched breath

         behind the door. I didn’t know the cost

of entering a song—was to lose

        your way back.

So I entered. So I lost.

        I lost it all with my eyes

wide open.

From “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.” Copper Canyon Press, 2016 

Ocean Vuong is a recently discovered American Vietnamese poet. He's written about with a sense of awe and respect by the New Yorker recently. I'm not going to tell you more about him; you can always Google him and read the article online. The latest update is that the poetry arm of UK publisher Cape has snatched him up and has dubbed him an important new voice.

This is the first poem in his new collection "Night Sky with Exit Wounds".

From the title alone, without reading through the poem, one wouldn't be able to imagine what threshold it is talking about. As it turns out, that word could point to the bottom of a doorway into a room. And it could also imply the beginning or entry point into something, a phase perhaps.

The first line, about the body, will be repeated, with a little variation in the preposition used, halfway down the poem, and it will signal some turning point in the boy's journey into this threshold. We can safely hazard a guess that this body belongs to a young boy in the beginning of puberty. His is a body not yet in its full "value", as he still lacks what the line says is a "price". And the boy wants, like a beggar,  his body to attain a more substantial form. 

Like a beggar, he gets down on his knees and tries to look through a keyhole, to spy on a man showering. Because of the confined view, he can only catch streams of water falling onto a rounded shoulder. In spite of this he still manages to attain an emotional intensity, as evidenced by his seeing the water as rain not falling onto the man but into him. The streams are so taut, they are like guitar strings snapping. This rendering is offered here instead of something lewd or pornographic, like the boy's member becoming as taut or tensed while spying. 

And again, the boy cannot take in much through a keyhole. Which is why he can only recall the sounds, rather than the body, especially the man's singing. And the man's voice can fill the boy right down to the centre of his being, without the boy having to catch sight of the man's entire body, merely a sliver of his shoulder. 

As we already know, the boy is kneeling on the floor. And if he also brings his name, something voiced, down to knee level, and he is asking to be spared from some kind of pain, it implies a climax akin to the death throes of pleasure. And I'm guessing this is his threshold to a new and adult experience. 

At this point the boy recalls only the voice singing. The phrase "He was singing" gets repeated, without any variation, unlike the other first line, which is repeated in the next line. And the turning point here is the boy's body has attained a "price", though not a physical fullness. And that is when he comes alive to this new experience. 

We then learn that this man the boy has been spying on in the mornings is the father. One morning the man realises there is someone behind his door holding his breath. 

The boy is still talking about value, and this time he enters the threshold, towards the singing. He tells us in this beginning of his journey into adulthood, he gets taken into a path he is willing to be lost in. In the language of the erotic, this is the point of no return. And he ventures with eyes open, so that he can now, at last, take in the full view of his first naked man.

Titanic

Text by Leon Wing
Poem by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Titanic

Cadences
before water filled the open lung
of the baby grand.



This little poem is a haiku comprising 17 syllables, no matter the stress patterns, if any. Normally the lines would be cut into three parts, with a 5-7-5 number of syllables a line. Most of the time you 'd associate a haiku with serene and beautiful images of nature or some poignant experience.  

But as you can tell from reading this piece here that the first line only goes up to 3 syllables. The remaining two are brought down to the middle line, totalling the second line to 9 syllables. The last line never wavers from the normal 5 syllables.

If you happen to know something about reading music, you'd know that a cadence is made up of two chords usually found at the end of a piece of music. It can be applied to signal the end of the piece of music. 

And the cadence, or rather more than one of which, used in this poem signals the end of an event or passage. The line above doesn't say if it is an imperfect or perfect cadence. Usually if imperfect, it indicates that the sound wants to keep going in order to finish the music. If perfect, it means the sound is finishing the music. 

Whether perfect or imperfect, the cadence in the poem will still signal some kind of ending, of life, or of more than one life as implied by the plurality of the word.

The sudden and unexpected cutting of the line after just three syllables instead of the normal five indicates a sudden and precipitate cadence, a sudden interruption of its playing a song, some kind of sudden and unexpected event. And in this case, it is the crashing of an iceberg on the ship Titanic.

Instead of telling or showing us the drowning of the ship's unfortunate passengers and crew, the second and last lines take on the metaphoric image of a baby grand piano with its opened lid like an open lung, filling in with water.


'Titanic' is taken from Not In These Shoes by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch's collections include Rockclimbing in Silk (Seren, 2001), Not in These Shoes (Picador, 2008) and Banjo (Picador, 2012). She was shortlisted twice for Wales Book of the Year. She received a Hawthornden Fellowship. She  won a Leverhulme writer in residence award in 2012 to collaborate with the National Wool Museum, with Rack Press putting out Lime & Winter in 2014. that same year in June she was poet in residence at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse. Literature Wales has awarded her a bursary to research and write her next collection. 

Bodybuilders Contest

Text by Leon Wing
Poem by Wisława Szymborska

Bodybuilders Contest 

From scalp to sole, all muscles in slow motion. 
The ocean of his torso drips with lotion. 
The king of all is he who preens and wrestles
with sinews twisted into monstrous pretzels. 

Onstage, he grapples with a grizzly bear 
the deadlier for not really being there. 
Three unseen panthers are in turn laid low,
each with one smoothly choreographed blow. 

He grunts while showing his poses and paces. 
His back alone has twenty different faces. 
The mammoth fist he raises as he wins 
is tribute to the force of vitamins. 


This amusing poem by Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska is a translation from the Polish. Whoever did this translation performed a superlative job of transposing the sing song rhythm, with regular unstress and stress patterns, ending each pair of lines with a rhyme.

This poem shows up the ridiculousness of these bodybuilding competitions, where monstrously muscled men preen around onstage, covered in oil, the better to show off those "monstrous pretzels" of muscles. They have to act or go through these routines which look as if they are grappling with a bear or beating off panthers in slow motion. This monstrosity is compounded by backs having different faces and a mammoth fist. The humour and mockery are heightened at the end of the poem, when the ending line praises the force - not the benefits - of vitamins.

Every line in this poem is in pentameter, with five beats or feet. In order to sustain this regular beat, when reading this following stanza, for instance, you have to read a normally unstressed word or syllable as a beat, or have to promote an unstress, as in IN. And if a normally stressed word or syllable happens to fall in the place of an unstressed position, you have to do the reverse, to demote the stress, as in "slow". 

And this sort of thing is happening in most of the lines. But if you insist on reading in a normal manner, like in actual speech, you will lose the rhythm, thus depriving the humour, mockery and sarcasm in the descriptions.

From SCALP  to SOLE, all MUScles IN slow MOtion. 
The Ocean OF his TORso DRIPS with LOtion. 
The KING of ALL is HE who PREENS and WREStles
with SInews TWISted INto MONstrous PRETzels. 


--

About Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska [qviˈswava ʂɨmˈbɔrska] : A Polish poet, essayist and translator, she was born in 2 July 1923  and died in 1 February 2012. She won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature for "poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality". Her countrymen called her the "Mozart of Poetry".  She even sells more books than other famous prose authors, and is translated into English, European languages, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.

The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer

Text by Leon Wing

Poem by Patricia Lockwood

The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer

Bambi is fresh from the countryside. Bambi is fresh

and we want him on film. He doesn’t even know

how to kiss yet. “Lean in and part your lips,” we say, ...

This very short piece here is an excerpt from a much longer poem taken from a new collection "Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals" by Patricia Lockwood. This collection is the second from this young American poet, and her first for Penguin Books.

Even with just only three lines on show here, they look on the surface to be just a simple poem, a weird and incomprehensible one at that, about a countryside deer named Bambi, whom the whole world wants to put in a movie, a virgin who hasn't kissed before and who has to be taught how to (up to this point).

One could imagine the poet penning it in a dash, quickly and without any second thoughts over form or method. Well, you would think so, wouldn't you, with a title that doesn't look as though it means anything deeply poetic but is merely a shock tactic? These three lines alone will give you an indication of how the rest of the poem will read; and if so, you could easily just skim through the poem, thinking nothing much of it, and quickly turn to the next poem, without looking beneath the words, their significance. 

That deer in the title is Bambi, like that innocent deer character of the same name in the Disney cartoon. As Bambi is an animal, this hints at the term for a new recruit into an industry, the so called "fresh meat". Based on the sexual innuendo of the long title, it wouldn't be off the mark to guess at the sex industry, where you might come across some porn star named Bambi.   "fresh from the countryside" hints at the innocence and inexperience of someone entering the big bad world of the city. The name Bambi, in this case, applies so well here, as it is imbued with the sense of innocence as well as sexuality.

There is a purpose to the repetition of "Bambi is fresh", bounding the first line on opposite ends. Even though the rather long title is really quite telling, and it is very clear it is all about some violent act of sex, this is the only place where the poet says this explicitly. She doesn't do that inside the body of the poem, the stanza. Instead she utilises the repetition of those three words to allow a sense the insistence of the "bam" sound to mimick the violent wham banging act of sex. 

Besides those repeated plosives, you will also find a number of sibilant sounds in "fresh from", "..side" and, again, "fresh". Straddling these sounds is a solitary guttural "c" in country, and its stressed beat here rhymes with the unseen rude word for the female privates.

At the first line you think Bambi is some female character, but reading on to this second line that contains toned down or softened nasals and aspirants, you are surprised  - or confused - to learn that she is a "him".  But why a female name for a male? This could be hinting at some cross dressing, transgender or even gay element, who knows. And the sentence after the full stop underpins or confirms his innocence, his not knowing how to perform something. An enjambment happens at this point, to create a tension: What does he not know how to do?  The following line reveals that it is something as fundamental and as requisite to the sex act as a kiss.

This third and last line has a lot of softer sounds, making the harder ones like "kiss" and "part" stand out. "Kiss", with a hard and sharp guttural, reminds us of the unseen rudeness implicit in "country". The plosive in "part" is also hard and pointing back to the softer plosive of "Bambi", like a final part of an act, like an orgasm. Following the hard "p" in "part", the remaining sounds in "your lips,” we say, ..." go soft. And this acts like the relaxation after that orgasm.

I'm afraid I must only parse this poem up to the above three lines. If I take on the entire poem, this posting could run on and on, to several hundred words and more. If you really want to continue reading the rest of it, get Lockwood's book at the links below.

---

About Patricia Lockwood: She invented the "sext" poetic form and is notorious for her Twitter poems, gaining the title Poet Laureate of Twitter. In 2013 her prose poem "Rape Joke" went viral and gained the attention of The Guardian, who said it "casually reawakened a generation's interest in poetry." and of The Poetry Foundation who declared her poem "world famous."  She got into The Best American Poetry 2014 and won a Pushcart Prize.

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is available from Google Play Books, Amazon,and Kobo.

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.

Night in Day

Text by Leon Wing

Poem by Joseph Stroud

Night in Day

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light's great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun--
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

***

Here, in the East, now, it’s humidity, at times scorching heat, then unexpected heavy rain, even when the sun has been shining brightly. This month, in the west, it was the summer solstice, particularly on the 21st, when Americans see the sun at the northernmost point, when it is the furthest from the equator.

Like our unwavering light in our East, the West’s summer solstice is “the day of light’s great/triumph”. This is the triumph of standing at the tallest reaches of the sky. In this poem there is a battle of ascendancy from “night”, which doesn’t want to surrender to “light”.

The direct oppositeness – and opposition - of each of light’s and night’s stances is reflected in the first two words of lines one and two. The run-on at “over”, in the first line, has the OH sound. The caesura, or pause, in the second line, between the full-stop and “So”, marks the repeat of this sound. Another punctuation, the colon, helps point to another repeat of the sound, in “crows”, which end-points, decidedly with a full-stop.

“Night” is personalised – or rather, de-personalised – by calling “night” “it”. “it” repeats in “itself”, where “itself” is repeated. “Night”’s vowels are short i's. Yes, even “light” has the same kind. But that’s because they are direct opposites, linked by their similar rhyme, and, also, “night” insinuates itself into “light”. Look at the i's buried in “obsidian”, and at how “night”’s dark colours are inherent in obisidian and crows. The connection of lava in obsidian suggests the heat and burning of Hell, and crows can be a symbol of darkness, when they sometimes eat carrion, the dead.

In the end, “light” is winning, with the 3rd last line repeating the U sound of “sun” in “triumph”, “sunflowers”, “guzzle” and “sun”. The dash at the end of this line mimics the “we”s dash to “guzzle” at the burst and released “watermelon”, which has benefited from “light”, and remove the dark bits in it, the “black seeds”. “we” “spit” these into the “grass”, which repeats the A sound of “trap”, so that it is finally “night” that is trapped (“night glistening”) inside “grass”, which is green and above the ground, like “watermelon”.

***

Joseph Stroud is awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship of the Library of Congress and the Pushcart Prize for his poetry. He has published In the Sleep of Rivers, Signatures, Below Cold Mountain, Country of Light and Of This World: New And Selected Poems.

Spinning

Text by Leon Wing
Poem by Kevin Griffith

Spinning

I hold my two-year-old son
under his arms and start to twirl.
His feet sway away from me
and the day becomes a blur.
Everything I own is flying into space:
yard toys, sandbox, tools,
garage and house,
and, finally, the years of my life.

When we stop, my son is a grown man,
and I am very old. We stagger
back into each other's arms
one last time, two lost friends
heavy with drink,
remembering the good old days.

***

Any parent who has brought up a child would concur with the sentiments in this poem, about how time flies (I know, how trite this sounds) as he grows up.

In the beginning of the first stanza Griffith uses internal rhyming (“hold”, “old”) to foreground his refusal to accept that his child is growing older. He again uses a similar manoeuvre in the next sentence, from line two to three, with “sway away” and “day”.

The juxtaposition of “sway” and “away”, especially the repeating of “way”, mimics a spinning around from one spot and coming back to it again, and again. The H, S and F sounds of “His feet” , in turn, mimic the air through which the little boy is spun around. The rush of air, with the F sound of “from” settles with the M sounds of “from me”.

The repeated AY sound of those rhymes, in “space”, also makes us see here that the days are moving away, with blurring speed, growing older, as it were. Not only are the years of his son growing up spinning away, also those of his life are doing likewise, into an expanse of growing older.

In the first line of the second stanza, Griffith uses again the settling mimicry of the M sounds of line three, here, in “grown man”. He prepares the foretaste for this with "stop" and a pause with a comma, and the M of "my".

“grown” connects to “own” in stanza one. Also, the O sound in “grown” links that in “old” of line one. This connection is confirmed when its sound is concretised in “old”, in the stanza’s second line, and underpinned by “very”. A full-stop literally stops time, and the reading breaks with a pause, as if father and son are being stopped short. Both “stagger” at a powerful run-on, practically the only one in the entire poem, to “back”, in the starting of the next line. It’s almost as if Time has granted them a return (“back”) to the “old” days, when his son was the little boy he was holding. This affords them a final embrace, a holding on to, as if they’ve found each other after being flung into the space of time, of growing.

While “two” in stanza one intimates a splitting, a separating of father and son, its use here is the reverse. There is still a splitting with the use of “two” here, but this is a good thing, as “one” becomes “two”, forging a father-son bonding. A spin-around, a twirling, each now becomes a “one”. Whatever are being lost in stanza one is made up for by being more than father and son, by being friends now.

In the penultimate line, “drink” puts one in mind of how “Everything” of the father flew into space, went “flying”, as they are “remembering”. The departing line is final with the repeating of “old” and “day”, placed side by side, like a father and son together.

***

Kevin Griffith teaches English as Associate Professor of English at Capital University. He is also a faculty member in the Legal Research and Writing Program at the Law School. He was awarded the Columbus Literary Award in Poetry from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist's Fellowships in Poetry.

He has published Paradise Refunded (Backwaters Press, 1999); Someone Had to Live (San Diego Poets Press, 1994); The Common Courage Reader: Essays for an Informed Democracy (Common Courage Press, 2000); and over 200 poems in journals like Chelsea and Mid-American.

Earbud

Text by Leon Wing

Poem by Bill Holm

Earbud

Earbud--a tiny marble sheathed in foam
to wear like an interior earring so you
can enjoy private noises wherever you go,
protected from any sudden silence.
Only check your batteries, then copy
a thousand secret songs and stories
on the tiny pod you carry in your pocket.
You are safe now from other noises made
by other people, other machines, by chance,
noises you have not chosen as your own.
To get your attention, I touch your arm
to show you the tornado or the polar bear.
Sometimes I catch you humming or talking to the air
as if to a shrunken lover waiting in your ear.


For the generation who’d rather listen to music in the form of MP3, rather than as music issuing from large speakers and spinning from a CD, the earbud is one of a pair, each a “tiny marble sheathed in foam”, as Bill Holm puts it, in his poem.

The way Holms refers to it - you stick it into each ear, much like “an interior earring”, for enjoying “private noises” – it is nothing you would want to show off openly. It’s an object to hide behind, to be “protected from sudden silence”; which says plenty about the brashness and loudness of such a society.

Holm uses the s alliteration in "sudden silence", to make more audible, for the reader, the abrupt hushness of no sound. He also repeats this alliteration in "secret songs and stories". But this time the collocation has a different effect. The "songs and stories" are audible only to the wearer of the earbuds.

For old people who needs to protect themselves from silence, like deafness, the earbud is like their ear piece which near-deaf people wear, who also require to “check your batteries”.

Holm views the earbud, and its concomitant “pod” (the iPod) as something you hide “in your pocket”, just like the “secret songs and stories”. Like a pod you are cocooned, protected, in your own “private noises”, not those from “other people, other machines, by chance,/ noises you have not chosen as your own.” The earbud does not belong with a social environment of sharing and communicating, as the triple repeats of other suggests.

Another triple set of repeats, of noises, works similarly to the s alliterations of lines 4 and 6. While the wearer might assume that other noises would encroach into her audo privacy, the observer (non-wearer) considers the tinny sounds from her earbuds noises.

Just like wearers of those ear pieces for amplifying sounds for the hard of hearing, earbud wearers sometimes have to be communicated to tactilely (“I touch your arm”). They can be so immersed in their own private world (“humming or talking to the air”), they have a narrow view of the other world, the natural one, particularly (“the tornado or the polar bear”). Their view of their own world is similarly reduced (“shrunken lover”).

The Tending

Text by Leon Wing

Poem by Sharon Olds, from The Unswept Room, published in 2002 by Jonathan Cape, UK

The Tending

My parents did not consider it, for me,
yet I can see myself in the woods of some other
world, with the aborted. It is early evening,
the air is ashen as if from funeral-home
chimneys, and there are beginnings of people
almost growing—but not changing—on stalks,
some in cloaks, or lady’s-slippers,
others on little trellises.
Maybe I am one of the gardeners here,
we water them with salt water.
I recall the girl who had a curl
right in the middle of her forehead,
when she was good she was very very good, I was not like that,
when she was bad she was horrid, I am here
as if in a garden of the horrid—I move
and tend, by attention, to the rows, I think of
Mary Mary Quite Contrary
and feel I am seeing the silver bells
set down clapperless, the cockleshells
with the cockles eaten. And yet this is
a holy woods. When I think of the house
I came to, and the houses these brothers and sisters
might have come to, and what they might have
done with what was done there,
I wonder if some, here, have done,
by their early deaths, a boon of absence
to someone in the world. So I tend them, I hate
for them to remain thankless. I do not
sing to them—their lullaby
long complete,
I just walk, as if this were a kind of home,
a mothers’ and fathers’ place, and I am
among the sung who will not sing,
the harmed who will not harm.

--

We wonder what that “it” is, which the poet’s parents didn’t consider for her. Is “it” the “woods of some other/ world”? We make this association when drawn to the alliteration of the w of “woods” and “world”. In some mythology a world of woods can either be paradise, a garden or some kind of Hades.

From “stalks”, “trellises”, “gardeners”, and “water them”, we gather “it” would most probably be some kind of garden. But, with “the air is ashen as if from funeral-home/chimneys” and “we water them with salt water”, we can narrow “it” down to a cemetery.

More so when “and there are beginnings of people/almost growing—but not changing—on stalks,/some in cloaks, or lady’s-slippers,/others on little trellises.” These “people” are “beginnings of people”, as when the old die they are said to have gone back to the beginning, before there is life. They are “almost growing “, planted beneath the ground. But they cannot “grow”; they are “not changing”, remaining the age when they died. The only growth to be seen around their graves are “stalks” and “little trellises”, which support these plants, these leaves. Some are buried with their belongings (“cloaks, or lady’s-slippers”).

This would be the place where the poet comes to weep (“we water them with salt water”) and remember the past , the good and the bad recollections (“I recall the girl ...”; “Mary Mary Quite Contrary ...”). She also comes to tend to the “rows”: her parents’ graves and tombstones.

Besides her parents’ graves, she also sees others, with younger people inhumed: “the houses these brothers and sisters/might have come to”, “their early deaths”. She pities them and their “aborted” lives, and so helps to tend their graves, as well. She takes on the role as “one of the gardeners”.

She is well aware that the “it” is a “holy wood”, that it is her parents’ resting place(“a kind of home,/
a mothers’ and fathers’ place”). This is also the resting place of all the other “brothers and sisters”; their “house”, as it were.

She walks among the “rows” of graves and gravestones, “among the sung who will not sing,” because “their lullaby” is “long complete”. And, “the harmed who will not harm”, because if some of the buried were harmed in death, they do not have any inclination for harming back. We see the manner in which lives come back to the beginning, a revolution from birth to death, in the circuitous way the lines run in “might have come to, and what they might have/done with what was done there,/I wonder if some, here, have done”. We are all reconciled to the ineluctability of dying: “a boon of absence/to someone in the world”.

Harking back to the first line, “My parents did not consider it, for me”, we now see how her parents – any parent – would never want their children to die before they do. We can confirm this view from “aborted”: parents do not wish to see their children’s lives cut short.

Note: Yesterday Eric Forbes of the famous goodbooksguide blog asked me if I had any idea what Sharon Olds's "The Tending" was all about.  He actually meant for me to give just a simple,  informal interpretation.  However, a mere summary turned into a full-fledged 500-word piece.

Long Marriage

Text by Leon Wing

Poem by Gerald Fleming

from Swimmer Climbing onto Shore,

Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco, 2005

Long Marriage

You're worried, so you wake her
& you talk into the dark:
Do you think I have cancer, you
say, or Were there worms
in that meat, or Do you think
our son is OK, and it's
wonderful, really--almost
ceremonial as you feel
the vessel of your worry pass
miraculously from you to her--
Gee, the rain sounds so beautiful,
you say--I'm going back to sleep.

In the beginning of Long Marriage, you can sense the comfort of the speaker in sleep, who has just woken up, in the long vowels at the start of the line ( “You're worried”). The r sounds somewhat evoke the sensation of snoring, don’t they? The comma in the middle of this line literally disrupts the snoring, by inserting a pause. After this you hear an aspiration, in “so”, which marks the moment of being brought out of sleep. But he remains as sleepy as at the start of the line, as indicated by the alliteration, or rather, the symmetry, playing on y and w of “you wake” and "You're worried". The end-stopping, with “her” has the waker exhaling.

Line two begins with an ampersand, normally used as a short form for and. This inidicates a precipitousness in the waker, so much so that he doesn’t wait to direct his talk towards his sleeping partner beside him. He just goes and talks into the emptiness, “into the dark”.

In the third line, there is an immediacy in the way he puts into question his worry of the first line, by leaving out quotation marks. The “you” at the end of this line breaks for an enjambement or run-on, to “say”, in the next line.  In this next line his worry is so uppermost in his mind that “were” is capitalized without ceremony. We know he is worried, from the alliteration in “Were there worms”.

Further on, in the next couple of lines, we realize he is not really pinpointing just one major worry which happens to wake him up. He happens to possess a few more, like his worry over their son. Then, a comma is again utilized, this time to signal a change in his mood. The run-on “it’s” to “wonderful” of the next line plays down his worries. The w in “wonderful” echoes that in “worry”,”wake”, “Were” and “worms”: we – and he – see how ridiculous all these worries are.

And all this are “almost/ ceremonial”, like their marriage, when he lets his spouse do all the worrying now; a kind of sharing between loved ones, like a vow.  It's interesting, the use of vessel, which is a tube in which bodily fluid circulates.  In  the context of marriage - and sleep and bed - it hints at marital sex.  It is more than "your worry" passing "miraculously from you to her": it's as ceremonial as their wedding night.

The dash of an end-stopping is very strong: the next line echoes the wonderful motif, in an earlier line, with “beautiful”.  

Finally, in the last line, the poet uses, not a comma anymore, but a dash, to signal a break in tone. He decides to go back to sleep, while it is his spouse who is now staying up to take on all his worries.

Cat, Failing

Text by Leon Wing
Poem by Robin Robertson

Cat, Failing

A figment, a thumbed
maquette of a cat, some
ditched plaything, something
brought in from outside:
his white fur stiff and grey,
coming apart at the seams.
I study the muzzle
of perished rubber, one ear
eaten away, his sour body
lumped like a bean-bag
leaking thinly
into a grim towel. I sit
and watch the light
degrade in his eyes.

He tries and fails
to climb to his chair, shirks
in one corner of the kitchen,
cowed, denatured, ceasing to be
anything like a cat,
and there's a new look
in those eyes
that refuse to meet mine
and it's the shame of being
found out. Just that.
And with that
loss of face
his face, I see,
has turned human.

The poet Robin Robertson has found a cat – if that is the word for it – which he has “brought in from outside” into his kitchen. The first impression – his and ours – is rather wispy. We witness a ghost of an animal, vaguely resembling a cat. It is not shown to us as a fully embodied living thing. It is merely a “figment”, and not even a fully-crafted entity, just a “thumbed/ maquette”, like some abandoned sculpture.

Is it alive, when “his white fur” is “stiff and grey/ coming apart at the seams”? It is like a broken doll, abandoned by a child who has lost interest, and love, in it. His face doesn’t even register into the poet’s consciousness as such; it’s a “perished rubber”, the body “a bean-bag” - hardly living descriptions.

For all that, there is a “light” in the animal’s eyes, but it is fading, as he stumbles about in the poet’s kitchen, afraid, as he has cause to be so. As the poet witnesses his deterioration, he also catches sight of something human in the cat as he hides his eyes from him, from shame for being exposed in such dereliction.

It is not till the end of this poem that the poet is able to see in that “perished rubber” of a face some semblance of something human: “loss of face/ his face, I see,/ has turned human.”  

If the poet hasn't been talking about a cat in this sad condition he could well have been drawing a picture of a homeless old man. Observe lines five onwards in the first stanza: "his white fur stiff and grey", "his sour body/lumped like a bean-bag/leaking thinly/into a grim towel"

Similarly, most of the lines in stanza two, except line five, could also be readily ascribed to a man in deplorable conditions.

"What the Ear Said"

Text by Leon Wing

Poem by Oliver de la Paz

A scene from the play God's Ear by Jenny Schwartz

What the Ear Said

Nothing to hear in that hollow. Not boats,
not the cadence of boats and their oars.
Not wood and water and the ferry
to island in a storm, not rain. Not
the repetition of rain and the often loved
sound of trees. Or the sea.
Or the open mouth receiving. Not the lean
of the grief-struck against an oxcart or the low
of the dog caught in that rain. Again
the sound of the heart in the throat, and the too soon
lapse of breath. Again the beat of the foot
against the floor—the speech of the bed-creak
or the priest. Not to hear a cloak or some ghost.
Not moon. Not door. Not the entered shoes of a beautiful
stranger and her door, her moon.

Oliver de la Paz
from Furious Lullaby
Southern Illinois University Press

Copyright © 2007 by Oliver de la Paz


This is very strange when you and I know that this body’s organ, the ear, is meant, in strict scientific and biological terms, to receive auditory sensations. Or simply put, our ear is meant to hear sounds.

However, this poem by the Filipino poet Oliver de la Paz has turned things around, and he has made this organ speak.  That’s why there is “Nothing to hear in that hollow.” In the pause following, could this Ear be straining to do this, what it is meant to do? Well, no, the line, next, is saying the first of many “not”s: “Not boats,/ not ../Not ..Not/the repetition."   And many, many more.

The alliteration in “hear” and “hollow” offers a sensation of mere breath and no sound. The Ear cannot even hear the music in the “cadence of boats and their oars.”.

The Ear might not be able to hear all these, but the w alliteration and the rhythm in “Not wood and water and the ferry/ to island in a storm, not rain.” make our ears hear (in our head if we are reading that line silently) the rise and fall of the water lapping against the wooden ferry. And, there is a storm, as opposed to just rain. We hear the pitter-pattering rhythm in “the REpeTItion of RAIN”.

Again, the Ear cannot hear but it is aware there exist “sound of trees”, “the low/of the dog”, “sound of the heart in the throat”, “beat of the foot/against the floor—the speech of the bed-creak/or the priest.”.

Before the poem comes to its end, the poet repeats “Nothing to hear” in “Not to hear a cloak or some ghost”; as some kind of rounding off. The last two lines repeats “not” in succession, in a regular rising (penultimate line), then falling (last line), and, finally rising, rhythm: “Not MOON. Not DOOR. Not the ENtered SHOES of a BEAUtiful/ STRANger AND her DOOR, her MOON.”

“moon” and “door” in the penultimate line directly reflect, or mirror, “door” and “moon” in the last line. Like some reflection on the water, the symmetry of those images, together with the rise-fall-rise rhythm, is nearly perfect. 

The rhyming in the repetition of “moon” also reflects “soon” in “the sound of the heart in the throat, and the too soon/ lapse of breath.” This is so that we can link “entered shoes of a beautiful/stranger” to “Again the beat of the foot/against the floor”.  

The Ear itself is not mentioned in the poem, but we get the echo of it in repeats of "hear".  Also, we hear echoes - internal and other rhyming - in "boats" and "throat" and "cloak", "rain" and also "Again" and "against", "trees" and "seas", "oars" and "door", and of course "door" and "moon".  We see - and hear - a universe of symmetry acting out, connecting, inside this poem.

Something to ponder: why has la Paz personified the Ear? Is the Ear some kind of higher being, someone all-seeing, ubiquitous, perhaps?  What's more, the Ear did foresee the beautiful stranger's shoes beating against the floor.