Sampling Poetry, March 2007: Bards and Shards

(About the March 2007 issue of the journal POETRY, "founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe")

I started writing this blog partly to keep samples of writing and ideas that I like. I've found a few in last month's issue of POETRY. These are samples, and, maybe by coincidence, they all seem to make samplings or fragments either their subject or their technique.

First, there are selections of some nine hundred fragments of verse by Sophocles. Found in quotations in other sources, these bits and pieces are grouped for us in fortune-cookie styled strips under categories that the translator-arranger Reginald Gibbons claims are "among the dominant themes of a poetic mind." For example, under the heading, "The Fullness of the World," Gibbons makes sub-groups under Roman numerals. Under "I" are several images that suggest creatures' guarding or hording: "A scorpion stands / Watch among the rocks" and "Everything is covered by spider webs." Other sub-groupings suggest varieties in wildlife, sensual pleasures in peoples' perfumes and garments, and tastes of foods.

There's more in common among the subgroups gathered under the heading, "The Sea." all supporting the thesis sentence: "Seafarers I assign / To the ranks of those most / Beaten down." There's a section about a certain fisherman who "invented" some "clever" pastimes as "board games and dice" to provide "Sweet relief from idleness." Sophocles imagines the great happiness of being a sailor on land, "Under the eaves to sleep / And hear the steady small /Rain in your thoughts." I especially like a thought that Gibbons encloses parenthetically among these "sea" related ones: "Yet, to a mother, children / Are the anchors of her life."

Another poet, Richard Kenney, reminds me of Lawrence Raab in building poems on notions taken from fantasies and science fiction that have been ubiquitous in American pop culture since the Fifties. The persona in "Science and Technology" seems to discount, and then, to confirm, the possibility that "unknown bodiless entities" use our brains for entertainments that we experience as dreams. Even more fun is a poem that takes off from the fact reported in the mid-90s that most household dust has settled to earth from outer space. He gives voice to the tiny space aliens who view us (from behind our furniture, and from our fingertips) as "long water bags minerally stiffened" who sometimes try to merge, failing because of "surface tension."

The sounds and the sense, and even the look of Kay Ryan's "Train-Track Figure" are all one. It's a fun little riff on the way we glimpse something on the other side of a passing train, "sliver over sliver of between-car vision." The lines are brief themselves, making a sliver of text on the page. There are some end rhymes, but even more consistent repetitions of vowel sounds in groups of four: "between - car / vision, each / slice too brief / to add detail / or deepen...." The repeated sound goes by in the same rhythm as the repeated sliver of image goes by. Does it mean anything? It's just a "slice of life," and it suggests only everything that we perceive in bits.

Finally, I'll mention another poem that did nothing for me, an example of a kind of poem that I read too often in POETRY. It's got the same internal rhyming, and even end rhymes, and the same short lines as Ryan's poem. But the fragmentary images seem to me to be merely random ones, associated in some way that remains private to the poet, and I lose patience with it. "The seeker leaves / for Bangladesh, / the prophets check / for signs of theft, / the singers sing / for what is left." Okay, Marxists would say that all profit is theft. Is there a pun in there? Maybe, but there's nothing real here to make me care to make sense of it. (I'll omit the poet's name. If you don't have something nice to say. . . .)

T. S. Eliot, whom POETRY helped to promote, also worked with fragments, and made fragmentariness his subject. But, as a lecturer at Oxford pointed out when I was there to study Eliot, he had a great sense of the dramatic, his fragments often conjuring characters whole by means of a bit of stage business, costuming, or dialogue, as he conjures those pretentious ladies who "come and go / Speaking of Michaelangelo."