Saturday, April 7. 2007
Painful Frustration in Poetry
Not all moments of frustration in poetry create pleasure. Sometimes, they bring pleasure and pain together in a compelling moment of poignance. Take, for example, the start of “Purple Bathing Suit” from Louise Glück’s collection Meadowlands:
I like watching you garden
with your back to me in your purple bathing suit:
your back is my favorite part of you,
the part furthest away from your mouth.
You might give some thought to that mouth.
Also to the way you weed …
This is the same kind of stroke as in “Snow” from Ararat, where she says of being a young girl on her father’s shoulders:
My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn’t see me.
The incisive mind invades the expectation of tenderness, cuts it off and makes it sinister - the same experience as feeling shocked by cruelty in a moment of vulnerability, the same thing - in essence - as heartbreak itself.
Because these moments go unresolved, just as in life, and the poem continues on to other observations, there is a kind of emotional destabilization that creates a hunger for resolution, information - more. And the poems, instead of giving some tidy end that would ultimately leave us satisfied-yet-unsatisfied, continue instead to frustrate us and break our hearts with a beautiful quiet intensity that comes from playing between these two worlds of love and bitterness, cutting short before any kind of neat resolution, propelling us deeper into questions of humanity.
Glück’s poetry is a fascinating study in frustration on many levels - both in terms of unresolved (and therefore somehow more satisfying) themes - and in the way she moves between ostensible realities (like persona and confession) to give new layers and shades of meanings to those realities. The same raw materials - unresolved themes and conflated realities - in a different poet’s hands might fail miserably. Yet at the essence of Glück’s work seems to be a deep meditation on personal experience, and extrapolation from there into universal experience - what it means to be sensitive in a heartbreaking world.
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Very good post! I like that excerpt from "Purple Bathing Suit"…haven’t we all felt that way about someone we like/love but who still manages to drive us mad.
I find reading Gluck to be frustrating; some of her poems are heartbreakingly lovely, and some (to me) are mundane and dull. But you have certainly put your finger on what she can do so well at her best.
Thanks for visiting my blog. Come back anytime; I’m posting regularly throughout April. Next up: Frank O’Hara.
I find reading Gluck to be frustrating; some of her poems are heartbreakingly lovely, and some (to me) are mundane and dull. But you have certainly put your finger on what she can do so well at her best.
Thanks for visiting my blog. Come back anytime; I’m posting regularly throughout April. Next up: Frank O’Hara.
Thanks for stopping by, Greg.
The last stanza of "Purple Bathing Suit" sums up precisely what you’re talking about:
you are a small irritating purple thing
and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth
because you are all that’s wrong with my life
and I need you and I claim you.
The epitome of dysfunction there. I could stand to learn more about Frank O’Hara. Blog on!
The last stanza of "Purple Bathing Suit" sums up precisely what you’re talking about:
you are a small irritating purple thing
and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth
because you are all that’s wrong with my life
and I need you and I claim you.
The epitome of dysfunction there. I could stand to learn more about Frank O’Hara. Blog on!
LOL, that’s such a biting poem by Glück. Bet she doesn’t anticipate world naked gardening day May 5
http://wngd.org/
That sense of emulating life without the closure when we want it is an interesting point for engagement.
Glad you enjoyed my (long) rumination at LJ.
http://wngd.org/
That sense of emulating life without the closure when we want it is an interesting point for engagement.
Glad you enjoyed my (long) rumination at LJ.
"Dancing [naked] in the fields epitomizes the spirit of communion and back-to-basics living." (from the website)
Indeed. Who needs purple bathing suits in the first place? Thanks for stopping by, an sprinkling a little of the surreal into my day.
Indeed. Who needs purple bathing suits in the first place? Thanks for stopping by, an sprinkling a little of the surreal into my day.
You’re most welcome. A day is hardly complete without a fleeting glimpse of surreal. lol.
