Let me just say - William Carlos Williams and Wendell Berry

I love the word just. It’s the word I use when I’m explaining something I still haven’t figured out. It’s the word I use when I don’t want to come off as the b-word (bossy).  It’s the word that does nothing, which is the reason why every writer will tell you not to use this word.

I was surprised to see this useless word appear in William’s poem “This is Just to Say.” Why would a famed imagiste use abstract filler words like just and this in his poetry?  In the poem, the speaker admits to eating someone else's plums and asks for forgiveness. Unlike the title (that acts as the first line of the poem) the confession is clear and shows no hesitation. The poem reads as if the speaker left a note on the kitchen table before leaving for the day. If the poem clearly explains the situation, then why include an imprecise title? 

I relate to the speaker, in that I can’t fully abandon the use of the word just. This idle word is a crutch of honesty. Just is a confession of vulnerability. It bares honesty while admitting a lack of confidence. Writers eliminate this word because they must be confident that language will carry the meaning. However, the vagueness of just and this within the title give the poem meaning. Somehow, Williams directly treats a moment of confession through imprecise language. The title sets a tone of uncertainty that contrast the certainty of the poem. This tonal conflict is created through the differing choice in language. The title offers some type of defense, perhaps born out of uncertainty, for the plum crime. The pairing of a vague title and concrete description nuances the emotion, and thus the meaning, of the poem. William’s experiments with the ways a “direct treatment of the thing” looks like by making hollow words create meaning. With little, empty words, the poem critiques, or perhaps more positively, revises imagism while operating within the poetic tradition.

While William Carlos William’s reevaluates the usefulness of language, Wendell Berry’s poetry commands a reevaluation of material value. The speaker of his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” explores the negative consequences of loving material, monetary gain. Explicit imperatives structure the manifesto. The speaker encourages the reader to pursue a life of long-term investment with phrases such as: “Ask the questions that have no answers./ Invest in the millennium./ Plant sequoias.” Berry’s poem follows the manifesto tradition in giving explicit meaning and commands. With this form, the reader is offered a new perspective on living. While William’s poetry does not outline a philosophy of living for the reader, his poetry does offer new perspectives on the function of imaginative language.  

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made.

Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won't compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium.

Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion - put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn't go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

The Good, the Bad and the Meaningless: Eliot's 'The Wasteland' and Dale Biron

Back at it again with The Wasteland.

This go around I noticed how Eliot used water as a symbol for death. The fourth section “Death by Water” is the most obvious section where water appears as a deadly force.  The speaker recalls  Phlebas the Phonecians meeting his end in the sea:

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and feel

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool. (315-8)

While in this case the sea devours poor Phlebas, water typically serves as a symbol of rejuvenation or renewal. Eliot acknowledges this tradition of water in the fifth section “What the Thunder Said” as the collective speaker yearns for water: “If there were water we should stop and drink” (335). Eliot shows that water is dangerous in its absence and abundance. Without water we thirst, and with much we drown. The poems defamiliarize water as a positive source by associating it with suffering and death.

The combined features of water as both necessary and deadly indicate that death itself is ever-present and inevitable. Phlebas’ death serves as this very lesson:

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. (320-1)

Phleba’s is remembered for his death, not his life. There seems to be a lot of meaninglessness in his death as well. Death in The Wasteland is painful, inevitable, and perhaps even insignificant. These images of water contribute to a vision of the world unfamiliar with positivity notions of life.

             The speaker of Dale Biron’s “Laughter” is similarly disenchanted. The speaker considers what old age might look like, concluding that the scars of life and laughter lines will be indistiguishible. I tend to read this in the negative spirit of The Wasteland, the joy in life (taking the form of laughter lines) is ultimately insignificant as it will blend with the troubles of life and be forgotten. Maybe the mixing of scars and laughter lines is not negative or depressing, but a symbol of the meaningless of life. The nuances of life events begin to blend as we get older, thus making what we feel is significant rather meaningless.  

Laughter

Dale Biron

When the
face we wear

grows old and weathered, torn
open by time,

colors
tinted as dawn

like the late
winter mountains

of Sedona
ashen and crimson.

It will no longer
be possible

to distinguish
our deepest scars

from the long
sweet lines left

by laughter.

Love Languages: T.S. Eliot and Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I’ve never known what to do with T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. The endless allusions overwhelm me and the only reaction I can manage is confusion. However, unlike my reaction to Stein’s poetry, I don’t feel angry or frustrated.  Stein’s poetry, specifically Tender Buttons, is telling a story about the physical world that is bound with Stein’s experience. Her poetry is remote. Eliot’s The Wasteland also fragments reality—exposing the distance between the reader and history. Yet, the pieces the poem offer are not so disjointed that it becomes unrecognizable to the reader. His allusions are still grounded in a reality many readers are familiar with.

Perhaps my favorite fragment is “A Game of Chess” in The Wasteland. Eliot uses both content and form to explore women's relationship to other lovers and sexuality.  The poem has two female speakers, yet they speak and dialogue in different manners. The first speaker poses frantic, paranoid questions to an unknown lover. She speaks to her lover:

    “My nerves are ad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
    “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.” (111-114).

Eliot includes quotation marks as a way of indicating direct dialogue. Yet, in the second part of the poem, there are no quotation marks. Instead, this new speaker indicates dialogue by repeating, “I said” and “she said” in the middle of the lines of the poem. The language also changes to a more colloquial and coarse vernacular with phrases such as:

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said. (148-9)

Both women speakers in the poem are discussing lovers and sexuality in two differing forms, indicating that Eliot’s poem is noting different perspectives on women and sexuality.

In her poem “Chess,” Aimee Nezhukumatahil also writes about sexuality with the metaphor of chess.  Eliot’s metaphor is rooted in the history of chess as a sexual metaphor, where as Nezhukumatahil’s poem uses the metaphor to discuss the unexpected trajectory of romantic relationships.

"Chess" by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Exactly four different men have tried
to teach me how to play. I could never
tell the difference between a rook
or bishop, but I knew the horse meant

knight. And that made sense to me,
because a horse is night: soot-hoof
and nostril, dark as a sabled evening
with no stars, bats, or moon blooms.

It’s a night in Ohio where a man sleeps
alone one week and the next, the woman
he will eventually marry leans her body
into his for the first time, leans a kind

of faith, too—filled with white crickets
and bouquets of wild carrot. And
the months and the honeyed years
after that will make all the light

and dark squares feel like tiles
for a kitchen they can one day build
together. Every turn, every sacrificial
move—all the decoys, the castling,

the deflections—these will be both
riotous and unruly, the exact opposite
of what she thought she ever wanted
in the endgame of her days.