… has asked her to elaborate on why the inauguration day poem was so bad. Here goes.

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

*********************************

Why is this a bad poem?

Forget delivery. Could have been delivered in a shimmery soprano by Kathleen Battle. Look at the language. Look at where UD began to laugh.

She began to laugh here:

picked the cotton and the lettuce

“Why lettuce?” she asked out loud. No one answered. UD‘s alone at the seashore. Only the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the tide replied.

“Why not?” the tide replied. “Why not? Why not lettuce and peanuts and coffee beans and rice?”

“Well … cotton, you know… I get cotton. It’s a reference to slavery. But lettuce…? Man does not live by bread alone, says Woody Allen: Frequently there must be a beverage. It’s like that. What my kid would call random.”

“I see what you mean, UD. But why? Why does it come across as random?”

“Here’s why. The poem lacks a metaphor. It lacks a controlling dominant image. It also lacks a controlling mood. Its title promises a song. A song of praise. That’s a bit vague, but okay. We’re ready. We’ve encountered songs of praise before, and we’re ready for another one. We expect an upbeat mood, etc. But where’s the singing here? Where’s the praising? Where’s anything? We’re looking for a way to ground ourselves in this poem. We’re looking for an image that recurs, or an idea that recurs. We’re looking for language that holds together by means of rhythmic repetition — after all, it tells us it’s a song — or by means of a controlling metaphor through which all of the poem’s images can be understood so that when we get to the end of the poem we feel we’ve had a coherent experience. Something comprehensible, graspable, has been said… Forget beauty. Beauty would have been nice, but there isn’t any here. Plain speech and all that. Okay. But at least give us a coherent utterance.”

“You’re being awfully harsh, UD. Karlson’s right. You’re going to have to elaborate.”

“Line by line?”

“Line by line”

“Hokay.”

************************************

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

First off, forget rhyme. You’re not going to get a song that rhymes. What about intriguing, beautiful language instead? Language that sings? Poetry that doesn’t rhyme is fine, but poetry lacking all lilt, all linguistic oomph, is not fine. Especially if its title tells us it’s a song.

The idea in this first stanza is that we live quotidian inauthentic frustrated lives – stuck in daily business, asocial… Sometimes we catch each other’s eyes, and sometimes we speak, but it’s no different from not speaking or not catching each other’s eyes. Rather depressing, this.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Yet more depressing. In place of speech, mere noise. We note already the use of repetition in this poem. And yet – why? In what way does it strengthen or underline or shift in some noteworthy way what the poem wants to say by having it say certain things twice? I see no point to the repetition.

Many people report having been bored by this poem. Pointless repetition is one of the reasons.

Now we get a new image: bramble, thorn. When we speak, our words are the accumulated words of all of our ancestors, and OUCH. They hurt. They are brambles, thorns. Bleeding tongues. Not pretty. Odd in a praise song. Vague thoughts in the reader’s mind of Jesus here. Should there be? Will there be a Christian element? Er, a little maybe, at the end. But the poet does nothing with it. Which is the other big problem with this poem. Random stabs in the direction of many images, none of which becomes a symbol or metaphor, because each is dropped as soon as mentioned, and no shaping, therefore, of a larger message takes place.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Put this in the form of a sentence. Same deal. It is a sentence, that’s why. It’s not poetry. Poetry is a special sort of utterance in which plain prose is lifted up into something that sings. This is flat speech. Not poetry. It tries, with ye olde repetition, to be poetry at the end of the sentence — repairing the things in need of repair. But because there’s no content here beyond simple statement, and no poetic elevation of the prose in which it becomes suggestive of more than mere propositional statement, it just sits there, looking stupid. Looking like a tautology. We repair… things that need to be repaired! We speak or… we don’t speak! If there’s no larger meaning, or at least larger implication, that you can lend your language, you’re lost.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

Again, the sense of arbitrary observation rendered in dull language. We begin to detect a slight theme — the difficulty of expressing ourselves — weighed down by ancestors, by mutual incomprehension, by the dull dailiness of life’s business… But then we get images of waiting and watching… What are they about? And we get a teacher who speaks to her students telling them to start writing… And?… Do we condemn the teacher? She perhaps has contributed to the linguistic dullness, the desperate attempts to communicate, that this song of praise describes…

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

Well, it was thorn and bramble before; now it’s still spiny, but also smooth. If spiny means painfully derivative, what does smooth mean? And note once again the deadly repetition that feels not like a song but like a kindergarten teacher repeating things for our slow-witted benefit. words, words… consider, reconsider… This poem is talking down to us.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

This fails to make sense spatially, and in a variety of other ways. Who crosses highways?

And is it the crossing we’re supposed to be thinking about — Like the chicken, we want to see what’s on the other side — or is it travellin’ down that highway? I know there’s something better down the road. Across or down? See – it’s just muddy. Poetry is supposed to be language at its most carefully deployed. This is a mess.

And it gets worse. Put aside the cliches that comprise this entire stanza. Note instead another pointless transition — again, her transitions come across as pointless because the poem is unstructured by any dominant image or mood — We need to find a place where we are safe. Where did that idea come from? Who said we were in danger? This reads as bathos.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Okay, this is a promising moment. The stifled or failed or painful speech that went before is now set aside, and we are enjoined to say it plain. Sing it out. But if you introduce your stanzas like this, the reader has a right to expect a reasonable elevation of language at this point. It feels like a climax. Yet we get more dully reported examples of human effort. The ugliness of the final two lines – “brick by brick the glittering edifices / they would then keep clean and work inside of.” – cannot be evaded. Brick by brick is a terrible cliche. And ending her sentence with the deadly little creepy crawly of? Really. Look at this language. Read it aloud. And tell me how it could possibly be understood as poetic.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

This is about as good as it gets. She at least alludes to her title. But the stanza remains a compendium of cliches.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

Because the poet has been unable to rise above cliches, the ancient and beautiful truths she cites here – love thy neighbor, etc. – become as it were infected by her trite linguistic universe. They too wither into cliche. Then we suddenly get love — again, since the metaphorical ground hasn’t been prepared for it, it just jumps out as the next thing the poet grabs — which, in a stale version of Wallace Stevens’ calm darkens among waterlights, becomes a widening pool of light. And why at this late stage in the poem the pool image? Again — nothing in the poem has done anything with that liquidity. As a result it’s just a bore — part of a grab bag of images which together amount to little more than sentimentality. As to the glorious word pre-empt, no comment.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

The poet pulls herself together here and concludes by returning to her inadequately expressed idea about self-expression.

A poem mainly about the importance of overcoming the difficulty of expressing ourselves should be able to express itself. There lies the depressive dullness at the core of this lament: The poem tells us that we’ll never make any progress toward the light.

*****************************

Update: Here’s another explanation of why this poem failed.

*****************************

Another update: Well, I thought “lettuce” was random, because I recall everyone in my town boycotting grapes, not lettuce. I take the point that lettuce is another clear reference to oppressed farmworkers.

The idea of great American poetry on inauguration day’s a good one. UD thought she’d share a great American poem — one that says things about the sea she’s been trying to say in her own writing. It’s The Slow Pacific Swell, by Yvor Winters.

Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.

Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.

A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.

******************************

Any reader can sense, even on a first reading, the writer’s effort to convey something about how the mind works. Maybe the way awareness comes and goes. Sometimes we experience very sharp precision of thought, and sometimes we float into vagueness; sometimes we’re mentally agitated, and sometimes we’re very calm — pacific, if you like. Sometimes we drift very close to the truth; sometimes we’re kept infinitely far away from it.

More interestingly, sometimes consciousness feels like both of these states at once. Like the seawater that washes up on the poet’s ship, consciousness can be a “loose weight” — which sounds like an oxymoron, but water is very heavy, and at the same time without structure. Our thoughts have weight, perhaps, but they are after all merely thoughts.

So, to wade through the poem…

Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.

[Note the last phrase of the poem: “Ebbing out of mind.” The land is where we walk through our lives, grounded, in a familiar world. The sea remains, in its vastness, looseness, and distance, ungraspable, incomprehensible, to us. So say it conveys here the realm of intellectual and spiritual mystery — all that we’ll never understand, however advanced we become. We gaze at it and listen to it because we’re enchanted and intrigued by what we don’t know.]

When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.

[Everything here goes to precision, clarity, the ability to hold something steady in order to see it, analyze it. No dust in the eye; a clear April day; the sky’s unbroken by cloud. Dark and precise the little steamers ply – / Firm in direction they seem not to stir. Glorious poetic concision here, stating something I’ve thought too, gazing through my binoculars at cargo ships in the afternoon, so geometrically clear, heading somewhere full of goods… And yet – he’s right – they don’t seem to be moving. They’re so far away. Sometimes I’ll stare them a long time just to measure their forward progress from place to place; but it’s so hard to see them actually moving as they get somewhere! So another paradox beloved of poets — firm in direction but not stirring.]

Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.

[Cape Flattery’s “the farthest northwest point of the contiguous United States.” Here all the clarity, precision, and stillness dissolves as the poet’s thrown to the deck by the force of the waves. He’s lost consciousness, briefly, and lies dreaming.]

Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.

[The slow pacific swell. So much of our lives we spend dreaming, half-conscious; and then the slow pacific swell of thought and feeling overwhelms us, rouses us to awareness. I came / Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same. Yet the act of awareness — the formation, the swell, of thought — will be maddeningly slow.  We’ll be getting somewhere, perhaps — like those steamers — but it’s going to feel as though we’re stuck.]

That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.

[The poet’s skull; and now the whale’s head: The theme of awareness, of consciousness itself as it tries to understand and act upon the world, seems dominant to me in this poem. The whale is a kind of perfection of consciousness; it can lift itself clean above the wave.]

And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.

[Same paradox of consciousness: A shining moment of clarity, triumph over the ungraspable infinite; and then it sinks in spray, back to the deeps.]

A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.

[I prefer to live on land, where I can feel somewhat secure in my world, though I know that by keeping a distance from the rushing of the deep I remain only half-awake. I don’t confront, or try to take into account, that deeper enigmatic realm that undoes our sense of precision.]

By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.

[There’s something frightening – and hence evaded – about the powerful realm of chaos the sea expresses to us constantly.]

The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,

[This line wins the alliteration award.]

Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,

[Here again things feel pretty ominous. The sea doesn’t merely remind us of the erosion of our certainties; it withdraws land… It actively undermines our sense of solidity.]

Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;

[Heaving – like the poet himself heaving on the deck under the water’s influence; and – blind. The poem ends with that ultimate image of darkness… And the sea is under the influence, after all, of the moon; and so it is passive, and unable, like the little steamers, to set its own direction. You might have at some point in reading this poem been reminded of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which has a similar theme — the sea in its circular powerful chaos is both a figure for our own sense of spiritual and intellectual futility, and a challenge to us to struggle toward greater clarity.]

Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.

[The poem concludes with the final escape of the sea and all its philosophical challenge; or, rather, with our banishment of the sea, our insisting that it ebb out of our minds so that we can regain a sense of uprightness on solid ground.]

[Maybe you didn’t think of Arnold.  Maybe you thought of Elizabeth Bishop – At the Fishhouses.  This is how that poem ends.]

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

***********************

Cape Flattery

… arranged it so that just after Elizabeth Alexander recited her verse, Joseph Lowery recited his?

It’s a lesson, if you want to learn it. A graphic lesson, in art and oratory.

… of the W.D. Snodgrass poem, April Inventory, is now available for viewing at Inside Higher Ed.

I dedicate this yearly post
On the newly-done UD
To the drink I drink the most
And most adore: tea.
Coffee revs me up to teach.
Tea’s greater reach
Summons the muse.
I could go on about the brews
I steep and sip… bergamot-rich Earl Gray,
And Lady Gray (a less-known mix)
The milky chai you fix
In complex, subtle ways:
Honey, sugar, cardamom seed …
The way its sweet smoke, freed

To float around the room
Mingles with the smoke of a candle,
Also scented, to make romantic the gloom
Of an autumn night. Imagine sandal-
Wood coming off the pillar, and the fruity
Spice of Marco Polo, a moody
November evening, an aromatic log
In the kindling, and … the blog.
The blog, redesigned, beside the fiery
Hearth, hard by a porcelain cup,
Calling out for up-
Dates of University Diaries.

Before I settle
To sessions of bloggy thought,
I rise and return to the kettle
To brew another tea I bought:
Snowberry Pumpkin Ceylon…
Oh ship of tea, sail on!
All Thanksgiving praise
To oxidized haze,
To heat rising up from the swirl,
The pot scorched out,
Its Asian spout
A crackled pearl.
A hymn to the leaf serene.
A hymn to the black and green.