Colliding Worlds - Adrienne Rich and Henri Cole

“Poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so. ”

—C. D. Wright

I love the intimacy of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, especially in the ways she invites the reader into her poems. The opening of “Shooting Script” brings the reader inside the poem by creating an image of conversation: “We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.” This complex metaphor indicates the reader and the language of the poem are situated in a conversation.

While the poem opens with a relational metaphor, the language of the poem shifts back and forth between isolation and conversation. The content of the poem creates a sense of movement by shifting between the ideas of dialogue verse monologue. Rich uses nature imagery such as the hermit penetrating a shell to contrast the themes of monologue and dialogue, inside and outside, isolation and community.

Each line of the poem hinges on the idea of an endless conversation established with the first line of the poem. Grammatically, the lines after the first full sentences are appositives that flesh out what exactly is this "endless conversation." The conversation is sometime intimate and effective like the relationship between the wave and the rock: “The wave changed instantly by the rock; the Rich changed by the wave retuning over and over.” The cyclical imagery appears again as the waves are described as endlessly returning to the rock.  

However, this endless conversation also incorporates moments of waiting. Rich uses the image of an empty shell to illustrate how waiting for monologue to become dialogue is part of the cycle of language: “Inside this shell, a tide waiting for someone to enter.” The inside of the shell is separate from whatever may enter to create the “wheel of endless conversation” (In this poem, the hermit crab is what enters to create dialogue). Throughout the poem, the shell is characterized by the way it waits for someone to enter its inner world. Rich compares the shell to “a monologue that waits for one listener.” These rich metaphors make this first poem is a perfect opening for “Shooting Script” as it captures the themes of language and inner and outer worlds that appear throughout the rest of the poems.

Henri Cole’s poem “Gravity and Center” uses an honest and intimate tone similar to Rich’s poetry. The speaker apologizes for not being able to say “I love you,” and struggles with his desire of the “inner and outer worlds to pierce one another, like a horse whipped by a man.” This desire is coupled with the desire of freedom and “the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond.” This poem captures the intense, yet impossible, desire of our inner feelings to commune with outer world, "the sound of water poured into a bowl." 

“Gravity and Center”

Henri Cole, 1956

I’m sorry I cannot say I love you when you say

you love me. The words, like moist fingers,

appear before me full of promise but then run away

to a narrow black room that is always dark,

where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold,

devouring the thing I feel. I want the force

of attraction to crush the force of repulsion

and my inner and outer worlds to pierce

one another, like a horse whipped by a man.

I don’t want words to sever me from reality.

I don’t want to need them. I want nothing

to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom,

or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,

or the sound of water poured into a bowl.

For extra fun:

Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Outer—from the Inner” also uses the image of a wheel as she writes about seeing the unseen.  

See also the poems by Lars Gustafsson to further explore this theme.

Rivers that Remain: Langston Hughes and Tess Taylor

I remember feeling moved by Dr. Smith-Mckoy’s reading “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at the recent African-American read-in.  Her reading did justice to the fluid form and the intimate tone of the speaker. The speaker feels connected to rivers that are “ancient as the world and older than the/ flow of human blood in human veins” and connect the speaker with African-American history and heritage (line 2-3).  By recalling rivers like the Euphrates, the speaker acknowledges the African history reaches back to the beginning of humanity.

Yet, the speaker is not just telling the readers that this history exists; rather, the speaker is deeply connected with these rivers as if he has lived through all its history. The speaker can claim actions such as “I bathed,” “I built,” “I looked,” and “I heard” because the impact of this history directly affects him/her. Furthermore, history and heritage not only affects the speaker, but is part of his/her identity. The speaker confesses, “I’ve known rivers” and “My soul has grown deep like the rivers”.

The individual’s soul carries the dignity of this rich history, while also experiencing the consequences of corruption.  For example, the speaker recalls: “I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset,” indicating the tension of having a heritage and identity that is both beautiful yet tainted (line 9-10).

Much of Hughes’ poetry is a reminder that history does not disappear; these old rivers are physical reminders that people are deeply connected to both dignified and dark heritages.  This poem tells a different historical narrative (which is verified by physical nature) than what is often told.   

Tess Taylor’s poem “Eighteenth Century Remains”  traces physical objects or “remains” from the eighteenth century. Taylor’s choice of the word “Remains” functions as both noun and verb.  As a noun, the word indicates a literal objects from the past that still exist. As a verb, the word implies these historical objects have action and an operational presence in contemporary society.  

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“Eighteenth Century Remains”

By Tess Taylor

   Albemarle County

The ridge a half mile down from Monticello.

A pit cut deeper than the plow line.

Archaeologists plot the dig by scanning

plantation land mapped field

for carbon, ash, traces of human dwelling.

We stand amid blown cypresses.

Inheritors of absences, we peer

into the five-by-five foot ledge.

Unearthed painstakingly, these shards:

two pipe stems, seeds, three greening buttons.

Centuries-old hearthstones are still charred,

as if the fire is only lately gone.

“Did they collect these buttons to adorn?” But no one knows.

“Did they trade, use them for barter?”

Silence again.

Light, each delicate pipe stem,

something someone smoked at last

against a sill-log wall that passed as home,

a place where someone else collected

wedges of cast-off British willowware.

Between vines, a tenuous cocoon.

A grassy berm that was a road.

A swaying clue

faint as relief at finding something left

of lives held here that now vanish off

like blue smoke plumes I suddenly imagine—

which are not, will not, cannot be enough.

Tongue and Voice - Jean Toomer and Tonya M. Foster

The tone and rhythm of “Her Lips Are Copper Wire” make this poem one of Jean Toomer’s most engaging. The opening lines set the tones of secrecy and privacy: “Whisper of yellow globes/ Gleaming on lamp-posts that sway/ Like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog.” As I read I picture streets with dim yellow lights and maybe even a drizzle of rain. The assonance of the “bootleg licker drinkers in the fog” creates fluid sounds that add to the secret and even seductive ambiance of the poem.

As the title suggests, the speaker is comparing a woman to industrial features such as “copper wires” and “incandescent” bulbs.  The speaker says to the woman: “and let your breath be moist against me/ like bright beads on yellow globes.” The brightness of the globes indicates a power and ability of the woman. In the final stanza, the speaker again asks the woman to take action: “then with your tongue remove the tape/ and press your lips to mine/ till they are incandescent.” The image of the tongue and the tape suggest a theme of the speaker finding his voice. Perhaps the speaker is not finding his voice, but learning how to make this voice power like the surround industrial materials. 

My reading of this poem is influenced by the anthology’s introduction to Toomer’s Cane poetry: “...Toomer’s own racial self-image was conflicted—a conflict, of course, that is only possible in a culture that insists one have a racial identity” (352). Perhaps the tongue removing the tape demonstrates this conflict through the struggle of finding and using one’s voice.

The poem “In Tongues” by Tonya M. Foster also relates the ability of the tongue to the power of one’s voice. The opening stanza explains how the “tongue stumbles and stutters,/ sticks to the roof and floor as if the mouth were just/ a house in which it could stagger like a body unto itself.” The poem continues tracing the sounds of a stuttering tongue through alliteration and consonance as seen in the fourth stanza: “What mastadonic presumptions precede and/ follow each word, each be, each bitter being?” The alliterated p sound and the cacophony of the consonant sounds ch and b challenges the reader’s voice to speak musically and clearly. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In Tongues

Tonya M. Foster

for Auntie Jeanette

1.
Because you haven’t spoken
in so long, the tongue stumbles and stutters,
sticks to the roof and floor as if the mouth were just
a house in which it could stagger like a body unto itself.

You once loved a man so tall
sometimes you stood on a chair to kiss him.

2.
What to say when one says,
“You’re sooo musical,” takes your stuttering for scatting,
takes your stagger for strutting,
takes your try and tried again for willful/playful deviation?

It makes you wanna not holla
silence to miss perception’s face.

3.
It ain’t even morning or early,
though the sun-up says “day,” and you been
staggering lange Zeit gegen a certain
breathless stillness that we can’t but call death.

Though stillness suggests a possibility
of less than dead, of move, of still be.

4.
How that one calling your tryin’
music, calling you sayin’ entertaining, thinks
there’s no then that we, (who den dat we?), remember/
trace in our permutations of say?

What mastadonic presumptions precede and
follow each word, each be, each bitter being?

5.
These yawns into which we enter as into a harbor—
Come. Go. Don’t. says the vocal oceans which usher
each us, so unlike any ship steered or steering into.
A habit of place and placing a body.

Which choruses of limbs and wanting, of limp
linger in each syllabic foot tapping its chronic codes?