Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

I found Elizabeth Bishops villanelle “One Art”, enjoyable to read because of the way she masterfully uses the form explore themes of loss and grief. Bishop treats losing as a practice that you learn to master over time with many experiences. I was curious what she means by “mastering” the art of losing. Perhaps it means to accept the loss and move on with life with, accepting that it wasn’t a disaster, but a natural and inevitable part of life. But would more experiences with such heavy emotions necessarily help you?  The speaker declares that losing things isn’t hard to master and encourages the audience to try out losing something everyday. She speaks from her own experience, starting out by suggesting to love tangible and simple things like keys and time. However, in the next stanza, she tells us to lose “farther” and “faster”, such as places and names. In this sense, I felt that losing implies forgetting the memories of the places and names since you can’t physically lose them. She once again reiterates that losing and forgetting will not bring disaster, but might even a peace of mind. The speaker then says she lost even larger things that holds more meaning such as the mother’s watch and loved houses, instilling emotions and nostalgia into the loss. Even larger, rivers and continents, and finally, losing “you,” which I interpreted to be the speaker’s beloved. The progression of increasing loss made me feel like the speaker was direly holding on to her own philosophy that losing isn’t hard to master. The repetition of the last lines the art of losing isn’t hard to master served as a reminder to not just audience, but more so herself. The last stanza felt like an interruption of the poem’s form and message with the dashes and parentheses. While the first five stanzas suggest that the speaker has already mastered the art of loss and is teaching her audience, the last stanza reveals that it is still an ongoing process for the her as she copes with the loss of her beloved or the possibility of it. Her repetition was not a lie, but something she wants to believe that she can overcome and master this art. 

Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” is fascinating because it speaks to the definition of poetry, and what its purpose and value is. The poem describes how “When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, . the same thing may be said for all of us, that we / do not admire what / we cannot understand” (ll. 8-11). This, in conjunction with the poem’s idea that poetry is “a place for the genuine” (l. 3), expresses that poetry written just for the sake of creating intelligent-sounding phrases. It reminds me of Pope’s An Essay on Criticism in its argument that poetry should have something meaningful to say. Here, I understand her to be arguing that poetry should have a language element that is intriguing and “raw,” but should also have a real meaning behind it, a concrete idea that is not a “high-sounding interpretation” (l. 7). 

The form of the poem plays into this somewhat. It is written in free verse, with no sort of meter or rhyme, and can be easily read as prose. She writes in complete sentences, with each sentence a self-contained idea, which brings about the question of what makes this work into poetry. From her argument in the poem, it seems that her answer is the ideas: that she is conveying a real idea in a format that cannot be accurately captured in another form of writing. 

“Poetry,” interestingly, was heavily revised over her lifetime. The footnote after the title says that the poem was eventually cut down to the first three lines, making the entire poem “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers  in / it after all, a place for the genuine.” The choice to eliminate all other lines reflects the attitude towards poetry that she expresses in the poem. She takes out everything but, it seems, the heart of her argument: that poetry may not seem something good on first look, but it has the ability to convey real meaning. She adapts her work to better fit her ideal image of poetry. 

This poem is a mystery. At a first glance, it’s vague and shallow. It paints a singular picture in a singular sentence: a rained-on red wheelbarrow sitting next to some white chickens. But the opening line, “so much depends / upon” is the true brain boggler. What exactly depends upon this image that Williams is illustrating? And what exactly does the red wheelbarrow next to chickens mean? What part do we focus on? The color red? The rain water? Or the whiteness of the chickens? Does the ominous subject of the poem depend upon this image under the condition that each of these factors exists, or would it change if the wheelbarrow was blue or if it was sunny outside or it was beside some cows?

From my interpretation, I can’t decide whether this poem is about the societal dependency of every-day, previously unnoticed objects, or if it’s a broader appreciation of agriculture and its impact on human civilization. The former would mean that the wheelbarrow is merely an example of an object that people take for granted and the key emphasis of the poem is on the simplicity. On the other hand, the latter would indicate that the image itself is the important part because of the references to agriculture and farming as a whole. The poem could be an appreciation of the fact that humanity was and is only able to progress because of the invention and innovation of farming. So, the “so much depends / upon” is really just so much– progress, technology, love, creativity, leisure, safety. All of these things depend on the reliability of the rainy red wheelbarrow sitting by some chickens. 

I can’t think of many things more magical than falling snow, but I’ve always had terrible circulation. Yet, I can remember a few precious years of not noticing the cold, even long after it had stung my cheeks and seeped deep into my bones. My father would have covered any potentially exposed skin with fleece and waterproof-lined down, executing daily on his secret trick. If you put your mittens on before sliding your arms down the sleeve of your winter coat, you form a protective seal– avoiding that freezing gap left otherwise at your wrists. When you walk outside like that, bundled up in care from head to toe, you don’t feel the chill at your back when you lie flat in a snowdrift. You see the stark bluebird sky above, and the way everything sharply sparkles in the cold. You notice if the snow feels powdery or packable; can you build a snowman, or will you take sleds to the hillside?

To not find “misery in the sound of the wind,”  Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” believes that “ One must have a mind of winter,” and “have been cold a long time” (8, 1,4). The poem suggests that to accept winter, one needs to have forgotten the satisfaction of a warmer time. Remembering anything less bare and biting than January will only bring a feeling of bitterness for what used to be. Ultimately, “the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (13-15). For a poem entitled “The Snow Man,” the sentiment that winter’s listener must be empty himself in order to accept the emptiness around him struck me as strange. Snowmen, the product of play, should represent a certain kind of joy. Here, the snow man has grown frozen himself, filled with the numbness of winter and none of its bliss.

Really, you can grit your teeth through winter, or just accept its bitterness. I think that truly loving winter entails entering it in a way that permits you to love it; to wrap yourself up in warmth that will last long enough for you to access the priorities of childhood. To be able to play, protected from the elements. I was a lucky enough kid to know a well-lit home, where I could eventually run to as dusk fell. If we’re all to be faced with January’s cold despair, we all deserve to know the kind of care that seals out the cold.

I love when art is referenced in poetry, so I immediately gravitated towards writing about “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” for my blog post. This poem really proposes a beautiful message, and begins with a clear purpose (that is only heightened when looking at the painting it is paired with). The first stanza alone is shocking in its redirection from the generic. Williams writes “According to Brueghel / when Icarus fell / it was spring”. This line was so jawing for me because it highlighted aspects about the infamous story of Icarus that are usually insignificant. The subject of this stanza is not Icarus — it is spring. This poems story is not set up to remind readers about the overused and cliche remark “Don’t fly too close to the sun” that is usually referred to when discussing Icarus. William’s discusses the “ordinary” events that went on when Icarus perished — and the same events that were not effected in the slightest by Icarus’s fall from the sky. To the “farmer [who] was ploughing”, the melting of Icarus’s beautiful wings and his plunge into the sea was completely unimportant. Williams even writes that the splash was “unnoticed” by those around. With Icarus being (arguably) one of the most famous characters in Greek mythology, it’s refreshing to remember that his death was as insignificant as it was infamous. It is also important to note that Williams wrote this poem after Brueghel’s painting, which is shown below. The painting is equally as impactful, as most viewers will glance at this painting and admire it for the beautiful landscape and entrancing colors — and not the flailing man drowning in the lower right corner. It is remarkable how poet and painter can create such a connection of emotion between two different mediums, with both producing the same message. Although I believe there are multiple messages to get from this painting and poem, I like to see this story in a more positive light. Life will continue to move on, and even an event like the fall of Icarus will remain unnoticed by many. While that insinuates that we as humans are insignificant against the plethora of things that are happening at any given time, it is heartening to think that there is so much happiness and light that can surround so much tragedy and despair.