This is the passage of nobody knows
is nothing, if not plaintive.
It's very plain.
It's very direct.
It's not complex, but that does not mean that it's simple.
Now here's another moment I want to look at.
The strange elegance of that chant line passage in lines
11, 12, and 13 about loneliness.
This is kind of a remarkable moment in this poem too.
"And lonely, head hanging from the balcony of her body,
lonely.
Darkest passage from the hairless vagina.
Lonely, but brave, but lonely."
Now that is really an interesting moment in the poem.
If the poem is really kind of plain in what
it's talking about and in much of its speech,
isn't that sort of amazingly inventive, and strange,
and elegant?
It doesn't resemble any other language in the poem.
These elaborate compound adjectives,
they sort of stop the drama of the poem,
and they create this kind of ritualistic interlude
with remarkable tonal effect.
I think that these are kind of-- they're
like invented phrases fabricated by the writer of the poem,
but they have a kind of mythological kind
of archetypal, like, this is a Norse way of describing winter.
What kind of winter is this?
It's the darkest passage from the hairless vagina.
You know what I'm talking about, Olaf.
They import into the narrative a kind
of ceremonial speech, which, again,
transcends the immediate drama of son and mother locked
in struggle.
Though invented, these phrases invoke archaic formulas
of lament and praise.
How does it work?
In part, those complex adjectives,
a compound adjective, in other words, a multiple adjective
created by hyphens, is so elaborate that the number
of words that it employs and the time it takes to read
implies the freedom of rhetoric and poetry from time.
It seems to come from outside the frame of narrative time
that most of the poem is in.
The tone shift elevates us to a perspective
from which we see the scenario of suffering and dying
not as personal, but as universal perennial human
passage to which we will all be subject.
And I want to point out that this isn't just
a grammatical invention of a hyphenated compound adjective.
These are also metaphors, and the metaphors
are carrying information too.
Head hanging from the balcony of her body, lonely.
That's a metaphor.
And the suffering body is turned into a building
in that metaphor with the balcony from which the head is
looking down at the building.
The building is ornate.
The suggestive scene is sort of like an Elizabethan tragedy,
like Romeo and Juliet, a stage play
in which the head addresses the body, which, in a way,
is a weird kind of metaphor and image for rhetoric itself.
The second one, darkest passage from the hairless vagina,
well, I mean, I don't know how he came up with that.
It's so wonderful.
The sun implicitly sees and laments,
because who came out of that vagina?
His own vast separation from the body of the mother.
And the isolation of being spilled
into the world, and his naked childlike mother's
imminent exit from life to death.
So the mother is both a child, and the speaker
is also the child, and they're both about to be--
they've both been expelled and sprawled out
of the hairless vagina.
Here, pity and praise seem to apply
to both the son and the mother.
The invented dignity of these phrases
suggests that these ordeals--
dying, sorrow, separation-- are inevitable,
and there's something of the eternal or even beauty.
So you can feel prayer and litany here.
Now, finally, I just want to point out
that this kind of amazing kind of tonal management,
and complexity, and dialectic going on inside a poem,
what it does, for one thing, is it makes you understand
that really surprising ending.
"The world is evil, Mother, and I am too."
Really surprising, and yet you completely understand it.
Because the tonal information that you've
gotten about the situation and about
the relationship of the speaker to the mother
is completely understandable.
And so when that end arrives, even though it's surprising,
it's dramatically, utterly comprehensible and powerful.
Once again.
I just want to point out, there's
an enormously complex dynamic of attachment and detachment going
on here.
Those rhetorical moments are enormously detached.
These different moments are shooting down laser rays,
anchoring with a great kind of variety.
If a poem does not have enough detachment,
it can't have tonal complexity, and, in a way,
it can't be adequate to the world.
But if it has, it'll be co-dependent to the world
in the way that a lot of narratives
are co-dependent in the world.
They don't have enough imagination.
There's not enough space between the telling and the tale.
But when there's a lot of detachment and a lot of angles
here, you can see that there's a lot of distance
between the telling and the tale.
We know that the tale.
The telling tells us what the teller knows, and tells us
how the speaker is careful, how the teller is attached,
and how the teller is detached.
And basically, that is the good news.
These other poems in the handout--
I'm going to finish by reading a Milosz poem,
just because he's a great poet who died recently,
and because, a poem that was in The New Yorker about two
or three weeks ago is a fabulous kind of embodiment of just
a masterful kind of knowing.
And remember, Milosz wrote the book
called The Witness of Poetry, and talks endlessly
about the pursuit of reality.
You may never get there.
You may never attain reality.
You may never actually make a poem
that's adequate to our experience of it
or adequate to the world.
But it's absolutely necessary to continue pursuing that.
And as American poets, we also have to learn how to grasp,
in a complex and dialectical way,
the position of being American poets in the American empire.
We sometimes seem to be like a terrible, terrible force
unleashed upon the world.
Unless we get really sophisticated and really
inventive, we can not actually render
that in a way that isn't morally simplistic and infantile.
We can't, as American poets, simply accuse.
We have to negotiate it in a complex way.
And when we can negotiate in a complex way, in some sense,
maybe some of the power and authority--
maybe some power and authority will--
social power and authority-- will be returned to poetry.
But that's just me being a Pollyanna.