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?

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.

"Snap Back to Reality" - Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and Harryette Mullen's Negotiations

Reading Gertrude Sten’s Tender Buttons is like listening to a chatty two-year sincerely explain her feelings. The child is talking and taking and talking and nothing is making sense. But you smile, nod, and keep listening. As I nodded my way through Tender Buttons, I felt severely disconnected from the text. With “Patriarchal Poetry” I felt overwhelmed, frustrated, and even lost within the words. Yet, Stein almost leaves me with nothing in Tender Buttons.

To be fair, Stein’s writing made me chuckle as I envisioned bizarre foods such as: “light curls verse light curls have no more curliness than soup” (25). Yet I mostly struggled with conjuring images from her words.

Apparently “Chicken” deserves four entries in a row. Sometimes “Chicken” connects to my understanding of what chicken is, and then the next entry disrupts that reality with what seems like random words such as: “Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird” (35). I struggled so much with this because sometimes I’m familiar with what Stein is writing about, and then she totally looses me in her repetition. I can’t disconnect my perceptions of reality from what Stein is writing.

I think Stein’s writing is trying to make me see chicken in another way, but I can’t un-see chicken as a feathered animal.

If anything, Tender Buttons pushes back at me as reader. I’m fairly certain the purpose of the poems involves making me as a reader feel uncomfortable and disconnected. But I’m not sure if there are moments of connection that I’m entirely missing. Cleary Stein’s writing insists on being re-read and re-re-read.

While not as difficult as Tender Buttons, Rae Armantrout’s poem “Negotiations” portrays life experiences as fluid and temporal. In the second section, the speaker recaps the transformation of The Little Mermaid, concluding “This meant that/everything’s negotiable/ and that everything is played out/ in advance/ in secret.” Armantrout’s poem shows how the impossible becomes the possible. Both Stein and Armantrout’s writing leave me with several questions: Does reality construct language? Or does language shape our perceptions and experiences with other objects? Can we rely on language to communicate individual perceptions to others?

“Negotiations”

Rae Armantrout

    1

The best part
is when we’re tired
of it all
in the same degree,

a fatigue we imagine
to be temporary,
and we lie near each other,
toes touching.

What’s done is done,
we don’t say,
to begin our transaction,

each letting go of something
without really
bringing it to mind

until we’re lighter,
sicker,
older

and a current
runs between us
where our toes touch.

It feels unconditional.

    2

Remember this, we don’t say:

The Little Mermaid
was able to absorb
her tail,

refashion it
to form legs.

This meant that
everything’s negotiable

and that everything is played out
in advance

in secret

Chaosss: Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian

Gertuide Stein is most striking through her repetition. By simply glancing at a page “Patriarchal Poetry,” the repetition is highly visible. Her prominent feature almost numbs the mind when reading. I wanted to skim over the wall of “As to and to not to as to and such a pretty bird and to as such a pretty bird and…” (58). I expect these moments to be reliable in their repetition, as if a contemporary Stein would employ copy and paste. Yet, she disrupts the rhythm of repetition with extra small words. At the end of the paragraph the words alter to: “as to and to and such a pretty bird and to as to as such a pretty bird…” (58).  The same words are used, but the pattern slightly changes and disrupts my expectation as a reader.

While the poetry displays her craft, a feeling of chaos overwhelms me. Why dedicate so much physical space to this repetition and disorder?  I think its safe to say Stein argues for a particular perspective on patriarchal poetry. Toward the end of her prose poem, the words “Patriarchal Poetry” are repeated. Most often both words are capitalized, it varies: “Patriarchal Poetry means in turn for that./ Patriarchal poetry means in return” (76). Stein is playing with meaning, expectations, and even presentation and genre. She demonstrates the slippery and unpredictable nature of language by disrupting the reliability of repetition. These formal elements contribute to her perspective on Patriarchal poetry perhaps more so than at the content. (However, I still don’t know what she’s on about.)

Contemporary poet Lyn Hejinian also uses prose poetry and some repetition in her publication My Life. In the opening lines “Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there,” the speaker says, “Where I woke and was awake, in the/ room fitting the wall, withdrawn, I/ had my desk and thus my corner.” Though not as aggressive as Stein’s poetry, Hejinian uses light repetition (“woke” and “awake”) and creates a fluid sound with the alliteration of the “w” and “wh” sounds. The speaker provides a self-narrative lacking in Stein’s poem. However, the narrative reads like stream-of-conscious writing that creates the same feeling of chaos of Stein’s poetry. Both these poems raise questions of how different techniques and genres create similar experiences.