As I read Anne Winters, I was reminded of Adrienne Rich’s essay in which she says that she uses poetry in order to make sense of things. I can see this idea in Winters’s work, specifically when looking at “The Grass Grower.” The McHale article was also helpful in looking at the narrative that is created in this specific poem as far as investigating ways in which Winters constructs gaps and spaces within the poetic form.  

                The poem itself is divided into two sections, and within the space of the two sections, it is evident that a time lapse has occurred. The speaker begins the narrative in 1979, after integration and only a few years after Jim Crow Laws were abolished, but then flashes back to the speakers first encounter with the grass grower. The overall narrative depicts the evolution of the relationship between “a skinny white kid” and “a black vet” named Joel Harmon. If the collection of poems can be viewed as a cohesive whole with one speaker, it is possible to make the argument that the speaker is Anne herself. However, the first-person narrator remains unnamed and undescribed, aside from the aforementioned epithet.

By applying McHale’s contributions to the poetic narrative, I can see how Winters constructs the narrative from stanza to stanza. In the first stanza Winters creates a snap shot of Joel Harmon, the grass grower, providing a brief but vivid description of the subject. As the reader focuses on this image, the speaker shifts back into memory, imagining him “[as] on that first day.” The reader is propelled forward into the next stanza and back into time through Winters’s enjambed line formation. This technique is used continuously through the two-part poem, guiding the reader not only in and out of time but blurring the lines of the internal and external.

Spaces are created through the varied use of internal thought and the external dialogue that occurs between the speaker and Joel Harmon. Within the dialogue, Winters seems to play with the concept of time as Harmon recounts his experiences and memories to the speaker, creating a third person within the narrative, a personified Jim Crow. Recalling the idea of the initial snapshot, the speaker paints an image as “Line by line you gave me Jim’s portrait, his subtle subsets.” As the speaker explores these experiences, she later declares, “So I’d sensed by then, that Jim, and not you, was the subject.” Harmon is displaced by the fictional image of Jim Crow, the Jim that “made [him] a grass-widow man here in Harlem.

While narrative is significant in this particular poem, Winters also does some interesting and worthwhile things with the concept of language. Joel Harmon is a radio repair man, someone who fixes a source of sound and words yet “simply conducting, in silence [his] life.” Through his dialogue, Winters points to the power of words, equating the words of Jim Crow Laws to the death march of Hitler and Stalin, “liked words.” And I can’t help but connect the idea of Harmon as a repair man of words, sowing the seeds of … I’m not quite sure what.