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Deck the Halls 8: parents
<html> <body> <table width=750 background="http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/uploads/Sharon+Passmore/tealfab.jpg" cellpadding=0> <tr><td></td><td> <table width=675 background="http://www.fischerpassmoredesign.com/images/tinceiling.jpeg" border=4 bordercolor=black cellpadding=17 rules=none><tr><td></td><td>.</td><td></td></tr> </table><tr><td></td><td background="http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/uploads/Sharon+Passmore/magnolia.jpg"> Reading Aloud To The Corpses Of My Parents The speed of light slows to a crawl—. It falters—. Then it grabs a hold of wheelchair chrome, of wedding gold—. They’re barely burnished. That is all the light I have to read by. Half filled glasses in their hands are tipping—almost spilling. Lapse and loss have given birth to gaps I need to fill. My voice expands the silence it is freed by. “Your father wants to hear you read— from your own book.” So I brewed tea. And gladly silenced the tv. Their eyes closed almost instantly the moment I’d begun. Yet if I stop, they soon protest, they’re wide awake with loving smiles— a Pharaoh and his Queen beguiled by prospects of eternal rest: “Just read us chapter one.” It can’t be true my book’s that boring. Her dropped jaw. His tilted head. They cannot possibly be dead, I tell myself, I hear them snoring. Such peace, I can’t deny them. The force of breath descends to drift—. It fades—. Then steadies to a wheeze. And in that all but failing breeze two sails too briefly sigh, and lift a voice to lullaby them. (Massapequa, Long Island—2008) </td><td></td></tr> <tr><td></td><td></td><td height=50></td></tr> <tr><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr> <tr><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr> </table> </body> </html> |
Wow.
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Major chills, of course. My fave so far.
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I don't recall ever having read this before. It is certainly unusual. It is always hard for me to relate personally to poems about parents.
Anne |
I can intuit who this is by, although neither visceral, avant-garde, nor giving a nod towards the maddeningly solid Deep -End, nonetheless my perception is sufficiently warped towards the positive to acknowledge that this is a truly good poem.
Another great choice, and although I am much taken by 'Q' this, so far, gets my number 1. |
Yes, this edges Q in my book, too. One of our best of 2008. Fascinating slant on the child/parent theme, and I remember how hard the author worked on the final stanza to strike exactly the right note. Very well done.
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<body> <table width=750 background="http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/uploads/Sharon+Passmore/tealfab.jpg" cellpadding=0> <tr><td></td><td> <table width=675 background="http://www.fischerpassmoredesign.com/images/tinceiling.jpeg" border=4 bordercolor=black cellpadding=17 rules=none><tr><td></td><td>.</td><td></td></tr> </table><tr><td></td><td background="http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/uploads/Sharon+Passmore/magnolia.jpg"> This gorgeous attempt to reconstruct the past--the lives of parents--from photographs is something I've struggled with and written about, but have seldom seen done so well. Everything is here: the humor of parents dealing with the highly verbal young, the disappointment of the young author over his parents' snoring through his reading, the touching good intentions and affection on both sides, the speaker's attention to small details in the photograph and in the recollection. The light reflected from wedding band and wheelchair is "all the light" he has by which to read the past: that's powerful. The poem unfolds like a movie, stanza by stanza, and those stanzas are beautiful with their unexpected short end lines rhyming at a distance. I can't find a thing to pick on, and am eager to see what others find. </td><td></td></tr> <tr><td></td><td></td><td height=50></td></tr> <tr><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr> <tr><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr> </table> </body> </html> |
My warm feelings for this poem stem from a reading somewhat different from Rhina's. I read this N. as middle aged, reading to very elderly parents, and I've had the same experience of watching a parent nod off, never knowing if I should keep reading or not. The lapse and loss in the parent's life, all coming into sudden focus. The silence that frees--or does it? The peace, although the N. is not at peace but in tension. They all touch me, almost too nearly.
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Maryann I read this as you do.
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My favorite so far, I think. The tinge of humour gives the reader some much-needed breathing room. I love it.
Austin |
This gets my vote, too.
Frank |
I read the scene as a photograph being contemplated because 1) the title suggests the parents are already dead; 2) the light is described as slowing and then faltering, and then picking out two details, both metal, which provide light that can be "read by." That sounds like the glints of light in a picture.
Then the second stanza uses verbs in the present tense, but the third stanza, after the quotation from the mother, uses the past tense, as if the speeaker were remembering events. The switching of tenses in the following stanzas suggests recollection of a time when the speaker read to his parents, who are now dead, "sailing away" and leaving the reader to "lullaby them." Have I been too literal in my reading of the title, or in my interpretation of the closing lines? He does mention the "all but failing" breeze that may be their breath, but then they "too briefly sigh," so I can't tell if they're still breathing or not. Does he mean that his parents are "as good as" corpses? |
When I first read the poem (I love it) the parents were already dead and the poet was reading to their remembered selves. It still suggests that to me.
Perhaps our personal circumstances create the poem? Janet |
How the heck did I miss this poem! I think I live on this site and still I have not read it until now. Wonderful! And I'm glad it was chosen.
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From first posting, I've read this along Maryann's lines, not that I dispute the validity of Rhina's take, which offers its own satisfactions. Just read the first chapter, as though they were expecting a novel or travelogue. Fortunately, my parents were so on the ball, such great poetry teachers, that I didn't have this problem. But many of my friends have been in like case.
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In favorable reviews of formalists' work, I've noticed, people are fond of downplaying the importance of form. So-and-so works in form, but doesn't make a big deal out of it; doesn't stick to it too rigidly; it's the content that's important. This is probably a reaction to the charge that some formalists value form above all else and don't pay enough attention to content. Reading this poem, though, I'm struck by the beauty of the form. Yeah, yeah, you could make all kinds of fancy arguments about how this particular form is a good match for this particular theme, and that's why the poet chose it, but it would be BS (as are most of the justifications-in-hindsight that critics are so fond of inventing for poems written by famous poets, without extending the same courtesy to unknowns), and the truth is, the form itself is lovely. Those trimeter lines with their feminine endings, and the way they tie the stanzas together in twos, are just gorgeous. If this were written another way, it would not be the same poem.
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My understanding of the poem was the same as Maryann's.
This one is admirable - one of the best posted to date. The voice is consistent all the way through, the interlocking rhymes work well, and it all flows naturally and unobtrusively. What I particularly admire is how carefully the relationship is drawn, so that it portrays tenderness and affection toward ageing parents without a hint of either condescension or saccharine. |
Beautiful and unforgettable. The movement from snoring to breath to wheeze to breeze to sigh is so evocative, it makes me think I have memories I don't have yet. And verbing "lullaby" is an inspired move.
David R. |
I remember this one very well.
It exemplifies the kind of at-the-edge surrealism typical of the best writing of the early twentieth century. It has a daring psychological aspect of self-confrontation that I think is its most effective dream-like quality. Rick [This message has been edited by Rick Mullin (edited December 14, 2008).] |
Thanks for all the comments on this one. I should mention that Maryann's reading was the one I intended...as far as intentions go...
It is interesting, Rhina, that you viewed this from the angle of looking at a photograph: in many ways I was trying to make the present moment into a photograph. There was no small degree of poetic license taken in the opening stanzas (stanzas that I remember some readers, including Alan Sullivan, thought might be dropped) with their camera-like zooming in on the glints of light "to read by". These stanzas for me are a sort of passage between normal time and the poetic time evoked by the experience which the poem attempts to preserve: like any Polaroid, the moment is thus pickled in light. The switch in tense you mentioned was an attempt to relate the events in the immediate past that led up to this stilled photo of a moment. And the title was an attempt at dark humor to leaven the scene (a humor I remember Tim objecting to at the time): the joke being to fantasize that the parents are dead and not just sleeping. In a way, Rhina, your seeing this as an old photograph makes me feel that my strategy of stopping time and light has been at least partially successful on a level I wasn't able to anticipate. And poetic success on an unforeseen level, well, that's one name of the game! This poem was the first I wrote in 2008, a year in which I vowed to take Rilke's dictum more to heart: "A poem is good if it is born from necessity." Like all relatively unknown poets in middle age, I have an enormous quantity of work stacked up on both real and virtual desks, and have come to a decision that perhaps I write too much. This poem gestated for a long time, and then insisted on being given form. The fact that it has been so well and thoughtfully received is gratifying, and makes me realize that one heartfelt 'picture' may indeed be worth a thousand words. Happy New Year, all. Nemo |
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Apologies for the late contribution when everybody else is writing their thank you notes. I wanted to say this earlier but didn't find the time. Chris Editing in to make it clear that I am not trying to make a straw man of Rose's position, or suggest that she doesn't understand the proper function of form, but merely to suggest that the kind of justification she dismisses as BS is in fact worth contemplating. [This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited December 17, 2008).] |
Wilbur has talked about this too, Chris and Rose. More likely than not, he is finding a nonce form in the course of constructing the first stanza. Not a form that will fit where he wants the poem to go, but a form that will help him FIND where the poem wants to go. The same is true for me. First stanza? I'm just catching a tune. But I'd like to hear Nemo discuss this phenomenon in this particular poem. These tag lines whose rhymes bridge stanzas and are pretty far apart, strike me as a corollary to the "a meter-making argument." Aren't they the "matter-making integuments" of this poem?
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I think Rose has been misunderstood here, as I think she would pretty much agree with Chris's argument about the search for a form being part and parcel of the evolution and integrity of the poem itself: "If this were written in another way, it would not be the same poem." I think her BS Detector creeps in with after-the-fact justifications, in the case of already famous poems: theories which posit the divine formal forethought of canonized poets, rather than maps which chart the blind formal groping of struggling artists.
Searching for a companionable form in the first stanza ("catching a tune" as Tim writes) is exactly how this (like most of my poems) was written. The process is anything but rational. This is often followed by a moment of panic somewhere later in the poem when I regret having locked myself in. And in rare occasions a change may then occur if I discover a more reliable path toward where the poem and its form have now convinced me I must go. In this particular case those tag lines were a partial recanting, a sort of fork in the road that I chose once I was confident I could sustain their detour throughout. It is rare that I successfully choose a form for a given poem beforehand, for instance a sonnet; and in such cases it is usually the subject matter that decrees some set form and the poem is often almost fully outlined (though not "colored in") in my head beforehand. In cases where a discovered form works well, however, I will often call upon it in another instance as I did with this one in my poem "Something Less." What strikes me now about the distantly separated rhymes in this form is how satisfying their echo is to me; whereas I confess that a classic abba form (in a sonnet for instance) always leaves my Rhyme Ear vaguely frustrated. Nemo [This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited December 18, 2008).] |
What I would say about the effect of this form with this matter is what I already nestled away in my previous post: there is both a sense of confinement in the envelope rhymes (abba), which seems to me to correspond to the poem's concern with mortality (i.e., the confinement of a life-span), as the parents sputter on the speaker, as well as a sense of something (in the c rhymes) slipping that confinement--the spirit of the dying parents, which evaporates; the voice of the living son, which continues. The c lines could rhyme or not; that they do is somehow comforting, even mystical.
My suspicion is that Rose would call that "justification" BS, even though it's done for unknown Nemo rather than well-known George Herbert. But it's my reading, and it's what I would talk about if I were to teach this poem. Which isn't to say that I think Nemo planned it all like that beforehand, & in this way, maybe, I could dodge Rose's disagreement, since I wouldn't presume to legislate Nemo's intention, only to express the intellectual, as well as musical, pleasure provided by the choice of form in this poem*. However it happened in the drafting process, I think those distant c rhymes were a great insight--in some way, are the insight embodied in the poem. I guess I saw Rose as dismissing a type of formal analysis in which I frequently engage, and not just of Great Dead Poets either (certainly of Wilbur!). Of this poem, I'll go on thinking what I wrote in the above paragraph, until somebody offers a more convincing or more appealing reading of the form. *I should say that whether the poet "planned it out beforehand" or whether the form was discovered in the process of writing strikes me as immaterial to critical discussion of it; likewise, whether the impulse was merely musical or whether the poet would have copped to a more elaborate justification. But we should be able both to appreciate the form and attempt to articulate its effect--otherwise, my whole approach is wrong, which I don't think. Chris [This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited December 18, 2008).] |
What an interesting coda to the "Deck the Halls" event this is! I agree that it's valid to investigate what it is that makes a certain form right for a specific poem, even though I can't always answer that question even about my own poems, let alone anyone else's. I can always say why a form "feels" right, but not how it was chosen. I'm not a very calculating writer--the calculation comes later, with the revisions--because when the poem begins to form in my head it seems to bring all its paraphernalia with it, and I do more internal listening than anything else.
That doesn't mean I'm not doing the choosing, of course: I'm the only one in the room, after all. But I'm not fully aware of how I'm doing it, and can only guess, afterward, at what I was half-thinking when I settled on this or that pattern. Is it kosher to advance theories afterward as to those unconscious processes? Well, why not, so long as they don't spin out into sci-fi or harden to certainties? |
It's interesting that Nemo wrote these words about a chosen form when writing:
This is often followed by a moment of panic somewhere later in the poem when I regret having locked myself in. Absolutely. And then, if it's a complex form and one is too far gone to reverse gear one has to continue. Often at this point a mood change happens and the formal restrictions can deepen the exploration. I never read to my parents Nemo but because my character is so dependent upon what they gave me in one sense I am always reading to my parents. That is how I read your poem. Janet |
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