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.

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.