It can pull you into a consciousness more intensely than even the most intense stream of consciousness in a novel.
It’s brief, a poem of the sort I have in mind– a sharp and even shocking awakening, for the reader, into the condition of being another human being.
If it’s highly organized, well-wrought as formal art, this sort of poem can stagger you with the way the poet somehow takes unkempt suffering and tugs it as tightly into coherence as the edges of an army recruit’s bed.
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Here’s an example of what I have in mind: Black Mare, by Lynda Hull.
Lynda Hull’s friend Mark Doty wrote about her life and early death, after years of self-destruction, in his memoir, Heaven’s Coast.
Hull took, in life, “a position from which one might understand the vulnerability and porosity of the self, the power of its costuming gestures.” A poem is a costuming gesture, the “transubstantiation of pain into style.”
A lot of art is like that. Art of the sort Hull produced makes life bearable because the fact that the poem has been accomplished at all — given the writer’s sufferings — affirms volition, lucidity, and love.
Go here for her poem, Black Mare, unaccosted by my observations about it.
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Black Mare
[The title, one supposes, refers to a horse… But my mind goes to mare, Italian for sea, and imagines a black watery expanse. Also night-mare — a thing appearing in the blackness of night.]
It snakes behind me, this invisible chain gang—
the aliases, your many faces peopling
that vast hotel, the past.
[The poet summons her memories, all of them housed in the immense and somehow disreputable comings and goings of her thoughts. She thinks of her thoughts as a chain gang, a set of imprisoned – immovable? uninterpretable? – links.
Her poem already exhibits tight yet not obvious structure; she will use exact rhymes, though not end rhymes, throughout (vast/past). Note also the assonance of long A‘s: snakes/chain/aliases/faces.]
What did we learn?
Every twenty minutes the elevated train,
[A near-rhyme here, learn/train. Train continues the chain. Also: we. This will be a sort of love poem, addressed – in a mode of wistful inquiry – to the man with whom the poet shared a certain time in her life.]
the world shuddering beyond
the pane.
[Train/pane. Shuddering adds a suggestion of pain to pane. Plus, already, we have a sense of world of pain outside the perception of the writer as she was at that time. She was inside the pane, where she saw, but didn’t feel, the shuddering world.]
It was never warm enough in winter.
The walls peeled, the color of corsages
ruined in the air. Sweeping the floor,
[warm/color/corsages/floor – Assonance again. And warm/winter/walls/ruined/sweeping — You see it there too.]
my black wig on the chair. [Air/chair.] I never meant
to leave you in that hotel [The metaphorical hotel of memory becomes the literal hotel in which the poet lived with her lover.] where the voices
of patrons long gone seemed to echo in the halls,
a scent of spoiled orchids. But this was never
an elegant hotel. The iron fretwork of the El
held each room in a deep corrosive bloom.
[Corsages, orchids, bloom: All spoiled, ruined, corroded. And yet the flowers convey an odd beauty, the beauty of ruins.]
[Hotel/El/Held]
[And fretwork: A great choice of word, conveying along with pane, fret.]
This was the bankrupt’s last chance, the place
the gambler waits to learn his black mare’s
leg snapped as she hurtled towards the finish line.
[People in Memory Hotel bet their last dollar on a fragile hope. Hopeless.]
* * *
How did we live? Your face over my shoulder
was the shade of mahogany in the speckled
[Again the peculiar undeniable intensity at this point of my merging with the poet’s remembering, suffering, arch consciousness. Its particularity excites me; in its particularity lies the originality of this poem. This is an accomplished consciousness, in any sense of the word accomplished you would like. I move more and more deeply into it because its peculiar realization and beauty beckon me.]
mirror bolted to the wall. It was never warm.
[The poem’s organization bases itself upon repeated phrases, motifs: Here It was never warm. The cheap hotel was badly heated; but there’s also the writer’s failure to find comfort… The repeated phrases do two things: They express the futile circling of the poet’s thoughts as she remembers and tries to learn what her past means. And the phrases contribute to the musicality of the poem; they are a kind of chorus.]
You arrived through a forest of needles,
the white mist of morphine, names for sleep
that never came.
[She recalls the lover, another addict, like her. Restless, unable to feel comfort; yet temporarily calmed and warmed and kept from pain by the fog of drugs, they lay abed, gazing out of their dirty windows, into their speckled mirror… Look at her lovely delicate druggy artistry: the white mist of morphine… the white cliffs of Dover…]
My black wig unfurled
across the battered chair. Your arms circled me
when I stood by the window. Downstairs
the clerk who read our palms broke the seal
on another deck of cards. She said you’re my fate,
my sweet annihilating angel, every naked hotel room
I’ve ever checked out of.
[What’ve we got here, a Bob Dylany lilt, coming up from sorrow just slightly for air:
…They stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train
Moving with a simple twist of fate…
He woke up the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere
He told himself he didn’t care pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate.]
There’s nothing
left of that, but even now when night pulls up
like a limousine, sea-blue, and I’m climbing the stairs,
[Spectacular simile, night pulling up like a sea-blue limousine… urban, surreal… The softness of the word, limousine, liquid, misty, druggy… All alkaloids end in -ine: nicotine, morphine… limousine…]
keys in hand, I’ll reach the landing and
you’re there—the one lesson I never get right.
Trains hurtled by, extinguished somewhere
past the bend of midnight. [Stop the world. If it doesn’t stop, if it keeps hurtling away, extinguishing itself always like each successive train, each drug hit wearing off, I can’t get hold of it…] The shuddering world. [It was never warm.]
Your arms around my waist. I never meant to leave.
* * *
Of all that, there’s nothing left but a grid
of shadows the El tracks throw over the street,
the empty lot. Gone, the blistered sills,
voices that rilled across each wall. Gone,
the naked bulb swinging from the ceiling,
that chicanery of light that made your face
a brief eclipse over mine. [What a beautiful and disturbing way to evoke their sex, also a mutual escape, also a synthetic effort – like the drugs – at pain-erasure.] How did we live?
The mare broke down. I was your fate, that
yellow train, the plot of sleet, through dust
crusted on the pane. [The cold, cutting world, glimpsed from within the corrosive bloom, the inverted eden, of that hotel room; seen at a safe drugged remove.] It wasn’t warm enough.
What did we learn? All I have left of you
is this burnt place on my arm. [Needle tracks.] So, I won’t
forget you even when I’m nothing but
small change in the desk clerk’s palm, nothing
but the pawn ticket crumpled in your pocket,
the one you’ll never redeem. Whatever I meant
to say loses itself in the bend of winter
towards extinction, [Extinguished somewhere past the bend of midnight…The poem eerily conveys what it feels like to be unable to experience continuity in one’s life; to have everything appear and then disappear so that you can’t learn any lessons and are constantly buffeted by a cruel world. The poet is like the character Rhoda, in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.]
this passion of shadows falling
like black orchids through the air. I never meant
to leave you there by the pane, that
terminal hotel, the world shuddering with trains. [The hotel sat alongside a train terminal; but also of course it’s a place of death, where the mare on whom you had placed such hopes collapses, unable to run the race.]
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I’m thoroughly pulled into the bluesy moody musing consciousness of this beautiful poem which has condensed into itself so many of the elements of the speaker’s undoing.
And that is what a really strong poem can do. It can make an extinguished poet revenant, make her a voice that rills through me.
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UD thanks the University of Iowa Press for permission to reprint.