Workshop 2: Poem close read

Bob has kindly volunteered to lead us in a close analysis of a poem by Laura Fargas. I'm hoping that this will lead to some interesting conversation about poetic language.

Over to you Bob.

*Cheering and applause from les Amateurs*

I've written Ms Fargas a note, requesting permission to use a specific "half-sonnet" - i can't imagine that there would be any problems, but, as when i asked permission to put her photo up on LT (still undone, those many things which i ought to have done), i figured (thanks TCM for reminding me) that it's always more polite and just nicer to ask first. Her initial reply in re her photo was very accommodating and cordial - but personal lives somehow or another get in the way of some folk's on line lives - and took a good while. So i'll also ask her publisher. If i don't hear anything one way or another in a week, two weeks(?), would folks think that it'd be fine to go ahead and if there ARE objections, then the thread could be removed? Her day job is/was(?) as an environmental lawyer - she got interested in law because of the importance of words in the field! Her book which includes this poem was published in 1996 - I'd love to generate enough interest to promote a reprint!

Bob,

I am most thrilled you are undertaking this. I want to participate. I am trying awfully hard to get a copy of the book. It is of course out of print and the used bookstores are charging way too much, when shipping to Canada is taken into account. There is no copy of it anywhere in the public library system in Ontario (an area the size of Texas). I was told they could get it for me from a university library at a cost of at least $20. I think I will pass. Next time I am in Toronto, I will go to my alma mater, get them to retrieve the book, and photocopy for personal use. More than a little frustrating, but anything in the cause of poetry. You have awakened a thirst, obviously.

that's nuts - i got a used copy for a friend in England via amazon.uk - it was, of course, shipped from a used bookstore in the US - but the total, including shipping was ~ $20.00 a few months ago. But then I've been trying to get her earlier chapbook - most of the poems are included in "An Animal.." and that's absurdly expensive - when i've found it...yeah, just checked, the total, including shipping was Payment Total: USD 20.83**
http://wonderbk.com/ was the shop i that i used.

Looks like some (though by no means all) of An Animal of the Sixth Day is online at Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=htMdzov9HiwC&lpg=PP1&ots=mmm_f1_KgQ&amp...

Barnes & (Ig)noble has it used for around $20 USD as well - approx $9 right now with their current sale but shipping to Canada is another $9 or so...

if that's the case --- i might buy up a couple more copies - i have a 26 dollar credit as i received a copy of Mieville's new book which i already had. I'll wait a bit in case anyone wants to go first. I will say i agree...i've gotten to where i REALLY dislike both B&N and Borders which has managed to lose and not refund more than one order. Sht - my credit is at Borders anyway.

i do wish google books would, esp. with poetry, pick pages more randomly than a set in sequence. Those are all pretty early on and "Absolute Location" is on p. 69. I imagine it's kosher to ask her publisher? Knowing nothing about the legalities of "fair use" - still the use of one poem for, really, educational purposes (at least for me - I read a quite a lot of poetry, but know very little about metrics, classical forms etc so i'm counting on being corrected and learning a lot) seems "fair"?

Publish and be damned, I say.

Post it up, if her publishers complain, we can apologise profusely and take it down. I'm sure the poet herself won't mind.

Might even prompt the publishers into doing something about their distribution problems.

The book is called An Animal of the Sixth Day and the poet is Laura Fargas? I will look for it.

If you were typing up the entire book it might be another matter, but since it is only one poem, I don't think anyone will mind if you just post it on here. I'll put it on reserve at my preferred library though so I can check out the rest of her poetry as well.

ok....
Absolute Location
Laura Fargas

That love is a well you could fall down forever.
Ultimately finding stars, and fire-winged angels.
Once I read Euclid in his own language,
drew with my young fingers his austere lines.
Simplicity, but not to fall out of the body,
must be the form of survival and joy.
Measures, we say of both music and precaution.
-------
preliminary confessions. I've not had courses on poetics; 1 course on Yeat's symbolism 40 yrs ago. On the other hand if non-poets eagerly read poetry - that's a good thing? right? So corrections welcome, no offense taken in the least.
-------
I've had a couple of glasses of excellent Dalwhinnie Scotch. But all the same, my initial reaction to this particular poem is aural. Esp. after reading aloud several times.

In this demi-sonnet, Fargas uses lines that employ rather heavy footed dactyls marching along: 1 & 6. 3 alternates dactyls with iambs in a tetrameter line.
Lines 2, 5 and 7 i find interesting because 2 & 5 start w relatively unaccented 4 syllable words and then 2 &5 add two dactyls + an iamb. I read 4 differently each time. And this is the line which Laura describes her younger self replicating the geometric demonstrations and proofs that Euclid provided in his Elements. Either way "austere lines" exemplify the self-evident simple "truths" the Elements reveal. Oh, and 7 ends with "music and precaution" which could be forced into metrical reading but sounds far better to me as in a "conversational" unaccented phrasing. She's switching back and forth easily between conversational and clearly poetic phrasings which make the "argument" the poem constructs effective.

Going back to the first line: "That love" is more ambiguous than her typical phrasing: "That love" - love of absolute truth/love of God/love for her lover? the overlap of possible readings all legit and dealing w/ the modes of love and passion bring both blake and john donne to mind. Or just a rhetorical use of "that" akin to, say, the introduction of a debate topic.

In any case it's a love that binds the reader to some form of inescapable truth. Fall down a long deep well long enough during the day - do you see the night stars?* Literally no - experiments have been done that debunk an old belief to that effect. But the image is still powerful - AND falling through love changes your view of the universe.

And almost all of Fargas' poetry is very physical - not, perhaps, as dramatically as Anna Swir's, but still her body, its place in nature and in relation to her lover and beloved - bfriend and Christ (heresy?) is a constant theme throughout her poems. And understanding, itself, is physical and tactile - whether tracing Euclid's lines or a loves body with her hands and other senses....
eek. 3AM and i have to go to work. Tear this apart. But if someone could tell me what form of Greek or Latin poetic form Fargas is playing with, i'd be pleased (before going into environmental law, her training was in classics). Blake (for all he abhorred science) and Donne come to my mind when reading many of her poems.

And Hopkins - not here, so much, but in "Among our great ceremonies"

A serious love touches the universe,
the two and one of it contributing to the sum of what's real.
Not that planets or even hydrogen atoms
begin falling toward you, yet something intensifies
where you are. The different light
shed by double stars. No consensus why they form,
nor how they'll dim or dazzle, perishing.

(i like this poem more - but Fargas is so up front about what she's about, there's less to dissect. Which is NOT a criticism)

Differences between poetic diction and rhetoric were, perhaps, less distinct, even 150 yrs ago and depended more upon poetry using "obviously" poetic devices? (ie clearly structured rhyme/metrical schemes). Musing on that "that" brought Lincoln's Gettysburg address to mind:

"Fourscore and seven years ago
our fathers brought forth upon this continent
a new nation, conceived in liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal."

nb the last time i had to learn anything about dactyls, trochees, hexameter etc was in 12th grade and that was a LONG time ago and though our teacher was V. good, we were a jerky group of 1967-68 HS seniors who treated an excellent teacher disgracefully, because he was obviously gay. But then our (public) HS DID show us "educational" films like "Boys Beware" which warned us that every male homosexual was a predator on teenage boys who would, at best, leave you alive though warped for life, but, more likely dead and a front page headline in your hometown newspaper.

bob, there are lots of rich ideas for discussion here. I'm going to need some time to digest and get back to you.

(just don't want you to feel that your efforts are being ignored just coz no one is posting. I'm sure everyone is digesting your thoughts.)

i am totally serious when i say i know very little ABOUT poetry - and would very much appreciate people pointing out formal structures, patterns, references and the like. I like to think of myself as one of those who helps out a few odd poets by being a non-poet who actually buys and reads a fair bit of poetry. I'm, perhaps, a step above the stereotype of the stereotype of the middle class American art "appreciator" - eg "I don't know much about art, but i know what i like." The main difference being that my tastes are (i tell myself) more eclectic than that putative critical representative of a large unappreciative demographic!

In Euclidean geometry two parallel lines will not intersect, hence the bottomlessness of the well. Measures relate to the preservation of synchrony between instrumental parts in music and I see a metaphorical suggestion that when things fall forever they ought to do so in step or hand in hand since they will never really meet.

That's my first thought. I can't connect the fifth and sixth lines to it offhand but I'll think of it more after the pizza is done.

I'm no expert either, Bob, but I do like this. I don't know the technical terms to describe what Fargas has done when she connects the "g" sounds (other than calling it alliteration or assonance?) in "winged", "language," & "fingers" and how the first syllable of "wing" and "fing" rhyme and just work and sound so right.

Or the "fall...forever...finding...fire."

The tightness or crispness of her style: My God, the first nine words are one syllables! That just struck me. I think that's probably hard to pull off and still have it flow and sound so natural.

She mentions "austere lines" of Euclid, and we see how much indeed an influence Euclid has been on the poem's narrator as her style is similarly "austere" in - at first blush - its "simplicity," though this poem, as I'm (as tomcat says, "digesting it") does seem too to be like a well itself - deepdeepdeep - that we its readers "could fall down forever" too! This is really great stuff; the poem, I mean, not my blather.

I've copied it again below so that future posters can reference it w/out scrolling back and forth from their post to the poem.

Absolute Location

That love is a well you could fall down forever.
Ultimately finding stars, and fire-winged angels.
Once I read Euclid in his own language,
drew with my young fingers his austere lines.
Simplicity, but not to fall out of the body,
must be the form of survival and joy.
Measures, we say of both music and precaution.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it; it belongs to those who need it.

Where can I find more technical stuff on poetry ? The iamb things and others ?

This book is a gold mine if one has the patience to use it properly.
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=11832232

>15 absurdeist: an overused, but true, observation: good poetry says more with less. Overloading words with meaning often helps.

> txs Porius

The CAESURA (usually indicated by the symbol //) is a slight pause within the line. It need not be indicated by punctuation, and it does not affect the metrical count:

Know then thyself, // presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind// is Man.

Alexander Pope

Bob,

I just wanted you to know you are not being ignored.

I spent a little time wrestling with this poem and am finding it quite difficult.

I am stuck on "That love". In your Gettysburg example, "that" is clearly unaccented. I am tossing and turning with whether it is possible to read Fargas's first line with an iamb at the beginning. You could argue that there is an understood phrase at the very beginning, something like

{We are discussing the proposition}
That love is a well you could fall down forever....

Does that significantly alter our interpretation? Does the addition make sense?

"Fall" is repeated. We have "fall down" and "fall out". But the falling down is really "falling up", surely, to see stars and angels? And falling associated with love is usually "falling in".

"music" in the last line brings to mind "If music be the food of love, play on" but we have it tempered both with "measures" and "precaution".

"Joy" may well be at the bottom of that well, as much as the stars and angels are, but again there is that tempering with "survival", "measure", "precaution".

Just a few first reading thoughts, over my lunch. I must return to this later.

Thanks, Bob, for sharing with us.

i do think the ambiguity of that simple first word is key - is it used as a rhetorical proposition or as specifying a "unique" love. Or both? i think both as Fargas weighs out her words. And as i take her as a sensualist Christian*, her conflation of personal and god's love seems a given, a postulate upon many of her poems are anchored. Though "love" is more important than "Christianity" in her world. My very favorite of all her poems is "Kuan Yin" - the Buddhist bodhisattva incarnation of compassion.

*surely an existing category w/ deep roots in English language poetry - Donne, Blake, Hopkins.

Can you post that? I"d like to see it, as Kuan Ying is a permanent presence in my life here in Taiwan.

I have a question about rhythm. I have always been a bit puzzled about one thing in prosody. When people talk about iambs and dactyls and so on, surely it's a subjective thing, dependent on how you say the poem aloud. For example, I can read:

That LOVE is a WELL, making one iamb and one anapest

or

THAT LOVE is a WELL, making one spondee and one anapest

or

That love IS a WELL, making one anapest and one iamb (a bit farfetched I admit, but just making a point.

is there a correct way to do this? what do other poets think?

IMHO there is no "correct" way. There might be a "standard" way, or an "accepted" way, but if you make it make sense, it has to be acceptable.

In the same way that translators translate the same passage in different ways, I think you can read with different emphases.

And in the Fargas poem, as Bob pointed out, she intentionally begins with a "That" which can be read as unstressed or stressed, and the meaning changes depending on how you do.

Ahem. I'm getting trochees, in line 3 at least - Euclid and language.

Do I have a problem?

oh. Mmm. Troches. Now that's tricky. Do they itch?

25: I think if the poet does not mark intentional stresses, it's up to you. Some poets did, for example Gerard Manly Hopkins. Incidentally, this poem reminds me of his sonnets for some reason. I think it's because of how I personally stress it when I read it to myself. And here is how that would look (It looks stupid written with capital letters but I can't do a better job than that - of course the stresses are much more subtle than the capitalization would indicate):

THAT LOVE is a WELL you could FALL DOWN forEVer.
ULtimately finding STARS, and FIRE-WINGED ANgels.
ONCE I read EUclid in his OWN LANguage,
DREW with my YOUNG FINgers his austERE LINES.
SimpLIcity, but NOT to FALL OUT of the BOdy,
MUST be the FORM of surVIval and JOY.
MEAsures, we say of BOTH MUsic and preCAUtion.

I like how two consecutive words (or a word and the first syllable of the next) are both stressed (that love, both music, fire winged, fall out, etc.) However it's so subjective and I guess all of us would read it differently.

My reading is pretty similar Anna, except I would not stress FALL in line 5, and I would possibly stress SAY and AND in 7.

ONCE I read EUclid in his OWN LANguage - yep, two trochees there, and I can see (I think) at least one more in the poem.

However, I agree that, pursued too far, the analysis of metre becomes slightly train-spotterish.

Kuan Yin
(Laura Fargas)

Of the many buddhas I love best the girl
who will not leave the cycle of pain before anyone else.
It is not the captain declining to be saved
on the sinking ship, who may just want to ride his shame
out of sight. She is at the brink of never being hurt again

but pauses to say, All of us. Every blade of grass.
She chooses to live in the tumble of souls through time.
Perhaps she sees spring in every country,
talks quietly with farm women while helping to lay seed.
Our hearts are a storm she trembles at. I picture her
leaning on a tree or humming or joining a volleyball game
on Santa Monica beach. Her skin shines with sweat.
The others may not know how to notice what she does to them.
She is not a fish or a bee; it is not pity or thirst;
she could go, but here she is.
----
not much to analyze, but - for me - a lot to love. One of my favorite poems, and one that works perfectly for me. I don't get crushes on novelists..but be it Diane Wakoski - Naomi Nye - Laura Fargas i defn get fanboyish with certain poets which probably overinfluences my fondness for their poems sometimes.

Wonderful poem, thanks.

mmmm

Bob, I hate to say this as she is one of your idols, but I am disappointed. I mean I like the images and the language and the sentiment, ideas etc, but to me this is prose (arbitrarily) broken up into line breaks. This is a key problem for me with much modern poetry.

What am I missing?

sorry...been away w/ Sen.
my problem - or my blessing - is that i have to usually like "the idea" behind a poem and, when I do, i can forgive/overlook a lot when a concept hooks me. Unlike Frost, sometimes playing w/ the net down appeals greatly to me ;-).

I wouldn't dare send one of Naomi Nye's poems your way (she can be very schmaltzy) ..but maybe AR Ammons?

And speaking of Frost - a poem like Design, is brilliant, i appreciate it immensely, technically, its references to other poems, but i don't "like" it particularly..

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

somehow i doubt gradeschool children get taught this one too often, unless they have warped parents like mine and then i, in turn, pass it on. An American non-mystic, genius all around a*hole responds to Blake

i apologize for being such a persistent thread killer. I really wasn't trying to be antagonistic; rather i was trying to point out the various reasons one could have preferences for various types of poetry - and that w/ post Whitman, in particular, form has become so arbitrary, in a sense, that while it's perfectly just to judge a poem's merits on form and structure - precision/incision of language and thought and "concept" are equally good reasons to appreciate or reject a poem. Technically it's hard to improve (in English) upon Donne and Hopkins (the obligatory touchstones of technical perfection imo) but there's both so much good stuff and so much slush that finding new poetry that one really likes is very chancy! I used to rely on the American Poetry Review and "Poetry" the long lived review started in 1912 (Poetrymagazine.org) - but now rely on skimming poetry shelves at the UNC bookstore and anthologies by people in whom i have some faith (eg robert hass)

I always loved "design." And I always thought it was affirming design - in a humorous way. At least it was affirming our need to see it - which is sort of the same thing in my rather nontraditional view.

I have a poetry writing mother and took several poetry and creative writing classes with her as a kid, but I really am more of a poetry gourmand than anything else - I love 90% of the poetry shared on any of these lists, both stuff that people find too emotionless and stuff they find too schmaltzy. Naomi Shihab Nye's poems are very accessible, I find, and have the quality of hitting me in the solar plexus that at the end of the day, is what I look for in any poem.

I, too, obviously have a weakness for "accessibility" that's not with stupid. Though there are rather more baroque/complex poets/poetry that i also like a great deal. The throne of Labdacus would be a long example and "Swells" by AR Ammons a brief example of a poem layered in depths. I'll see if i can fit Swells onto my LT profile page.