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.

What does it all mean?

As I read Jean Valentine, I was reminded at times of Merwin, at times of Rich, but then at times there was something that seemed all her own. I have nothing really to stand on in this statement as the collection is the only work of Valentine I have read; however, I can state that she is not a copycat of either but uses her own voice to explore some of the same concepts.  Like Merwin, Valentine is interested in the idea of loss, memory, and the beyond – what lies beyond death. Like Rich, Valentine is interested in the powerless, the helpless, and the act of creating. And like them both, Valentine seems to ponder the place and purpose of the aging poet. However, Valentine does not come across as politically charges at Rich’s work; Valentine seems to be more concerned with the human connection.

 As a newcomer to both Rich and Valentine, I found that Rich could be appreciated and, despite her complexity, could be accessed in a superficial way upon the initial reading. While you may not know the exact event Rich is referencing, I could still enjoy the lyrical sound of her work and the initial feelings it invoked. In some ways, the ambiguity of Rich’s poems was intentional to create a more global connection, to enforce the idea that we are all humans tied to the politics of location. Valentine's work, however, isjust as complex but slightly less approachable. As she referrences various works and people I am not familiar with, I had to put forth extra effort to connect with her work. Perhaps this is a way for her to speak to those that want to know, that are willing to go beyond the questions for answers? Playing with the idea of the supernatural and the dreaming world, Valentine ponders the idea of knowing, the idea of breaking the glass between this world and the next.  For example, in her poem “You ask,” Valentine presents a scenario of someone seemingly from the beyond asking the speaker to coffee: “You ask, / Could we have coffee?  --No, my truth, I’m still on this side.” The speaker then goes on to tell the spirit (friend, lover, family member, whomever) that s/he still sees him/her in the faces of strangers, that s/he continues to miss that person.

However, the poem seems to be more than that. Valentine uses the reference of the beautiful edge by the water in this poem as in others, leading me to the idea of water used in the Bible, but I am not sure what to make of it. She references the story of the woman at the well in her poem “Eurydice who guides,” in which the speaker says, “I met them in the country by the well / and once I drank from them / I never thirst.” In the biblical version, Jesus tells the woman to drink and she will never thirst again; however, Valentine combines this story with the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus (which can also be equated to Lot and his wife. Throughout the work, Valentine seems to draw from images of music, myths and stories from various religions, in an effort to know. This desire seems to culminate in her series to Lucy, in which she explores the idea as the mother of the human species, as the being that knows everything.

Valentine does so much, and her poems seem to interconnect across the sections. I am still not sure of how it all works together, but her work is something I would definitely like to explore further.

When I first read Rich’s “USonian Journals,” I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. First, I wondered if the placement signified something as the rest of the sections seemed for the most part in chronological order. Second, the “USonian Journals” is the only section written in prose poetry. I understood these selections better, but I am not exactly sure why. Perhaps I understood because there were more words? Perhaps I understood better because of its location, and I had experienced some of her work already? While I haven’t come to any concrete conclusions, I do think that reading Longenbach’s chapter on Poem and Prose as well as Rich’s essay “Notes toward a Politics of Location” helped me tremendously in looking at the “USonian Journals” in a thoughtful way. 

Longenbach reverences several examples of poets who turned to prose writing when the poetic lines wouldn’t present themselves. In his example of Yeats, Longenbach suggests that “whenever he wrote out a prose version of what he imagined a poem might be, the poem became itself not because of the logical sense of the prose but because a snatch of language in the prose ignited, leading sonically to other words, creating patterns of sound while simultaneously disrupted them” (103-4).  While Rich kept the prose form in the “USonian Jouranls,” I can see her using them as a way of putting ideas into words and then developing those ideas into individual poems. The idea of a journal in itself suggests that these prose poems were originally thoughts on a page, solidifying a moment in time into words on a page, a moment Rich could then explore. Additionally, the dates associated with the “Journals” spans two years or so, before and after Septemember 11, 2001.

If, in fact, Rich began the “Usonian Journals” in the same fashion as Yeats, I can see where images in the “USonian Journals” inspired separate poems. Hints of the “Journals” can be found in “This Evening Let’s,” in which the speaker wished to avoid the topic of country but to focus on the individual, to focus on the just the two of them at that particular moment, in that particular place. This poem seems to echo—as well as counter— lunch with K., in which K. categories their various coworkers and discusses Victorian prose in terms of the industrial revolution. Similarly, I saw residual ideas from “Address,” in which Rich depicts the “mixed metaphor of food,” the blending of replacing Thanksgiving with Christmas. In “USonian Journals,” the speaker ruminates over “how quickly things and people get replaced. Thanksgiving is replaced by Christmas before it has even arrived. The husband is replaced by the speaker when the wife mistakes the speaker’s car for her own.

In addition to Longenbach, Rich’s “Notes toward a Political of Location,” help illuminate the ideas that Rich is hashing out in the “Journals.” Rich says that she needs “to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create” (64). This investigation of a moment seems to be depicted in the “Journals,” in which violence occurs outside of the restaurant, and she documents her movements. The speaker goes on to take that moment than ruminate on how she would like to show what’s happening, not just the bad stuff but to “see how differently we’re all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter.”

In her desire to slow things down, to record a moment in order to know, Rich seems to struggle with the medium of language, aware of its ability “to ostracize,” “to dissociate,” to “torture,” but also aware of its ability to create a “territory shared,” a commonality that could unite.  

Upon Discovering Adrienne Rich

            In reading Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins, I immediately picked up the political implications—of varying subjects and degrees—within each of the poems that I have thus far read. Like Merwin, her poems seem to have lyrical quality, one in which you can appreciate the sound of the poem, the images that she evokes without knowing the exact event she references, although a specific event may not serve as the primary focus of every poem. In some poems she references specific events, such as the voting scandal in Tallahassee, FL. In others, she seems to be, like Merwin, seeking answers to impossible questions; however, the questions seem to be different for Rich.

            For Rich, the questions seem to revolve around making sense of the world in which she finds herself and, in the process, drawing political attention to the oppressed, the marginalized. While Merwin investigates memory and distance in his book of poems, Rich seems to use distance in an effort to separate herself from the culture of the location in which she happened to find herself, to don the persona of those marginalized in order to see the world as they do. However, Rich is also marginalized as a Jewish lesbian growing up in the midst of great political turmoil. She realizes that she cannot completely separate herself from the internalized values, moral, etc. with which certain outside forces instilled. Her parents, her location, her education have all influenced her place in the world and how she is expected to view it.  

            In her efforts to take on different perspectives, Rich diminishes the larger implications of global politics and brings the focus back to the individual, advocating personal relationships and the individual over governmental politics. While Merwin’s use of “I” in his poems left me with the impression of a single speaker, Rich’s “I” appears to be more complicated, taking on different personas at various times as she attempts to distance herself from her individual identity to investigate the perspective of others. Despite such a global focus, her poems strike me as intimate, not overtly attacking corporate greed, government power and oppression but in raw whispers. Instead, she focuses on people—their responses and how the poet speaker wishes to be viewed by them. At times, however, the poems seem to express the thoughts of a frustrated speaker in the inability of Man, specifically Americans, to step out of their habits and sense of entitlement to use their voices, to view the world not as a set of stereotypes but as a community of individuals with individual histories, to invest in people instead of things.

            While Merwin’s poetry provided me with a sense of universal connectedness through personal images, Rich seems to be tearing down the universal in order to focus on the individual, creating in me the overall idea that we are all humans and have the same capacity to experience the same emotions but that we are all still individuals that perceive the world in individual ways.

Just Around the Bend...

In Helen Vendler’s review of Merwin and The Shadow of Sirius, she depicts a vivid link between Merwin and his personal memories and experiences; however, through his poetry, Merwin is able is able to express a more universal experience, evoking a connection in the reader with the words on the page. How is this possible? While language may not have a word to capture a certain feeling, he is able to create a simple image or images that speak to the reader. How can such personal experiences, personal memories that have no direct connection to me the reader, produce a similar emotion? Is it because it is a poem, and we, as a reader, expect some evocative punch line to leave us ethereal?

I think Merwin tests the idea of memory and the lived experience with the bending of time, creating a place in which the speaker resides in a place that Vendler calls “suspended between past and present, with neither environment providing a true native tongue.” Through the linear and/or recursive nature of his poems, Merwin simultaneously depicts the effects of time—the aging of a hand, the changing of the seasons—with the overall feeling of timelessness—“the river still seems not to move / as though it were the same river” (96). However in other poems, Merwin seems to comment on inconstancy of time, testing the notion that it creeps by unnoticeably—“it has come upon us again taking us once more by surprise” (85). In this poem, Merwin seems to suggest the sudden change of seasons, as if the grass were suddenly ready for reaping and the change of the season happens in an instant. Perhaps Merwin is testing the notion of poetry in memory, the ability to recall one instant in time, one moment in which everything changed or became illuminated?

In “The Long and the Short of It,” I see Merwin exploring the idea of memory and how it can be expressed in poetry. He explored the idea of measurement and the distance between the memories he recalls, how he experiences the memory now with the distance of time and age and how the memory is never truly captured as it was originally experienced. It is by words that we measure, and it is in the words that we find meaning, reflectively examining the moments of our lives that led us to where we are and attempting to contain them in neat little rows, “the verse turning with its breath.” Although he doesn’t use specific rhyme and meter, this particular line evokes the meter and measure of song. Something, again, that is measured. However, the idea of measurement is problematic in that there is something here that is beyond measure. When words are not enough and one must use rely on a recreated image, the nameless emotions cannot be measured, yet we believe it, we feel it.

As Merwin states in “My Hand,” “it is what I remember / but it never seems quite the same.” While in this particular poem Merwin ponders the living presence of the past as it consumes the present, he tests the idea of memory and how it is not the same as the original experience. He demonstrates the quick transition of past to present, of experience (perhaps event would be a more apt word?) to memory in the words he chooses to describe the images: flutter, vanished, flash.

In each poem, I felt this sense of beyondness. If I read this poem just one more time, I will be able to grasp it. I will have the answer to the question; I will know what he wants me to know. The feeling, the words, the moment is right there is I could just stretch a little further, if I just dig a little deeper for the gold. Perhaps this is what Merwin wanted, to create for the reader individual moments of exploration and contemplation, to ask the reader to ponder those same questions and to hear the silence.