"How the Pope Is Chosen"

I’ve been reading “How the Pope Is Chosen” by James Tate, a poem in which one of my clear-headed creative writing students perceived “metaphors.” Hmm . . . Certain aspects of the poem certainly drop shadows we would expect cast from other shapes. Pope selection is orchestrated in terms of poodle selection:

If a Pope’s hair is allowed to grow unchecked,

it becomes extremely long and twists

into long strands that look like ropes [. . .]

Popes are very intelligent.

There are three different sizes.

The poodle, the juvenile delinquent and the rugged western hero can all stand in for the Pope as director Tate checks the lighting and tapes off marks on the stage.

For me, however, the poem stands in for and calls our attention to a certain kind of language at once nostalgic, because we’ve grown up with it, and ridiculous, because we’ve grown beyond it. We are lulled to some other psychological state by rhetoric so reassuring that Highlights Magazine should take note:

growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.

All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,

but sometimes things make them unhappy.

And the poem, for all of its finely honed humorous barbs, grows bigger and stranger and more tonally complex. The same lips that slurp bowls of cream attract black flies. This is no vendetta against Catholicism or The American Kennel Club, even if their shared pomp is brought into question. The poem is ultimately about the joy and futility of making meaning.

[G.F.A.]

"The Smiles of the Bathers"

"The Smiles of the Bathers"

I’ve been reading Weldon Kees’ poem, “The Smiles of the Bathers,” and thinking about the line, “Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love." It’s a list with seven stressed syllables. Out of context, and divorced from its perfect pulse, it reads a bit too primal, as if perhaps the poet has allowed himself to be carried too far away from the twentieth century’s grit and tight, sidewalk pivot by bloated universals. But Kees is better than that. The above list is neither – could never be – the poem’s opening or closing line. Instead, it’s the poem’s central metaphor. I think we know, or at least intuit, that any list has a tendency toward litany, invocation and prayer when included in a poem. The string of concepts, however, has to be considered together and, thus, constitutes a type of metaphor.

Kees frames all of the above as “perfect and private things, walling us in” with their “imperfect and public ending.” They are “interruptions.” And the bathers, lovers, scholars and pilots from the first four lines, all solid, tax-paying citizens of the above twentieth century, cannot bank on momentary smiles. They, ironically, cannot even bank on death’s ultimate interruption, for there is “No death for [them.] [They] are 

involved.”

                    - G.F.A.

Loneliness in Jersey City

“Loneliness in Jersey City”

I’ve been reading “Loneliness in Jersey City” by Wallace Stevens and thinking about metaphor’s central place when committing acts of poetry. To enter the poem we must consider its unlikely opening equation: “The deer and the dachshund are one.” It’s odd, but far from dismissible, more than passing strange. The stanza continues with a syllogism that never quite resolves: “Well, the gods grow out of the weather. / The people grow out of the weather; / The gods grow out of the people. / Encore, encore, encore les dieux . . .” I imagine Stevens fit to be tied, at the end of his rope, so to speak, stacking the world into probabilities as he did during his day gig as v.p. of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Nothing adds up. No foothold presents itself. This is not whimsy, but hell for a guy who wrote in “Three Academic Pieces,” (a Harvard lecture,) of the magic that can happen when metaphor bridges “things of adequate dignity.” I feel Steven’s isolation emerging as the poem goes on to surrender its street scene: its darkened steeple and its all-night immigrant serenades.

I remember a creative writing worksheet from my high school days. It was designed to help young people avoid clichéd expressions. Instead of writing “busy as a bee,” it instructed, one should invent a level of business more like, “as busy as a mustard paddle at a picnic.” I, frankly, fear the poetry that grows out of such instruction.

                               - G.F.A.