topics: |  poetry | critic

i find books on "teaching" poetry interesting, if only for their choice of poems, which are often exceellent.

wolofsky divides her discourse into parts, that proceed from individual words, to poetic syntax, to images and metaphor. to my mind, images and metaphor could have come before syntax, surely. on the whole, the text seems to be focused more on the form than on content.

but to me, this very attempt to break up the substance of poetry, the "naming of the parts" of poetry, seems difficult to defend. more than anything else, poetry needs to be holistic, perhaps.

the first poem cited is a classic, and works well to illustrate the nature of prosody. Why it belongs to the chapter on "individual words" is another matter. This dissection of a poem into its constituents seems to jar... I would go with the gentler, less structured, spirit in J Paul Hunter's Introduction to Poetry - let's look at some good poems and talk about how they work.

but Today we have naming of parts is a great poem.

Henry Reed (1914–1968): Naming of parts

	Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
	We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
	We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
	Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
	Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
	          And today we have naming of parts.

	This is the lower sling swivel. And this
	Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
	When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
	Which in your case you have not got. The branches
	Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
	          Which in our case we have not got.

	This is the safety-catch, which is always released
	With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
	See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
	If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
	Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
	          Any of them using their finger.

	And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
	Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
	Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
	Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
	The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
	          They call it easing the Spring.

	They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
	If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
	And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
	Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
	Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
	          For today we have naming of parts.

from Wolosky's analysis

Sequences of short, choppy, phrases or sentences recount the naming of the
parts of the gun, followed by longer, flowing sentences about the
garden. This is a world not of parts but of continuous, life-giving
processes.

This opposition works on many levels. The army-camp world of the gun is
piecemeal — as is dramatized in the act itself of naming parts. Each part
makes its appearance in a choppy sequence that reflects the task of putting
together a machine. It also implies how the world of the machine is a world
itself in parts, mechanically composed and controlled. The very experience of
time and of life is divided into separate units that don’t flow together into
any kind of wholeness: A "Today," a "Yesterday," a "tomorrow"— or, most
ominously, "after firing."

The world of the army camp is presented to us through the language of an army
instruction manual, but the world of the garden is a world of exotic,
lustrous language, in striking contrast to the dry, abortive words naming the
parts of the gun. Thus, in the first stanza, against the almost blank "naming
of parts," the phrase: "Japonica glistens like coral" leaps out in its
specificity (Japonica is a tropical flower), its sensuous color, it shining
imagery.

Other things happen in this poem, too. Eventually we are naming
not only parts of the gun, but parts of ourselves, our own
bodies—yet always and only in parts: thumb and finger, but without
a hand or arm or person attached to it...  When the second to last stanza talks
about the bees "assaulting and fumbling the flowers," a new kind
of language enters the poem: the language of sexuality. The poem
develops this through the pun on "Easing the Spring"—at once
part of a gun and the moment in nature of reproductive energy.

The spring of the gun doubles the Spring of bees and flowers; but so do the
bolt and "cocking-piece" of the gun, and the "breech" that goes "backwards
and forwards," all words that pick up the sexual implications of the
fertility of the garden.

Links to this poem:
[This poem is part I of the six-part poem, Lessons of the war.  The first
five parts were written during WW2, and the last shortly thereafter.  You
can read the rest at www.solearabiantree.net:
 * II. _judging distances_
 * III. _movement of bodies_
 * IV. _unarmed combat_
 * V. _psychological warfare_
 * VI. _returning of issue_
]

you can also hear Henry Reed reading _The naming of parts_
on a BBC programme, alternating with Frank Duncan as the sergeant-major.

2 Syntax and the Poetic Line

this chapter deals with the effect of syntax...

W. B. Yeats: Leda and the Swan

	A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
	Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
	By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
	He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

	How can those terrified vague fingers push
	The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
	And how can body, laid in that white rush,
	But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

	A shudder in the loins engenders there
	The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
	And Agamemnon dead.
				Being so caught up,
	So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
	Did she put on his knowledge with his power
	Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Wolosky's analysis

This is one of the great sonnets of the twentieth century.

the first quatrain begins with a phrase all its own, a sharp, powerful
phrase, "A sudden blow."  This phrase is set off almost as a sentence
fragment; and it represents a fragment of action, sudden, unsituated,
plunging us into the poem without warning. It catches and suspends us, just
as Leda, "the staggering girl," is caught and suspended by Zeus, who comes in
the shape of a swan to rape her.

The grammatical effect of seeming to suspend the action is made still
stronger by the way Yeats arranges his lines. Here we come to a good example
of the way grammar can play off against line in a poem. "Still," the word
ending the first line, and "caressed," the word ending the second line, are
both enjambed. The end of the line does not match the end of the grammatical
unit, so that the phrases spill over from one line into the next. This leaves
each end-word suspended, making the reader pause there, held, just as the
girl is held.  Finally, we notice that in these phrases the girl is strangely
poised between serving grammatically as the subject and the object. "Her
thighs" are the noun, but the adjective "caressed" places them in the passive
position. The same holds for "her nape caught in his bill."  "Nape" is the
sentence's grammatical subject, but it is passively caught. Indeed, the girl
appears only as a list of body parts—thighs, nape, and then breast.

10 Gender and Poetic Voice

The chapter opens with this comment:

	The question of poetic voice offers a special invitation to consider
	gender and its poetic roles: in what ways do women speak, in poetry,
	as women?

As an aside, I wonder why is it that the word "gender" in social discourse,
always means women?

The chapter traces poets such as Countess of Pembroke Mary Sidney Herbert
(1561–1621)- the cited poem talks of breeing, and
				... spill
	What it first breeds; unnatural to the birth
	Of thine own womb; conceiving but to kill...

Elizabeth Bishop, who is not known as a feminist, is cited as an instance of
suppressing her femininity :

	The very indifference or muting of her voice may be a gendered mode
	of restraint in Bishop’s self-projection... p.125

But good poetry works only because it has restraint.  The best poetry has
to do with strong emotions: anger, bitterness, sorrow.  That's why poems
from times of insurrection, mass killings, prison (e.g.  Carolyn Forché's
Against Forgetting) hold such power.  But much too
often, the anger (leftist poems, feminists) becomes too direct.  It is in
subtle indirection and restraint - not from the male suzerainty but in the
diction - that poems like the following, by the indomitable Sylvia Plath,
finds its power.

Sylvia Plath : The Applicant

	First, are you our sort of person?
	Do you wear
	A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
	A brace or a hook,
	Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

	Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? then
	How can we give you a thing?
	Stop crying.
	Open your hand.
	Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

	To fill it and willing
	To bring teacups and roll away headaches
	And do whatever you tell it.
	Will you marry it?
	It is guaranteed

	To thumb shut your eyes at the end
	And dissolve of sorrow.
	We make new stock from the salt.
	I notice you are stark naked.
	How about this suit—

	Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
	Will you marry it?
	It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
	Against fire and bombs through the roof.
	Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

	Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
	I have the ticket for that.
	Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
	Well, what do you think of that?
	Naked as paper to start

	But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
	In fifty, gold.
	A living doll, everywhere you look.
	It can sew, it can cook,
	It can talk, talk, talk.

	It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
	You have a hole, it's a poultice.
	You have an eye, it's an image.
	My boy, it's your last resort.
	Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.


[in her analysis, Wolosky observes that Plath, like many good poets
(Eliot), has an ear for voices.  The rhetoric of bureaucracy is "
captured in the most appallingly ordinary diction."  This is what love
reduces to, the counting of traits - glass eyes and false teeth, vs bringing
teacups and rolling away headaches.

	The poem's sweep through gender roles is far-reaching, including the
	mourning rites in which the woman herself is to be dissolved, with
	perhaps a hint at suttee, the forced burning of the widow on her
	husband's funeral pyre: "To thumb shut your eyes at the end / And
	dissolve of sorrow." But the poem subtly and ferociously crosses

The denigration of woman is "cruel an complete" - "You have a hole, it's a
poultice." She will fill and be utterly defined by (sexualized) need.


One feminist theory of voices posits that the dominant social group projects
a dominant language, which subordinate groups then adopt and internalize. To
unearth, or achieve direct expression of, the subordinate, female voice is
one goal of feminist writing and criticism. Plath's poem complicates this
model. In her representation, a dominant language of commercial and
bureaucratic processing dominates all others. Its flattened and detached
structures incorporate female and male, with gender one distribution of
function.  The female is perhaps more effaced than the male. But the
reduction of the woman entails the reduction of the man, in a poetic voice
that is disturbed and accusatory.

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