Adrienne Rich and Eavan Boland

In “Diving into the Wreck” Adrienne Rich plunges into an unknown world, recalling the “Eurydice” of H.D.’s poem when Rich's speaker describes the journey downward:

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

Like the speaker in “Eurydice,” Rich’s speaker learns that she can survive in a place she has been taught to distrust. In the poem’s first stanza, Rich’s speaker sets aside a book of myths, a loaded camera and a knife, diving into an unexplored world to “explore the wreck.” Unlike the speaker in “Eurydice,” who learns to embrace and find power in the dark underworld she’s cursed to inhabit, the diver in Rich’s poem consciously chooses to make the plunge. She (or he) has a goal:

The thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth 

But how does Rich’s speaker avoid the problem of telling a story of the wreck? Isn’t that exactly what he or she is doing? In this poem, I read “the thing itself” as a blurry, unknown form. I’m not satisfied with the secondary criticism that claims the wreck is some sort of feminine fantasy. Perhaps that is part of it, but I’m far more interested in the story of the wreck than whatever “the thing itself” might be. I am curious about the speaker, who moves from the first person singular to the plural pronoun, and from the feminine to masculine form in lines 72-77: “And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair / streams black, the merman in his armored body / We circle silently / about the wreck . . . ”

In one of Rich’s earlier poems, “Shooting Script,” the speaker writes: “I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat. / In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.” Something about the sea as uncharted, unexplored, and perhaps forbidden territory makes Rich’s poetry intense and alive for the reader. We are invited to come along for the journey, but we are also aware of the risk.

In “How We Made a New Art on Old Ground,” Eavan Boland offers her readers a similar experience. Boland’s speaker, however, addresses us directly:  

A famous battle happened in this valley.   

                     You never understood the nature poem.   

Till now. Till this moment—if these statements   

                     seem separate, unrelated, follow this   

silence to its edge and you will hear   

                     the history of air: the crispness of a fern   

or the upward cut and turn around of   

                     a fieldfare or thrush written on it.   

The other history is silent: The estuary   

                     is over there. The issue was decided here:   

Two kings prepared to give no quarter.   

                     Then one king and one dead tradition.   

Now the humid dusk, the old wounds   

                     wait for language, for a different truth:   

When you see the silk of the willow   

                     and the wider edge of the river turn   

and grow dark and then darker, then   

                     you will know that the nature poem   

is not the action nor its end: it is   

                     this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

the cattle grid underneath our feet,   

                     on the steering wheel shaft: it is   

an aftermath, an overlay and even in   

                     its own modest way, an art of peace:

I try the word distance and it fills with   

                     sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen   

And as I write valley straw, metal   

                     blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.   

Silence spreads slowly from these words   

                     to those ilex trees half in, half out   

of shadows falling on the shallow ford   

                     of the south bank beside Yellow Island   

as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion   

                     begins to be complete: what we see   

is what the poem says:   

                     evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and whin bushes and a change of weather   

                     about to change them all: what we see is how

the place and the torment of the place are   

                     for this moment free of one another.

I love how Boland uses enjambment: "If these statements / seem separate..." "...follow this / silence..." etc. The reader is invited (maybe even forced) to examine the process of reading the poem, and ultimately offered a chance to participate in the creative act. 

The speakers of both poems self-consciously recognize something elusive and fleeting in “the thing itself,” but almost paradoxically, they each give us a moment where we are freed from even worrying about distinguishing “the thing itself” from the story about the thing, or the place from “the torment of the place.” Rather, Rich and Boland demonstrate that poetry can usher us into a space where we might contemplate “the wreck” for ourselves, without resorting to a narrative that wishes to smother the pursuit.

Langston Hughes and Sherman Alexie

If “Let America Be America Again” was published in 2016 instead of 1936, I can only imagine Donald Trump’s response. The word “again” takes an implicit historical position in both the Langston Hughes’ poem and in Trump’s campaign promise to “Make America Great Again!” Hughes poem begins with:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

But that’s about as far as we can get comparing the two men, because following the first stanza, the speaker reveals his true position:

(America never was America to me.)

The narrator of Hughes poem is excluded from an optimistic historical perspective, reduced to a brief parenthetical statement. The formal rhyme scheme of the first stanza (ABAB) is thrown off by this insertion, however marginal it appears, only to pick up the same pattern in the following stanza. But the speaker’s parenthetical opposition becomes the dominant voice with the introduction of the I the “self” of the speaker who turns out to be selves:

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

“Let America Be America Again” criticizes the hypocrisy of a “homeland of the free” that never was, in verse that protests and laments at the same time.

O, let America be America again-
The land that never has been yet-
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

There may be no such thing as the America in this poem, but that doesn’t mean he can’t yearn for it.

Sherman Alexie’s poem “Evolution” also channels the tension between dominant and marginal narratives, but from a Native American perspective. Blurring the line of history and myth, “Evolution” re-imagines Buffalo Bill as a pawn shop owner on an Indian reservation:   

Buffalo Bill opens up a pawn shop on the reservation
Right across the border from the liquor store
And he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

and the Indians come running in with jewelry
television sets, a VCR, a full-length beaded buckskin outfit
it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish. Buffalo Bill 

takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it

all catalogued and filed in a storage room. The Indians

pawn their hands, saving the thumbs for last, they pawn

their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin

and when the last Indian has pawned everything
but his heart, Buffalo Bill takes that for twenty bucks

closes up the pawn shop, paints a new sign over the old
calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES
charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter. 

Alexie’s Buffalo Bill is a leech that sucks the life out of a people only to “preserve” Native American culture for his own profit. “Evolution,” like “Let America Be America Again,” is a title steeped in irony.     

Claude McKay and Terrance Hayes

We’ve been talking a lot about the relationship between form and content lately, and Claude McKay’s poetry adds a rich and complex layer to the conversation. From a young age, McKay read British literature and learned to imitate traditional form in his own poetry. But his relationship with these received forms was a dynamic one. Cary Nelson writes about how McKay transformed the sonnet– a “centuries-long tradition”– in his introduction to McKay’s poetry: “McKay would take the romance and the consolations of the historical sonnet and replace them with a hand grenade of protest.”

The metaphor of “hand grenade” rings true for my reading of McKay. Powerful just doesn’t seem to cut it. The sonnet is a form that has pretty strong associations with a European (and mostly white) tradition, and part of McKay’s protest is by using and redefining a tradition that has largely excluded him. In “Mulatto,” the speaker embodies the complicated relationship with an inheritance that is neither black nor white, but both:

Because I am the white man’s son– his own,
Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face,
I will dispute his title to his throne,
Forever fight him for my rightful place.

The speaker has to fight for his inheritance, which parallels to the project of McKay’s “protest sonnets.” The poem suggests violence because something needs to die in order for the speaker to achieve freedom, as witnessed in the final couplet: “Into my father’s heart to plunge the knife / To gain the utmost freedom that is life.” Sonnets often reflect a sort of thinking process, beginning with a problem and working it through to some sort of resolution in the final verses.

Terrance Hayes is a poet who also uses the traditional forms for his own purposes. In “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” however, Hayes is responding directly to a white poet who was contemporaries with McKay. Wallace Stevens was a modernist poet whose rhetorical invention is part of a literary inheritance Hayes identifies with. However, Hayes also recognizes the complicated relationship he has, as a black writer, with a poet whose work includes poems like, “Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” Like McKay, Hayes rejects the racism that fuels the attitudes of his literary antecedents. But Hayes also reveals admiration for and affinity with Stevens, when the speaker asks: “How, with pipes of winter / lining his cognition, does someone learn / to bring a sentence to his knees?” He follows this question through, ultimately reaching a different kind of resolution than McKay:

Who is not more than his limitations,
who is not the blood in a wine barrel
and the wine as well? I too, having lost faith
in language have placed my faith in language.
Thus, I have a capacity for love without
forgiveness. 

Hayes poem is a complex, complicated sort of tribute to Stevens. But his resolution can’t wholly be summarized as “love without forgiveness.” The poem ends with an insight that Stevens couldn't make: 

This song is for my foe,
the clean shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.

What is most brilliant to me about "Snow for Wallace Stevens" is how it questions the idea that the received poetic tradition is a purely white one. Stevens may have been blind to the “blueness” in his body made of snow, but Hayes isn’t, and his poem challenges any reader who is.