So-- so you can sense that there's an enormous dialectic
going on here.
There's an enormous amount of energy.
And there's an enormous amount of shifting
between levels of experience and levels of the world.
And I'm going to read a passage which, sort of, analyzes
some of the ways in which tonal complex tone is embodied here.
Jason Shinder's, possible--
"Hospital", is another poem in which tone is employed
in a dialectical manner.
It is a poem in which tone dances around a singular
narrative moment.
The moment is simple.
How the moment is handled is enormously complex.
Taking it apart, prodding it, exposing it from one angle
after another.
Having a conversation, in a way, interrogating the moment.
Asking, what is this moment.
Is it this?
Is it that?
Most every complex tonal --
poem that is tonally complex has a dominant fraction.
And I would say that the dominant tonal fraction
of this poem is pity, resentment.
Pity, resentment.
Attachment pushing away, revulsion.
Attachment, revulsion.
Pity, resentment.
You can feel that that's the dominant tone that's
running through the poem but there's an enormous amount
of subsets in the poem.
An enormous amount of micromanaged areas
where there's an incredible kinds of intelligence
coming through the poem.
It is dialectical performance.
This poem demonstrates what poetry can do better
than any other literary form.
Take a distinct lyric moment and slice it open.
Skillfully peel back its fascia.
Expose its muscular-- its musculature and skeleton.
Cross section and label its most particular tissues.
The scene is simple.
Taking his color-- taking care of his mother in the hospital
but the tonal plot is complex.
The dominant tonal angle is between sympathy and resentment
but to say that this poem turned to alternate tones of pity
and resentment, is true, but does not
account for the rich variety of tonal engagement.
There are so many specific kinds of resentment represented here.
Resentment of the heartless machinery
of the stinking clean hospital, as a kind of resentment
of technology.
Resentment of the mother's helplessness.
Disgust for the mortality-- resentment of the body itself.
Mortality in rot of the body, as represented
in the harsh language of shit and bowels and diaper.
Introjected, internalized resentment
of the speaker for himself and for his own helplessness
and detachment.
Each moment in the poem has an angle
and a different kind of distance and a different kind
of intensity.
Writer's skilled in the employment of tone
are always skilled ventriloquizers.
And quoters.
They're always good at appropriating voices and styles
from other sources and employing them.
Here, you can see that in this way
having tonal variety in a poem is also an act of collage.
And it's an act of-- what should we call, go
back to the Milosz quote, a poem is about the struggle of many.
You can see this really-- the Milosz quote
really makes sense in terms of this poem.
And this poem really makes sense in terms of the Milosz quote.
The poetry is to describe the struggle of a poe-- of a person
to be just one person, right?
Very, very clearly embodied in this poem.
Now, there's lots of pacing together and attitudes
and altitudes.
And I want to look at two moments in the poem just
to show you what I'm talking about.
The possibilities for language that have not
been exhausted and, in fact, are enormously
precise and enormously, sort of, directive and also sensitive.
Look at this moment that I-- you heard how I read it.
"Nobody knows, nobody can ever know how she has to pee
but can't."
Think about what's going on in that moment.
This is the mother's implied speech.
I think this is an implied ventral--
ventriloquial act where the mother
is speaking inside the poem.
Nobody knows, nobody can ever know how she has to pee
but can't, right?
It is very sympathetic but I think that the mother's voice
is in there.
This is the mother's implied speech.
Inside the empathetically ventriloqual lines
there are at least three tonal suggestions,
separate distinct tonal suggestions that I can hear.
To begin with, the repetition emphasizes
the mother's infantilization by weakness,
which is suggested elsewhere in the poem, for example
that detail about the diaper but the repetition
is not just the empathy of the speaker it also is a, kind of,
mockery.
It suggests the whininess of the mother.
The childish self-pity in the mother's voice
as does her use of the word, pee.
There's pity here but there's also
an element of mimicry, inflected with a tone of the speaker's
contempt.
Placing the position of compulsory witness
who clearly does know how she is suffering.
And the inevitably-- inadequate caretaker.
The narrator's resentment is implicit.
That's one element there or that's two.
Empathy and resentment, contempt, mimicry and sympathy.
There's a third tone too.
A more general kind of cultural echo infiltrating this repeated
phrase.
Nobody knows, echoes a refrain of the traditional slave
spiritual.
As in, nobody knows the trouble I've seen but Jesus.
You think that that's just hallucination on my part?
Maybe it is.
Nobody knows, nobody knows.
You see, this is how language, this is how historical, this
is how our common cultural speech feeds
in completely unobtrusively on a sub audible level.
And yet, it participates in the moment.
And when that feeds into the poem,
you see that the scenario of the poem
is completely lifted above an act of confessionalism.
It becomes the human drama of suffering,
of having to die, of, you know, of having to watch people die.
Nobody knows, nobody knows but then you have a deep, you know,
deep kind of resonance or echo or resonance
which is coming from the culture completely
outside of the frame.
That's tonal complexity.
Look at one other moment--