Dog-Ear: Kim Addonizio's Tell Me

There is a great deal of poetry out there. Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me is one of the fortunate collections to rise above the pitfalls of contemporary poetry, to rise above the usual clichés & staid images, to carry with it a strong sense of place & emotion without resorting to tricks, pity or force. Instead Tell Me is a return to the grounded & far-reaching powers of confessional poetry (keeping in mind “confessional” does not denote “autobiographical”), a collection that is raw, honest, well written and open to minds of varying principles & speeds. With its long, run-on lines & its concrete images (and occasional formal gestures), the collection allows its content to reach out to the reader while its poetic strengths of metaphor & narrative keep the poems from being merely personal anecdotes & reflections without overwhelming the emotional tenor.

Addonizio’s portraits of desire, love, loss and failure often dwell on the womanly life but these peeks are not exclusively about or to women. She deftly draws the reader in by directly addressing the reader and the emotions we all share in matters of love & life. In her poems, the “I” is not just a persona telling a story or a person demanding your attention; it is a confidante, an intimate voice sharing her pains, reaching out for a hand or another voice. Throughout the collection, she employs concrete imagery that is ambiguous or suggestive enough to go beyond the lines between age, gender and class. Her use of a mundane activity & subject is often one that can be easily identified with by many readers and so is an easy & intimate way to draw the reader in. Here is her poem “Affair” in its entirety:


God it’s sexual, opening a beer when you swore you wouldn’t drink tonight,
taking the first deep gulp, the foam backing up in the long amber neck

of the Pacifico bottle as you set it on the counter, the head spilling over
so you bend to fit your mouth against the cold lip

and drink, because what you are, aren’t you, is a drinker—maybe not a lush,
not an alcoholic, not yet anyway, but don’t you want

a glass of something most nights, don’t you need the gesture
of reaching for it, raising it high and swallowing down and savoring

the sweetness, or the scalding, knowing you’re going to give yourself to it
like a lover, whether or not he fills up the leaky balloon of your heart—

don’t you believe in trying to fill it, no matter what the odds,
don’t you believe it still might happen, aren’t you that kind of woman?


Addonizio utilizes the “you” in order to seemingly address the reader though it could be the speaker addressing herself as well. It is the longing and the simple activity of drinking a beer that brings the reader closer to the speaker. Like Anne Sexton, her poems are not just of the mind or of emotions, but also of the body. Even for a (heterosexual) male reader, there is a sense of taking in that is not physical in the way Addonizio relates it for women but rather in the desire & need to fill up one’s heart with love or companionship. The poem could just as easily end with “aren’t you that kind of person” because the hope & longing in the poem is not a feminine subject but a human subject, a concern that goes beyond the metaphors and cuts to the bone. And doesn’t every person want “a glass of something most nights”, something that fills up his or her heart & life?

The exchange Addonizio creates between the poems and their audience is one of sharing. In interviews she talks about how writing has been a kind of escape or therapy from everyday life, an affirmation of the life she has and can have. Poetry, for reader and writer alike, is often a consolatory activity. The title poem of her collection is the best example of where the lines between reader, writer and speaker blur so that they all share in the act of listening, confiding and resting on each other’s shoulders. She begins, “I’m going to stop thinking about my losses now/and listen to yours. I’m so sick of dragging them//wherever I go, like children up too late”. The first lines of the poem are literally an opening-up, a gesture toward the other as if to say we all have problems, let’s talk share them for a bit, a treatment of conversation as a kind of personal exorcism. Then the poem takes a turn toward escapism. Sharing each other’s plights is fine; after all, misery loves company but to wallow in it is to make more of what you want to get away from. The speaker declares she will send her children off and drink into the night but first she extends her own sympathy after asking for ours saying, “So tell me. Tell me how you hurt/even though I can’t help you.” In a subtle, indirect manner the speaker declares that we can share in each other’s troubles, comfort each other but we can’t always help each other but we can still escape it for a little, first in sharing, then in revelry. After all, the late night bar scene, the clubs, the midnight bowling leagues, all sorts of activities we indulge is to get away from our losses, our troubles, at the very least to get away from the same old. And so the speaker asks us to share our troubles but “then, please, dance with me,/hold me while we fool ourselves/they aren’t out there”. Problems may not go away, may not be solved, but the moments we can find ourselves taken away from them is one of the reasons why we yearn for companionship, why we try to make room in the crowded spaces of our lives & our bodies.

Confessional poetry seeks to open up avenues for poet & reader to find their way toward a proverbial Emerald City or home, a place to be comfortable in if even for just a little while. Addonizio’s Tell Me is, with its joys & sorrows, a masterful reenactment of memory & forgetting, the two halves of our emotional & embodied lives that keep us going. In wrestling them we might find solace. In sharing them we find we are not alone, which is perhaps the most important aspect of her collection “and finally/you depend on that, you pray it’s enough/to last, if it has to, the rest of your life.”

Happy Birthday Anne Sexton

from 1974 NY Times piece, Remembering Anne Sexton, by Erica Jong:

I could speak here of the fact that Anne Sexton is one of the writers by whom our age will be known and understood in times to come -- if there are any times to come. Some people -- including other poets -- were embarrassed by her poetry and sought to denigrate it, perhaps because it was so naked and painful that it exposed the hypocrisies they lived by (and even, at times, wrote by). But I would rather speak of Anne Sexton's bigness as a person than her greatness as a poet. The poems are there -- seven published books and two more (at least) to come. They will be understood in time -- not as "women's poetry" or "confessional poetry" -- but as myths that expand the human consciousness. Like all such myths, they are a big frightening. Some people would rather pretend they do not exist, or do not exist in the temple of art. But no matter: the poems go on saying themselves to us in the dark. They will not go away.

*

a poem by Anne Sexton (from All My Pretty Ones):


To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph


Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing that strange little tug on his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that feel back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

Dog-Ear: Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III

A good deal of text is spent discussing Elizabeth Bishop’s deployment of narrative and of the relationship of her details with the subjects of her poems. Putting aside discussions of gender, sexuality and biography that are so common in critical work on Bishop, I would like to return to the poems themselves and focus on Bishop as a painter of words. Considering that Elizabeth Bishop herself often painted watercolours, one can see her love of detail and her attention to colour & space.

In Geography III, her last book, Bishop, as in most of her poems, turns out detail after detail. “In the Waiting Room” she uses narrative as a kind of detail where lines like “It was winter. It got dark/early” do more than merely set the scene but also provides a tenor in which the themes of her poems work. This turning over of the particular is similar to primitive painters or the Baroque painters in that the images subtly become more than themselves and act as allegorical surrogates to the picture revealed. The act of looking is more than an outward activity; it consists of reflection & identification. The protagonist, Elizabeth, reads through an issue of National Geographic, goes from the images of “awful hanging breasts”, “babies with pointed heads”, and “a dead man slung on a pole” to a moment of surprise (that is, the cry “oh!”) and looks to herself. She considers the waiting room and begins to sink into herself wondering who she or anyone really is. Elizabeth “scarcely dared to look/to see what it was I was”; the images in the magazine, as do the images in the poem, draw her to consider what “held us all together/or made us all just one?” It is not uncommon for onlookers at any museum to find a work of art that draws them and causes them to think about themselves, their relation to the art, to the artist, to the whole act of making. “In the Waiting Room”, in plain language, in both the adult voice and that of a seven-year-old, performs the act of looking and reflecting from a set of photographs that might easily be about anything including us. The sense of confusion in the poem is not in the images but in the thoughts drawn from them; Bishop takes the reader into a psychological moment that is born not out of the confessional elements but from something that goes beyond the mere self and this is perhaps the great appeal of painting and why so many poets are often, if not artists themselves, great lovers of art.

The image is without a doubt an important & perhaps obvious element of poetry. It seems to be an altogether ridiculous idea that images in poetry might not evoke some kind of emotional or other mental process to take hold. What makes Bishop’s poems a bit different, besides her use of detail as a kind of narrative, is that they employ images in such a way to be more than mere representations of things but also as meaningful markers of thought. How we understand the reality of our surroundings is a result of many perceptions and we cannot but help to ascribe to our sensations a variety of descriptions. The prose poem “12 O’Clock News”, a Modernist masterpiece (even if it was published late in the game), is a clever landscape painting derived from an imaginative description of objects in a room setup in the way a television newsmagazine (à la National Geographic Explorer or Sixty Minutes) might describe a place & its people. Besides the usual muscularity enjoyed by much prose poetry, the poem is given stronger definition & physicality by the descriptive markers to the left of each stanza. One might consider how sculpture & assemblage, especially when using found objects, can be manipulated or given new context in order represent new things (one might think of Marcel Duchamp, for example). In this artistic spirit the poem resides. Rather than confronting the reader with a statement like, to paraphrase Magritte, “this is not a gooseneck lamp”, Bishop allows her painterly imagination to evoke a new place within a seemingly mundane room.

She writes, “Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.” The brilliant assignment of a gooseneck lamp as moon sets the light and tone for the rest of the poem. The next section named “typewriter” is a clever take on the work that she does, giving the typewriter new life as an escarpment with “elaborate terracing…What endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped terraces represent! And yet, on them the welfare of this tiny principality depends.” This tongue-in-cheek remark is followed by more descriptions of objects in the room, each given their own place in the landscape with geological reportage and editorializing. In each of her descriptions we are reminded of the imaginative enterprise with which children transform their surroundings, turning couches into great fortresses or carpets into deserts; Bishop recaptures the imagination in much the same way as seen in her “typewriter eraser” and “ashtray” sections where she reveals the people of the land frozen in time in their all-too-human poses such as when cigarettes play the role of dead soldiers lying in a pit. The visual & physical qualities of her descriptions do more than describe but allow use to be present in the same way a good painting or photograph might thus demonstrating her qualities as both poet and painter.

It seems particularly important to look at her choice of translation in Geography III, Octavio Paz’s “Objects and Apparitions,” a poem for Joseph Cornell. Perhaps not one of Paz’s best poems, it fits appropriately into Bishop’s theme of visual representation. Her own poems suggest careful visual constructions much like Cornell’s boxes and she sometimes suggests other surrealists in some of her images & techniques (though that is not to say that she is surrealist). The poem is Paz’s homage to Cornell & his art, celebrating the careful creations he has made “out of your ruins,” “monuments to every moment.” On a sidenote, Bishop was friends with Paz and his wife, Marie José Paz, a visual artist (they were all friends of Cornell). Bishop, in paying homage to her friends, also pays homage to the duplicity of images & ideas, making reference through Paz to the idea that things may have both universal appeal and personal/subjective meaning where marbles and other collectables may be “tales of the time”. Just as Paz writes, “Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes/my words became visible for a moment,” Bishop’s images in Geography III become visible for a moment in her poems, small boxes containing seemingly random objects held together by memory, longing and imagination that go beyond being themselves to suggest something outside of the poems, something in ourselves and the world around us in much the same way all art does or at least should.

Dog-Ear: C.D. Wright's Further Adventures With You

C.D. Wright’s Further Adventures With You is a tight collection of direct, often plaintive, poetry & prose. She expresses a deep concern for the lives & rights of the dispossessed and the poor; while the prose is often more personal, the poetry offers glimpses of the poor you might find in her native Arkansas. The poems & prose are mostly compact and move quickly. In some instances the poems carry their own weight but the collection mostly, in this reader’s view, feels both hurried & plodding. This weakness also is its strength as it gives the collection a hypnotic pace that allows the reader to dwell on the stories within the poems even if the language of the poetry is not exciting or exacting.

In the first poem, “Nothing to Declare”, the speaker does not so much as declare, as in make claim, but instead remarks matter-of-factly about the state of things, a kind of understated declaration in itself. The physical world may change but how the speaker feels about the world does not; this is the emotional center of the poem and for the book as a whole. In small leaps and bounds, the speaker reveals her living space and how this shapes her thinking. She begins, “When I lived here/the zinnias were brilliant,/spring passed in walks./One winter I wasn’t so young.” Already in the first four lines we have a matter-of-fact hardness setting in. Childhood and spring pass leisurely in walks among bright flowers; then one day it is not spring and one is not “so young”. The speaker takes a strange turn and states “hearts go bad/like something open on a shelf” as if to say that exposing yourself too much emotionally might lead to a kind of deterioration. The next lines catalog some regional details that might have been everyday and close to home but now served people in a nostalgic capacity though not even that since the objects are no longer around. The sense of defeat is pushed along by the stunning revelation of being taught that “the Russians send their old/to be melted down for candles.” The quick pace of the poem, like a compact novel, takes along the speaker’s desires for children she does not have, giving out advice that sounds noble & romantic but hollow for the absence of children. Despite the sense of resignation in the tone of the speaker, the romantic won’t pass, won’t be given up. The idealism & hope for the best, keeping your head up, the worthy cause of celebrating the poor, campaigning for the good & for the dead — the poem culminates in its challenge and advice, what it does not declare because it is simply what you must do when circumstances are difficult:

Try living where you don’t have to see
the sun go down.
If the hunter turns his dogs loose
on your dreams
Start early, tell no one
get rid of the scent.

Like Donald Hall’s “Danger salts the meat of life”, Wright’s poem asks us to make the most of what we have because that is how you get past the change & hardships of life. (Here is where someone might discuss the ghost of Frank Stanford....)

Wright’s best poems in Further Adventures With You are mostly the short simple ones like “Carla” or “Slag”. These sad little poems succeed because they do not rely on any unnecessary elaboration, no further explanation of the moments they capture. They are small portraits where the information available to the reader is all that is necessary to soak in the sadness they possess. In a time where so much poetry is either dismissive of narrative devices or overburdened by narrative excess, Wright’s poems are a refreshing reminder that it is possible to present an episode of a life without getting into the backgrounds & futures of the characters involved. In “Carla” it is enough to know the old man the speaker has in mind loves a woman enough to never leave town in hopes that she returns & finds him desirable. Who cares who Carla is and where she has gone? The poem itself could be seen as a kind of ars poetica, a poem that does not feel the need to do anything more than it set out to do, that is, paint a small portrait of a man, where both man & the poem stay trapped in time. “Yes he could back the Desoto/out of the shed, coast to the blacktop./And drive until he ran out of cash/or splendor” but why would he, what of missed opportunity, that two way street?

Overall, Wright’s Further Adventures With You is a slightly above-average book of poems with a few gems. Many of the poems strike me as boring or meandering with too much emphasis on details that do not contribute to the poems as a whole though the poems succeed in establishing a tone of hope & sadness that keeps them from falling apart. In the end, Wright’s book is a good one to read if you are looking for poetry capable of delivering the impact of a short story without a dependency on bald narrative or raw emotion.