Told from the perspective of a boy riding in the backseat of his aunt & uncle's car, "Getting There" begins much like William Stafford's much anthologized "Traveling Through the Dark" with a deer, dead or dying, lying in the road, but events in the former go comically awry. For whatever reason, travel, driving especially, has been a recurring motif in my poems that I can trace back to grad school when I wrote "Bob Hope & Anita Ekberg in a Blue Buick." The motif (meant to symbolize a life journey, I offer readers who need that kind of penetrating analysis to appreciate poetry) is apparently embedded so deeply in my psyche that it continues to appear in my work, even though I'd sworn it off years ago like so many Jägerbombs. Seriously, I'm totally unaware that I'm doing it again until it's too late & somebody's taking my keys, telling me to take it easy, & calling me a ride.
In "Song of My Sylph," the speaker, interrupted by recurring thoughts of an unnamed other, must push that person out of mind to get about the business at hand. In one way, the sylph represents fleeting thoughts, tapping the memory like the rain drumming the window. To this I'll add, though I know it may sound silly to some, to me it seems that when we think about other people or even ourselves--or for that matter, landmarks, cities, the ocean, the starry universe, whatever--we see miniaturized models of the thing-in-itself, built to scale in order to fit inside our tiny skulls, & the sylph symbolizes this--do I dare call it "shrinkage"?--as well. As for form, you may not think so when you first see it on the page, but "Song of My Sylph" is an experiment that crosses concrete poetry with the sonnet. Each two syllable line mimics the sound of the rain on the pane with iambs & trochees. Each five line stanza represents the falling rain (not a phallus, though Melanie reminds us in "Psychotherapy" that "a thing's a phallic symbol if it's longer than it's wide"), but also, given there are 14 stanzas, if you think of the stanzas as lines written vertically instead of horizontally, you'll soon see the sonnet hidden in plain sight! A sort of magic eye image for the literati.
"Getting There," "Song of My Sylph" & "Bob Hope & Anita Ekberg in a Blue Buick" all appear in Ordinary Fish/Watt Worris, released earlier this year by Half Inch Press. I may be biased, but the book has a slew of really good poems in it, some of my favorites, & the tête-bêche binding makes it especially fun to read. Perfect for the holidays!
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| Frida Kahlo, The Wounded Deer, 1946 |
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