Short Poem 1: station
 

On Bloomfield

Our beards are soft and gray as morning ash
endowed with parables and cigarettes.
Our coats, a vagary of petty cash,
describe the button holes in safety nets.
And if this station cracks beneath our boots,
the cold, erasing rain may knit us suits.

This poem is a bit of a puzzler.

The only sense I can make of the title is that it is the name of a town (probably one of several) in the U.S.

I was trying to acclimatise myself to the idea of a beard being endowed with parables and cigarettes (I failed) when I realised that what the first two lines (as a consequence of the lack of punctuation) actually mean is that "morning ash" is so endowed. Stumped then.

The rest of this appears to make even less sense.

I googled "Bloomfield Station" and what do you know? there is one in New Jersey. But that didn't help any.

To have chosen this, Wendy must have got it. So I'm assuming there is some U.S. code in here that a humble Englishman couldn't hope to decipher.

But coats can't describe and rain can't knit. I know this. Illogical ideas, but not startling enough to count as truly surreal in an unsettling or disturbing way.

I look forward to Wendy's elucidation and comments.

No idea who might have written this (unless someone like Allen T, who sometimes comes in from left field...)

Getting ready to kick myself in due course...

P

This is a marvel to me. As for some of the apparent lack of logic to the description, I can only say that the impression I got was that of gazing in reverie at an everyday scene in an everyday place (Bloomfield = Everytown) through a veil of some sorts: a wet windshield perhaps, on a gray morning; or maybe eyes still full of sleep during a morning commute. The paint-by-numbers postcard has been dipped in something viscous and melancholy that makes the colors and the sharp edges of reality run together. As such, it paints a mood with words, rather than talks a picture.

Such an approach might prove too dense in large doses, but sized like this I think it works perfectly.

Nemo

It left me cold. I'm sure that its difficulties can be puzzled out, but it doesn't motivate me to make the effort. Perhaps Wendy can educate me.

Maybe it wants a reader who assumes that obscurity equals profundity. The problem with this poem is that it is four lines too long. The writer should have stopped with the two excellent descriptive lines, 1 and 3, and left the conclusions to the reader. If Bloomfield Station ever cracks beneath my boots the last thing I'll worry about is a new rain-knitted suit.

Next?

Carol

It appears, to me, to be a riddle.

I’m not good at riddles; to little zeal for that kind of quest. If it’s not a riddle, then I do not understand it at all. That could be a sign of my stupidity, many things are, but then again, it could be a sign pointing to limited appreciation for this particular poem do to its apparent opacity.

Fr. RP

Well, it’s a killer. I see it as a poem about the homeless at a train station. No sooner does the subject appear than we’re given that devastating image of erasure. This poem shows us just how much atmosphere, imaginative thought, and empathy, can arise from a mere six lines. Every word is intentional and purposeful , yet the poem does not appear beholden to the intellect. Rather it appears beholden to, and emboldened by, the emotion that conceived it. A real lesson there for all of us. To give the intellect its secondary due: I imagine the imagery and the undisturbed meter would mean a great deal less without…well, without what feels like the holy ghost of restraint. Beautifully handled.

Give the intellect its secondary due? You can’t read this poem without it, much less figure it out by placing the intellect second. Emotion over intellect is the life of an animal not a human being. Intellect informed by emotion is human.

I thought of the homeless but then the last few lines lead me away from that, into riddle land.

Sorry, but I’m not with it.

Fr. RP

Bless me father, for I have sinned. ; )

I love it (and I'm pretty sure I know who wrote it), and to me it's a creative spin on a snapshot of early morning commuters, dreary and depressed in a cold rain at a gray station in a gray town, seen through the lens of mentally and visually bleary eyes, and turned into something else. And it reminded me of the Unreal City section of The Wasteland, and I cannot not like anything that reminds me of that faceless crowd. It's a painting as much as a poem, and you wouldn't look at a painting and complain it's obscure or puzzling (at least I hope not) - you'd go with it. I think poetry deserves the same - certainly for six lines. This might not work nearly as well if it was a much longer poem, but for a six-liner - oh hell, climb on and take a ride on the railroad. (Or, whatever you do, don't read In a Station of the Metro.)

I done seen it before, and all I can say, squire, is I never done it, and he din't too.

I dunno? I'm not getting homelessness from this at all. Endowed, button holes, safety nets, petty cash, station, suits--sounds more like bankers. Their beards are not scraggly and dirty, they are soft and gray which sounds more like age and refinement. It seems purposely misleading, but I don't understand why it's that way. If it's making a point, I don't get it at the moment. Maybe out of work homeless Wall Street Execs??


And I don't get morning ash at all. What the heck is morning ash? Is that different than afternoon ash ;)

Donna

This poem leaves a lot of questions.
One example is in the first line:

Our beards are soft and gray as morning ash

It's important to consider the POV here. This is not some Poundian observer seeing bearded faces at a (metro) station; this IS one of the bearded faces. So presumably it's not a scene seen from a distance, blurring together or dissolving. My question, then, is why is the narrator telling us his beard is soft? It must an important detail, because in my opinion beards usually are not soft -- short beards, anyway, can be prickly. So what's up with the soft beards? Do homeless people have soft beards?

Another line to question:
the cold, erasing rain may knit us suits.
I want to like this line, but it's too contradictory: the rain is erasing (= deleting) yet at the same time it is knitting (= creating). Something is wrong with the choice of words in this line.

Here's a line I like:
And if this station cracks beneath our boots,

I wish I liked the rest of the poem. My guess is, the poem is trying hard to be "special" but it just ends up 'erasing' itself in the process.

Michael and I are on exactly the same page here.

Nemo

Wrong. Is a painting exempt from the need to communicate?

Carol

Is logical articulation the only form of communication? Nay.

Nemo

I don't particularly like the style in which this is written, having a preference for poems that make more literal kinds of sense. Nevertheless, like Wendy I thought that this was about homeless men at a station. "Holes in safety nets" or "cracks" are what they have fallen through, and "petty cash" is the spare change they are asking for as they "buttonhole" passersby. The beards are long because they don't shave, gray because they are old (and possibly have cigarette ashes in them), and the parables are probably about the poor and how they should be treated. The only kind of sense I could make of knit suits was that very cheap "leisure" suits are sometimes made of double-knit. I suspect that the boots are cracked and that "vagary" is describing the men's general manner and suggestive of "vagrant." "Bloomfield" is no doubt a real place, but ironic in contrast to the poem's content.

Susan

Well, I don't get commuters or homeless people, and I certainly don't get any emotion whatsoever.

Fridge magnets is what I get.

I guess we'll have enlightenment, if at all, only when the culprit is named.

P

I read it initially as a commentary on penitent investment bankers: "us suits" seemed a giveaway.
Then I realised I'd misread Bloomfield as Bloomberg.
Best regards,
David

I'm sorry some people aren't getting this one - it's full of poetry.

Or is it about plants?
Holly, please enlighten us.

I love it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I seem to remember having seen this poem in a slightly longer form here on the Sphere, and I remember who wrote it. It is a watercolor of despair. Of course the rain can knit - those "drops" sometimes seem more like needles!

those {rain} "drops" sometimes seem more like needles>>

What a keen observation. This had escaped my attention.

Susan's analysis of specific word choice accords with my own. Each word is so carefully chosen, one can hardly dismiss a one. The 'erasing' rain continues to fascinate, and slay me. There are some things we don't want to look in the eye -- or even refuse to notice at all. I maintain the author took a genius approach to a most difficult subject.

And I think those who see a dreary painting of despair and facelessness -- but no specific message are onto something, too; even if it isn't the vision I received from this.

This is a poem I've seen before in a longer form (a sonnet, actually). I also know who the poet is.

I loved it when I first read it, and still do. It's a watercolor (as someone mentioned), and a powerful and evocative picture. The words don't make clear-cut, black and white sense -- but so what? It's art! :)

Martin

I remember this poem when it was workshopped, and I like the subsequent revisions. I think the poem works very well and is completely understandable - although, it's not a case of first impression. I like it.

Frank

If the measure of a poem is the reaction it prompts, it succeeds in that way. So maybe there is a point to being provocatively vague.

What I keep coming back to, though, is that if this poem is indeed about homelessness then the central error is in putting it in the first person. When you are homeless, you don't speak or think in wishy-washy watercolours--life becomes much more focused on the real, the immediate, and the practical.

This has the feel of something conceived in the first person, but translated into the third person to avoid seeming distanced from the subject, but the paradox is that the romantic fallacy thus perpetrated places even more distance between the reader and the subject.

There is a poem by Stephen Spender about the unemployed which this perversely reminded me of--perversely, because it is the antithesis of this in its simple observation, plain language and artlessness. The Spender poem is more effective than this by many orders of magnitude.

And as for comparing poetry with visual art, you can't really. The stuff of visual art is not language, and it cannot "mean" anything in the strictest sense. It can depict and/or convey mood, but the joy of visual art (as with music) is that it bypasses the intellect. Poetry can't bypass the intellect--the words will mean something, regardless of any intention to convey mood alone.

Anyway, those are my thoughts having given this the benefit of numerous reads.

Philip

I pick up bits of each of the proposed explications, and I think that ellipticality works here -- it is a poem about blurring and erasure, and so it seems blurry to some effect. But, even that blurriness is deceptive because the clarity of specific images make the poem. A well-turned piece, I say.

David R.

I read the poem as a person about to be shunted off to their death, as in railway ghost stories. But I could be wrong.

I read these lines:

Our coats, a vagary of petty cash,
describe the button holes in safety nets.

and went mad with envy.

I'm not sure what the poem is "about." Maybe I should care more than I do.

John

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

I maintain that a poem is not what it is about, but what it leaves in its own wake as it passes through the water between writer and reader. This one leaves an alluringly imprecise image floating there. I don't ask any more from it than that.

(Not that there aren't other sorts of poems, of course--which can succeed in other entirely different ways)

Nemo

My favorite so far, though I'm not crazy about "endowed" and "describe," as they seem discordant word choices for the poem. I think the poem would be even stronger without lines 2 and 4.

I know this station. But it's not called Bloomfield. It's called Crewe and every British serviceman who's ever been posted from anywhere to anywhere despairs, at some stage, of ever leaving its platforms,
Peter Wyton.

A lovely, sad tone poem. Like many, I was puzzled at first, but I'm convinced by Wendy and Susan's reading of it as describing the homeless.

If that's the case, I'm uncertain about the use of "button holes" in line 4. If the intent is to suggest that the men's coats are ragged, then the holes in question are likely larger than button holes. (The holes in "safety nets," such as those below the high wire, are larger than button holes as well. And the holes in the metaphorical social "safety net," which the homeless have fallen through, are good-sized, too.)

I don't know what to suggest instead--"looping holes" or "unstopped holes"?

In any case, lovely work.

I cannot get over what seems to me a deep flaw in this piece, namely that these homeless people are thinking in riddles. The general complexity of the poem seems an exaggerated reaction to the equally naive notion that homelessness is a simple problem, and that the homeless should just find a job. At a certain point, intellectual gameplay becomes patronizing, and that is the case here. Who is this poem for, I wonder? And why the heck are homeless people being so lavishly dressed with mystique and metaphor? I'd be far more sympathetic if the poem made even the slightest effort to call half the attention to its subject matter that it does to itself. The priorities of this poem are unforgivably backward.

And why the ostentation of "On" in the title? Is this a philosophic treatise?

Sorry I cannot be more positive here.

Nick

Well, I'm hoping the writer will provide the missing clue that ties it together. Meanwhile I think you're all wrong that it's about homeless people. It has to be about old people who haven't enough to do and spend too much time sitting around public places waiting to die.

Carol

Impressionism.

Nemo

False Impressionism

Philip

False because it doesn't "impress" you?
I don't see what is demonstrably false about the technique regardless of whether you like the result or not.

Nemo