The New Republic

2,21,13,6:15 pm, est///There’s an opening contrast in the imagery between heavy, labored, bulky, loud things, tinctured with soreness, and delicacy and dancing lightness. Of the former we have the river, “massive” and “gray,” which “shouldered its way to the harbor. We have imagery of a stormy wind. We have a “rasp” from the “guitarist” trying to get his ballad “into the wind’s sore throat.” Against this imagery, in lesser presence we have the wind’s “plucked awnings…,” and sending the “news twirling…” Also against the rough imagery we have “Rainlight” that “glossed the guitar strings/ and played its own tune.” We have, too, a “ballad.” Like a bridge between the two sets of images is the guitarist, “stationed” as though there by decree, a kind of institutionalized presence. He bends his head away from the storm in a doorway, huddling and hunched away from the wind, essaying art, it a “rasp” into the sore throated storm./// The poet meaning to see art, having a plan for it, is nakedly alone under the clattering, stormy sky. “Meant,” planned, to see art where? And why did the plan miscarry given the contrasting sets of opening images? Is it, she at some point, presumably before standing under the sky, has gone to a store, she meant to see the art in the world around her, make art out of her lived experience, in the midst of homely tasks, but that the storm laid waste to that intent? Nature in its way has better art success than the guitarist. The guitarist can’t do better than “rasp His ballad into the wind’s sore throat.” But “Rainlight glossed the guitar strings and played its own tune” and “The wind plucked awnings…”//// The poet seems to have wanted to detach her, could be his, desires from consequences. In that, the city’s storm seems a correlative for human wants, the city, life in the city, imagined as a storm itself, life as wants, “this city such a storm of wants.” In this, the storm, which is literally a storm, is a projection of a stormy city life, marked by wants, by clattering noise, brute movement of forces, illness as soreness, confusions, information and news askew, and in all the impulse to art, perhaps even art as frozen stasis like on Keats’s urn. But, it seems, in the storm and in the city as storm art seems a hurly burly and human attempt at art seems a futile casting into the wind.//// In the movement of consciousness through the poem, actual storm and self understanding merge in the articulation of “this city such a storm of wants.” And now consciousness turns for a bit to thought itself recalling what Krishna said. And the thought itself is tantalizingly ambiguous, more mystical than logical, tantalizingly meaningless, and incapable of withstanding analytic scrutiny. For on any analysis, we are, it seems obvious, entitled to some of the fruits of some of our actions. And the poet is herself dismissive of this seemingly meaningless wisdom: “in a book I read, with all the etcetera / about desire and emptiness.” The storm, city life as a storm has something she wants badly, “hard.” And it’s “Not emptiness, seemingly pointed to by Krishna.” //// The hardness with which she wants what she wants is set against the relative self abnegation that is the paradoxical sum of her want: she wants “a self like rain driven/aslant the fence, the hacked at sycamore.” She wants to be a forcefully acted upon self, “driven,” and she wants to affect slightly put upon objects and then, implicitly, be dispersed, as rain will splash off what it driven against and come to nothing. This want is the substance she wants over emptiness. She will feel herself, be herself, realize herself, as driven, affectless, passive dispersal. If it comes to this, is the “plan miscarried” of her meaning to see “art?”//// She descends back in short time to the “real world” of a fish store, where a butchered fish’s heart still throbbing and pulsing, dying life with its own dying, sloppy, rhythmic vitality, “blurping and shuddering,” spelling out to her imagination by the force of the what it is that what it is is a rebuke to, and repudiation of her want, that her intense want of self denial is an idiot’s wish, there is not that freedom from the storm, that the human self in its nature, and in the nature of life in the city, is ruckus and confusion and hurt, and out of that will come art as immersion in life. There seems some consonance between the poet’s dismissal of the “etcetera” of “desire and emptiness” and her insight into the idiocy of a want that wants for life.

- basman

February 21, 2013 at 6:14pm